‘XT.T** . 2 .. n ; /?, Jt* tV}* SbeirlviUra/ PRINCETON, N. J. % Purchased by the Mary Cheves Dulles Fund. FZZ23 .K 93 Section. THE OTHER AMERICANS BOOKS BY ARTHUR RUHL Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS WHITE NIGHTS : and Other Russian Im- pressions. Illustrated. 12mo . . net $2.00 ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI. A Year of War on Many Fronts — and Behind Them. Illustrated. 12mo net $1.60 SECOND NIGHTS: People and Ideas of the Theatre To-Day. 12mo . ... net $1.60 THE OTHER AMERICANS. Illustrated. lfmo net $2.00 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/otheramericansci00ruhl_0 The Jockey Club Hipodromo at Buenos Aires on a Sunday afternoon. THE OTHER AMERICANS THE CITIES, THE COUNTRIES, AND ESPE- CIALLY THE PEOPLE OF SOUTH AMERICA BY ARTHUR RUHL ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1918 Copyright, 1908, by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Published September, 1908 AUTHOR’S NOTE Chapters I-IX of this book originally appeared as a series of articles in “Collier’s” under the general title “The Other Americans.” Chapters X-XIII, with the exception of portions of the last two chapters, which were printed as separate articles in “Collier’s,” were published in “Scribner’s Magazine.” The author is indebted to the editors of these publications for their courtesy in permitting him to use the articles in their present form. A. R. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAQB I. The Other Americans 1 II. Caracas and the Venezuelans 8 III. The Royal Mail and Panama 29 IV. The West Coasters 48 V. The Highest Railroad in the World ... 56 VI. Lima and the Peruvians 71 VII. Across Lake Titicaca to La Paz 101 VIII. A Fourth of July in Bolivia 118 IX. The Other San Francisco 134 X. Santiago: The Metropolis of the Andes . . 150 XI. Across the Cordilleras in Winter .... 183 XII. The City of Good Airs 207 XIII. Rio and Brazil 254 XIV. Statistical Appendix . 301 Index . • 317 ILLUSTRATIONS The Jockey Club Hipodromo at Buenos Aires on a Sunday afternoon Frontispiece FACING PAGE Cartoons published in South American papers at the time of Mr. Root’s visit 6 A typical flower-covered home in Caracas 12 Playing tennis in Caracas 12 Venezuelan schoolboys at the baseball ground 18 U. S. quarantine station on the beach at Colon 38 The white man’s burden-carrier bound for Panama ... 38 Hoisting aboard “the beefsteak of to-morrow” .... 48 “For nearly two thousand miles the coast is as bare as an Arizona desert” 54 “Lighters with freight to give or take” 54 The little girls of Matucana bearing their gifts from a church festival 02 A typical mountain town in one of the transverse valleys of the Peruvian Andes 02 At the summit of the Oroya Railroad, 15,005 feet above sea level 08 Along the line of the Oroya Railroad in Peru 08 The monument to the war hero of Peru . 78 ix ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE The central plaza at Lima and the cathedral where may be seen the bones of Pizarro 78 The grandstand at the Jockey Club track in Lima ... 90 Small boys betting on the horses at the Lima race track . . 90 In the plaza at Lima during the Corpus Christi procession . 90 Mount Misti looking down from its nineteen thousand feet on the roofs of Arequipa 104 The Buried Valley in the desert in which the ancient town of Arequipa lies 104 Looking across the central plaza at Arequipa 110 Gateway leading to the cathedral entrance, Arequipa . .110 President Montes and his escort at the end of their two- hundred-mile drive from La Paz to Oruro, across the Bolivian Plateau 120 President Montes and the Archbishop just after turning the first shovelful of earth on the new railway 120 Cavalrymen of the Bolivian Army on their way from La Paz to Oruro 128 The roadstead and dry docks at Valparaiso from one of the city’s hills 138 Looking past the statue of Admiral Prat toward the landing stage at Valparaiso 138 Nitrate vats at an “oficina” in the north of Chile .... 156 The railroad station at Santiago 156 A Corpus Christi procession in the plaza in Santiago . . . 180 Juncal, on the Chilian side at the end of the railroad, at an altitude of about 7,800 feet 186 x ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE The natural bridge of Puenta del Inca 186 On the trail from Portillo 186 Cranes used in loading and unloading ships at the Buenos Aires docks 212 One of the basins in the Buenos Aires docks 212 In front of the cathedral during Mr. Root’s visit to Buenos Aires 232 The Calle Piedad, Buenos Aires 232 The Avenida de Mayo, Buenos Aires 232 Cargadores loading coffee at Santos 260 The new Avenida Central in Rio 260 The Rua Ouvidor, the principal business street in Rio . . 268 One corner of the Harbor of Rio 280 Map showing route taken by author . 1 Map showing route taken by author, CHAPTER I THE OTHER AMERICANS In a novel written by a lady of Buenos Aires and en- joying considerable popularity at the present moment in the Argentine, the heroine’s father, during a visit to Rome, obtains an audience with the Pope. He is a Norwegian explorer, and when the conversation turns to the subject of his family he explains that his wife is an “American.” “Ah, yes?” smiles the Holy Father, “Brazil — Mexico — Chile?” “No, your Holiness, from the Argentine Republic.” This — to us — ingenuous use of a word which here at home is considered the exclusive property of those liv- ing between Maine and California, Canada and the Gulf, is common throughout South America. Our Minister at Lima, for instance, or La Paz or Santiago, is spoken of not as the “American minister,” but as “el Ministro nor/e-americano.” A Chilian to whom one is being presented for the first time, sympathizing with one’s struggles with his native tongue, asks: “Ingles 6 norte-americano?” Although he was occa- sionally called Chancellor and Premier, and now and then “el estadista yanki ” — an adjective used as we 1 THE OTHER AMERICANS would use French or German and implying all re- spect — this same distinction of latitude was carefully made even for “el Ministro worte-americano,” the Hon. Elihu Root. The artless hilarity with which the average American receives the first intimation of this point of view is very typical of our attitude toward our neighbors on the south. It has been our pleasure to ignore the Other Ameri- cans — to know nothing, really, of what they or their cities are like, or their ambitions and problems. I ran across a friend on the street a day or two after I re- turned. “You found there was a place down there, did you? That’s good. I know it’s on the map all right, but I never could believe it was real.” People have assumed that there was such a place — vaguely comic and bizarre, inseparably attached, somehow, to the words “fevers and revolutions.” Now and again it appears in our fiction. It is unfortunate — when one recalls how many of our ideas of actual life are bor- rowed from the play life of engaging books — that almost all our South American fiction has dealt with the eccentricities of the little republics to the north. Argentina is not at all like Venezuela, yet those who have not been there are likely to interpret it in terms of “The Dictator” and “Soldiers of Fortune.” And true as “Cabbages and Kings” maybe to the palms and sunshine of the Caribbean, it has little more rela- tion to life in Buenos Aires than Remington’s cowboys have to Boston or Chicago. While to peruse one of those yarns, humorously illustrated, and inserted from 2 THE OTHER AMERICANS time to time in the polite magazines by way of paprika relief, one might suppose that all Latin- America was a sort of comic-opera land where gigantic young “Anglo- Saxons” with blonde hair and red faces, stalking through narrow streets like Gulliver among the Lilli- putians, had but to roar “Americano” to make presi- dents resign and sentries drop their guns. This sort of thing makes one a little weary read in Chile, for in- stance, where Americans are not always idolized and the gentleman already mentioned may become excessively bored when he hears that one is a North American and even lift his shoulders deprecatingly as if to say: “Oh, what a pity! How unfortunate for you!” It is em- barrassing again, in the Argentine, for instance, after you have carefully explained to your host that we have no imperial designs on South America whatever, to have him toss across the table- one of our barber- shop papers with a cartoon depicting Uncle Sam as a gigantic paterfamilias spanking a lot of little brown babies, or the Monroe Doctrine as a hen sitting on a batch of South American eggs, while the Yankee rooster crows alongside: “They’re mine!” It often seemed to me while meeting the courtesy of our South American neighbors, and observing the almost touching faith which the majority of them have in the United States, that nowhere more than in our attitude toward them do we show that crude bumptiousness which we gen- erally assume is to be found only in some absurd traveller’s tales of the States or caricatures of the for- eign stage. 3 THE OTHER AMERICANS If the line which your eye takes looking down the hill from Fifth Avenue toward Madison Square were con- tinued far enough straight south, it would hit South America near the west coast of Peru. Practically all of the continent would be east of that line — from there to Cape St. Roque is as far as from New York to San Francisco; from Cartagena in the Caribbean to Punta Arenas in Patagonia is as far as from Key West to the North Pole. There are nearly half a million more square miles within those extremes than in all of North America — and people ask, “What kind of weather do they have down there!” On the Fourth of July in Bolivia I saw a new railroad opened in a whirling snow- storm, and two mornings afterward the thermometer on the hotel porch stood within four degrees of zero; a month later in Rio, in more or less the same latitude, one wilted in a muggy heat as oppressive as any we have in the dog-days here in New York. No more can one generalize about the people or their countries. In Bahia, on the Brazilian coast, probably not more than one man out of ten is white; in Peruvian towns, in a corresponding latitude on the west coast, a negro is less often seen than in Boston. There is as much dif- ference between the lazy lotus Caribbean coast and Tierra del Fuego as between Mandalay and the Straits of Kamchatka. One generalization, however, can be made. It is the fundamental difference between the ways in which the two continents were, so to speak, born and bred. Speaking in generalities, North America was settled by 4 THE OTHER AMERICANS men who came to the new world seeking liberty; South America was exploited by adventurers hunting for gold. Our colonists cleared land, planted fields, and established homes; when the time came to separate from the old country they had a stable society, an ade- quate political system spontaneously developed, and a familiarity with self-government that had been pre- paring from the time of Magna Charta. The Spanish and Portuguese, following Peninsular traditions, entered the new lands primarily to exploit them. The civil- ization of the Incas, for instance — to recall the most tragic example — was destroyed, and this industrious, skilled people — adapted to their environment, capable of attaining a level we only can guess at, once acquainted with the civilization of Europe — anni- hilated. All that they had done perished with them, and the new owners of the land had to begin at the beginning. When Bolivar and San Martin followed the lead of Washington and Latin America threw off the yoke of Spain, its people had had no training in self-govern- ment, nor even in useful industry, and their ideal was still the antique and romantic one of the intrepid war- rior and successful conqueror. This was the seed. The harvest has been reaped all these years in the revolu- tions which a sit-tight commercial people such as we find it so hard to understand. A continent cannot be plowed and resown like a cornfield. Education, im- migration, the gradual infusion of saner ideas and more stable blood — it is a long, discouraging task that THE OTHER AMERICANS earnest Latin Americans of to-day are wrestling with, one in which they ought to have, at the least, our appreciation and sympathy. There they are, these different, almost forgotten cities, down below the southern horizon, beneath their different stars. The main stream of modern life, stri- dent and relentless, flows far away — you think of it down there as of something left behind, over the shoul- der of the big earth, as it were, as you think of the North Star and the Dipper. Echoes of it come each morning in the newspapers — vague cables from Europe and the States, letters and feuilletons from Paris or Madrid; the name of one’s banker takes one back to New York or London, the locomotive roaring into the station is a detached bit of Germany or of home. But the grip of the big world’s life is not felt, its restless, relentless intellectuality, its worship of strength. Peo- ple feel rather than think — wear the clothes, employ the caterers, read the poetry and shout “Bis! Bis!” over the operas of the great world without bothering themselves with its problems. Side by side are the new and the old, jostling each other and blending in a way they never have even in our land of contrasts — the old older than our oldest, the newest more raw and cruder than our new. Over the antique civilization, still drowsing on under the blazing tropic sun, buried away in the thin, cold air of the Andes, the skirmishers of the new are everywhere pushing — engineers, promoters, prospectors, drum- mers from Hamburg and Leeds and Manchester, the 6 THE OTHER AMERICANS Yankee medicine man. Under the wilting sunshine of Brazil the pink pills of our New England landscape re- appear in lazy Portuguese as the Pilulas Rosadas para Pessoas Pallidas; down the west coast, on walls against which Pizarro’s men in armor may have leaned, is lifted the hopeful finger of our benevolent Dr. Mun- yon. Through windows barred just as they were barred in the days when the splendid viceroys used to come out from Spain, comes the busy clatter of the American sewing machine; in mining camps buried away in the Cordilleras the llama drivers, huddled in ponchos about their tiny fires, listen to the phonograph quavering through the wine-shop’s open door out into the cold moonlight. CHAPTER II CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS W’y seet een cheelly Pearl Estree’? Trahnslating letters all ze 7 ay , W’en o'er zc Caribbean Sea I would to home go me aliway? Fair Mercedita waits for me, So w'y op here one must estay Een cheelly, ogly Pearl Estree’? Porquef Across ze Caribbean zen! To see ahgain ze beeg, red tiles : To wahtch ze leetle soldier men March op an’ down een crooked files. Ah, look! Ze moonlight on ze sea! (Ees seelver pure — for miles an miles!) An’ Mercedita calls to me An’ smiles. But not! I cahnot go, you see, {My Government — I ahm eets foe ) — I most estay een Pearl Estree ’ — I’m revolucionario! 8 CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS One mont’ to wait — a shor’ time — bah ! One mont’ before ze fight estart. One mont ’ — no Mercedita — ah! My heart! — T. R. Ybarra, “ The Spanish-American Export Clerk." Caracas is one of the few Latin American capitals which seem at first to live up to the traditions of the Caribbean and the stories we print in our magazines. From the moment one consults steamship agents about going to Venezuela, one has a delightful feeling of being somehow a conspirator and of becoming en- meshed in a vague intrigue in which strange and pict- uresque things are about to happen. Before the steam- ship man will even sell you a ticket you must get a passport and have the Venezuelan Consul countersign it, and look you over and satisfy himself that you are not a filibuster. All the way down through the Carib- bean, with the flying-fish sailing away from the ship’s bows and the northern stars sinking under the horizon and the breath of the trades growing more velvety and moist, and the yellow seaweed floating in the blue water, mystery and dark innuendo seem to exude from the very deck of the little steamship. Such tales as the irreverent young purser and the mysterious doctor tell, sotto voce, cynical, of graft, plots and prisons ! The mere gringo feels like a cub reporter at the office of a campaign committee. Even the cap- tain, who has sailed up and down this path for thirty years and seen it all, occasionally drops a sentence, at which smiles show, shoulders lift, and the two dark 9 The other Americans conspirators at the foot of one’s table look up quickly and rattle off half a dozen phrases in Spanish. All day they sit in the smoking-room and conspire, hov- ering over their half-emptied glasses, with cigarettes made of black tobacco smouldering in their long, lean, smoke-stained fingers, whispering by the hour. The gossip of the smoking-room, from drummers, coffee and tobacco planters, prospectors and engineers: “Forty million dollars — that’s what Castro’s made out of it. Sure — he can’t last much longer — he’s got about all he w*ants. He’ll be beatin’ it for Paris pretty soon where the rest of ’em all went. . . . Money?* Is there! Talk about the Klondike or the Transvaal or — why, you can go up the Orinoco in a five-thousand-ton steamer and there’s your iron right on the surface — all you got to do is shovel it off the bank — cocoa, copra, rubber. . . . Ah, she was a beauty. That’s no lie. He saw her an’ — well — you know the rest. They gave her thirty thousand bolivars and the best house they could find in Caracas, and on his birthday. . . . Courts? Hell — no! That’s where you don't go! You’d only lose an’ have to pay the judges, too. It’s cheaper to give ’em their bit before- hand and get it settled right. Lawyers? Sure we keep a lawyer, but only to tell us what their bally laws are, so we don’t make trouble for ourselves. . . . Look at that flour-mill at La Guayra — wouldn’t it make you laugh? They can’t make flour at a profit in Venezuela when they’ve got to import all their wheat from New Orleans. The Government’ll just put up that mill to in CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS jolly the poor people — they won’t have to pay duty on flour because the Government monopolies don’t have to pay import duties, and then they’ll import flour from New York at four-twenty-five a barrel, and sell it to the people as coming from the flour-mill at the old price. Talk about graft — gee! These fellows ’ud make Philadelphia look like amateurs. ... All you got to do is to run out into the Plaza, wave your little flag an’ yell ‘Viva la revolucion!’ Follow you? Sure — why not? If they don’t fight with you the Govern- ment’ll make ’em fight for it and won’t pay ’em, either. With you they’re sure of a chance of loot and plenty of excitement and fun — sure. Just go out to-morrow morning and wave your little flag.” . . . "How many more years of school?” the captain asked one night of the little lad who was returning to Caracas for vaca- tion. He was a pretty little fellow with a Conservative family name. The present government is Liberal. “Five years,” said the boy. “Five years school,” rumbled the skipper, screwing his eyes up in one of his satyr-like smiles: “Five years politico, then — fifteen years in prison at La Guayra — no?” And everybody nodded and the schoolboy snapped his black eyes, and his uncle, sitting beside him, about to lick his cigarette, stopped and licked his lips instead and smiled, too, though in a subtler, sadder way. He had a right to. He had been in the La Guayra prison once, chained by the leg to another man. And he wasn’t at all sure that after landing in the morning he wouldn’t be invited to call on the prefect and be clapped into jail again. 11 THE OTHER AMERICANS When, after a week or so of this, the stern brown rampart of the Venezuelan coast looms through the morning mist, climbing up and up eight or nine thou- sand feet from the fringe of surf at its foot, with a theatre-curtain yellow and terra-cotta town nicked into the baked hillside, and a little toy fort bristling overhead, one feels that whatever happens one is pres- ently to be “done ” and done interestingly. The languid sea wind dies down, the hot breath from the town puffs out across the water. While you study the yellow gashes in the mountain’s tawrny flank — cuts the rail- road makes in climbing aw’ay up over the summit to the capital — a launch flying a strange flag comes off from shore. Your papers are inspected, you are in- spected, then you bake in the vertical sun while the scouts go ashore to telephone about you up to Caracas, and see if you may be allowed to land. You feel ex- actly like a spy or an absconding bank president — al- most as though you w r ere an alien approaching the har- bor of New York. If they don’t like your name or the color of your hair, so the irreverent purser drawls out of the corner of his mouth, back to the States or to jail you go. That was what had happened to one of our passengers the last time he had come down — nineteen days in prison because he had been seen talking to an ex-revolutionist on the w’harf in Brooklyn. Landed at last, the porter sharks fed with all the money left in his clothes, each passenger must sign his name on a slip of paper before the little train starts for Caracas. Up it climbs, zigzagging across the parched flank of the 12 A typical flower-covered home in Caracas. Playing tennis in Caracas, CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS mountains, till the baking air of the fever port has given way to the cooler breath of the upper levels and the misty blue floor of the Caribbean stretches out miles below, and the donkey trains, gray with trail dust, creep past. Another pause — are we held up? No, worse luck — only the autograph collector again. And then — after days of tropic seas, after passing the sentries and the fever-belted shore and dizzily creeping over the mountain tops, instead of finding a jungle with aborigines living in mud huts and eating jerked beef, you roll down into a frivolous little capital, with a pretty tiled plaza and monuments and beautiful trees; where, of a morning, over the coffee of which they are so proud, one may read along with the cable despatches snatches of Montmartre poetry and gossip from the boulevards, in the cool of the afternoon play tennis with engaging young men who talk across the net in one’s own language as casually as in French or their own, and in the evening stroll perhaps with the crowd, round the statue of Bolivar with little hooded victorias twinkling past like fire-flies, and the band playing things out of “LaTosca” and “La Boheme.” It seems almost as if the little city had had it all arranged to make her charm more sure, hidden behind these seas and mountains and passports in a sort of Spanish coquetry. Caracas has nearly a hundred thousand people — counting whites, mestizos , negroes, and the rest, and it lies in a beautiful valley three thousand feet up in the air. This makes its climate delightful in winter, and in 13 THE OTHER AMERICANS summer oppressive only for those who are able to go north to the States or abroad. It is built of thick stone or plaster walls, with tile roofs and sky-blue courts, filled with flowers and vines. Some of the streets are paved with asphalt, the others with cobble-stones, and there are tramways and electric lights, and the whole is spread on the floor of a valley with mountains rising up mightily all round, eight or nine thousand feet. There is nothing prettier in all South America than the sight of it — looking across the valley from some shaded balcony in the Paraiso, toward sunset, with the sum- mits green and soft with timber, the flanks bare and gauntly ribbed, and in the dry season, at least, colored curious rusty browns, and below the terra-cotta roofs and yellow walls of the town. The clouds hang round the summits, and when the rains begin, they almost always have a shawl of mist thrown across their shoul- ders, and now and then it comes drifting down into the very streets of the town, standing out as compact and white against the brown backgrounds as so much whipped-egg froth. Toward sunset time, the level blaze sweeps straight down the valley, throwing the ribbed, wrinkled flanks into high lights and black shadows, like canvas rocks in the glare of a lime-light. The summer was just beginning when I was in Caracas, and each afternoon before the sun had swung round to the west there was a shower of the quick, warm tropical rain. The narrow streets would be rivers in a minute, the mountains would disappear, then pres- ently the air would dry, the sky resume its limpid blue, 14 CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS and down the length of the valley and across the drip^ ping city would blaze the searchlight sun. The moun- tains turned to plush, the barren rusty flanks softened into browns and greens so velvety that the mere color seemed to have a texture, and here and there all over it shone little silver lines — sudden cascades pouring down the rocks, warm and steady, miles and miles away. A distinguished gringo once came to Caracas by way of Honduras and Central America. He had cut his way through swamps, been bitten by mosquitoes and fleas, and suffered from fever, and when he saw the plaza and the people and the band playing under the electric lamps at night, he called Caracas the Paris of South America. To me, after seeing Lima and Santiago and Buenos Aires and Rio, Caracas seemed scarcely more the Paris of South America than Pasadena or Colorado Springs are Parises of the States ; but it was easy enough to understand the distinguished gringo’s point of view. The lamps of Paris light its plaza; its little victorias rattle through the narrow streets; the newsboys call out their papers with long, rippling, accented cries that seem an echo of the boulevards ; on the benches of the plaza, shabby, cynical verse-makers scribble decadent rhymes and drowse in the sun. It goes through the motions in many little superficial ways, and it regards these motions with quite as much seriousness as though they were the real thing. They read in the morning papers about the new statue of de Musset beside the Theatre Francais or a couple of col- 15 THE OTHER AMERICANS umns of impressionistic description of the art of Mile. Cleo de Merode — “Our Lady of the Smile and Dance” — with as much interest as though the first stood in one of their own squares — alongside their statue of Washington — and as though the lady could be seen at the municipal theatre each night instead of the bio- graph. And it is with the conviction and self-absorp- tion of the true boulevardier that they write about the thunder of traffic in their quiet little streets, the mag- nificence of their pretty little villas, and describe the carriage parade in the Paraiso as though that little macadam street w T ere Hyde Park or the Champs- Elysees. The Plaza de Bolivar is the centre of the town and of Venezuela, and in the centre of the plaza stands the equestrian statue of the Liberator, who, after freeing all this part of the continent from Spain, was im- prisoned by his own people and died broken-hearted, in exile, with the w r ords: “I have plowed in the sea.” Round the square are the Government Buildings, the library and sleepy old university, and a cathedral whose bell whangs out every quarter-hour, and leaves no doubt in the mind of every stranger who tries to sleep in the hotel near-by that Venezuela is still domi- nated by the Church. Across the end of the square tinkle the little toy street-cars, and now and then a hooded victoria slips through, the top drawn like a visor over the inside, so that all you can see is the tip of a chin or bit of white parasol. It is not pleasant for ladies to appear on the streets unless they are extremely plain. 1G CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS At the cathedral corner, under a big tree, is the news- stand. There are several newspapers and periodicals, and some little humorous sheets full of crude little drawings. None of the newspapers has exactly free speech, and some of them are, as it were, rented from time to time by politicians who want to push their campaign. The “Constitutional” speaks directly for the Government, and is the only one which has the air of real stability and dignity. Some of the most characteristic traits of the Vene- zuelans — their mixture of frivolousness and sentimen- tal melancholy, their impressionability, their fondness, common to Latin Americans and particularly those of the warmer latitudes, for high-flown and flowery de- scription — come out in these newspapers. Almost always there are sensations de voyage from some trav- eller journeying a few miles from home, discussions of some fine academic point in literature or speech, “communications” in which some fond scribbler en- deavors to imprison in classical prose some aspect of his native town. A charity bazaar, for instance, is to be held at one of the more pretentious villas; it is a nice house, the lady is nice, too, the prospect thrills our gifted friend Rodriguez, and he seizes his pen and ad- dresses “El Constitucional.” He begins at the begin- ning, thus: “It was a gracious afternoon, one of those on which the spirit opens itself to all the varied and harmonious accents of the language of beauty — in the atmosphere wandered vague aromas, indefinite beau- ties beckoned from the horizon, and the day wrapped 17 THE OTHER AMERICANS itself in the seductive melancholy of its last adieu. . . .” Follow, after a few paragraphs, specific details — municipal improvements along the Paraiso, the new automobiles, the sight of children playing baseball ; then the lyre is struck again: “The day declines; the afternoon loses its pensive attitude of the enamored virgin — no longer is there light on the hills nor vague glimmers on the mountain tops. Faraway sighs seem to come to the ear, airy messengers of chaste amours; the shades deepen, innumerable diamonds begin to sparkle in the sky. . . .” Thus we are brought to the house, which is deftly described even to its dimensions in metres, then to the interior constructed “with a visible eloquence, that quid divinum which gives voice to forms, expression to lines, life to details, joy to art, and grandeur to the whole.” Desirable this is, but finer yet “that spiritual culture, that kindness of heart, that firmness and character and elevation of soul pos- sessed by the villa’s mistress, of whom it might truly be said that she passes between the flowers of her gar- den without touching them with the hem of her gar- ments.” And so on for two newspaper columns signed with the contributor’s name. Happy bourn for the “littery!” Far from our Park Row, where the im- passioned “communication” is tossed into the waste- basket, and the copy-reader’s shears and blue pencil commit continuous murder! If you stop to listen in the plaza, at almost any mo- ment of the day, you can hear somewhere in the dis- tance shrill, boyish voices crying out numbers in Span- 18 Venezuelan schoolboys at the baseball ground. CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS ish — “Dos meet — queefentos — cmquenta ” — long drawn out, melodious, like a phrase of a song. They are the lottery-ticket sellers, perennials of the street in almost all Latin- American towns. In Caracas, when I was there, a new national lottery concession had just been granted to a Frenchman. It was “for the good of the people,” and advertisements represented it as a horn of plenty, showering money down into the hands of the delighted populace while an army of beaming winners marched toward a rising sun with money-bags upon their backs. There were drawings twice a week, and until the last minute news-venders and beggars and little barefoot boys were tramping the sun-baked side- walks all over town with strips of these tickets to sell. There were sixteen coupons for each number, and one could buy them separately for ten cents each or the whole number for four bolivars. If that number won a prize, the winner received one-sixteenth of it for every one of the coupons he held. The company’s percent- age was three and a third. The numbers which ex- perience had proved were lucky were bought up by speculators, at whose shops certain favorite tickets could always be found. You could even have the lucky number reserved for you for the next drawing, just as you would go to Tyson’s and have a seat re- served on the aisle. Some six thousand tickets could be sold, and as half-past two, the hour for the draw- ing, approached, and there were still hundreds of them out, the boys would hurry into the plaza, waving their strips and shouting the last call. It was just siesta 19 THE OTHER AMERICANS time, when the plaza lay quiet and almost deserted, baking in the midday glare, and from my room I could hear them pattering by in their bare feet and wailing, like locusts in the sun — ‘ ‘ La ooZ-ti-ma o-ra !” “ Para oy ! Numero saysmeeZ-dos cientos-ochentary-nueve ! La ool- ti-ma o-ra!” The Spanish tongue was made for such cries. One really got almost excited and the little raffle under the trees in the market became a hazard of dignity. There were city officials to watch it and the conces- sionaire on the outskirts of the crowd twirling his mus- tache and looking as though the Bank of England were in the balance. The iced-drink peddlars urged their frescos helados and there w 7 as a vender of little second- hand books — a sort of Italian-opera-chorus comedian, like the travelling physician in “L’Elisir d’Amore” — who would rattle off “I speek all the languages, senores — todos los idiomas — I speek ze Ingles va-a-ary good — 0 yes, all right — will you have my books — Voulez-vous des litres — for ze back-ache, ze stow-mack ache — 0, yes — Quiere usted los libros V ’ In a big, hollow, woven- wire globe were poured wooden balls, like hazel nuts, bearing the ticket numbers, in a smaller globe the balls bearing the prize numbers and the blanks. These globes, hung on axles like churns, were revolved, stopped, a ball extracted from each through a sort of spigot by incorruptible little boys. They w r ere then handed to the clerk, w T ho read the numbers. If number 301 had dropped from the big globe and 80 from the little globe, the man who owned lottery ticket 301 won eighty boli- 20 CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS vars. He stood about one chance in thirty-three of getting this or any other prize. The prize numbers were chalked up on a blackboard, each accompanied by about the same little buzz of interest that is be- stowed on the bidder who gets a bargain at an auction at home. The squirrel cages continued their turning. The old negro women and the languid mestizos watched apathetically, and when the last ball had dropped out as apathetically shuffled away. When the cool of the day comes and the sun is going down, the shutters are drawn back from the front windows, and Mamma and the ninas, dressed up and made very beautiful, sit watching the street with their faces close to the bars. If one knows them very well indeed, one may call, being careful to pay all one’s attention to Mamma, while Maria or Elvira sits across the room, fingering her bracelet or the lace on her sleeve, and dropping her great dark eyes and blushing if one but so much as looks her way. Or one may stand on the sidewalk, and, while folks brush by on the narrow flagging — young dandies, perfumed, and whisking their little bamboo canes, negro women in pink or sky- blue, the powder lying on their dusky cheeks like flour, water-carriers, beggars — talk politely through the bars. There is always a chance this way that Elvira or Maria, in the most casual way imaginable, may let her fingers slip through the bars — though, to be sure, just a chance, for Mamma’s rocking-chair is close by and it is too much to hope that she is asleep, even though she sits with eyes half closed., a little like an 21 THE OTHER AMERICANS owl. But the stray gringo may only tramp glumly past, almost brushing their elbows, staring — for that is considered only polite — as frankly as though they were pictures or pretty flowers. All may seem lovely then. One forgets to wonder whether they could think or waltz or bake bread, whether, were they at home, they would not be leaning on a pillow in a Harlem flat window’ watching the “L” trains go by — forgets the funny little “tidies” and “airbrush” portraits, and the funnel of the phonograph dimly visible behind them, and with the brilliant tropic moonlight turning the shabby old walls to marble and the tinkle of water coming from some inner court, every man perforce be- comes a Romeo, and each half seen phantom behind its barred window a Juliet. But what is Maria like — suppose you could drop in as if you w r ere at home ? Just for the present I intend to evade this delicate and extremely interesting subject, though as we stroll on down the street I trust there will be no harm in pausing at the big-tree news-stand a moment and reading what some wicked, cynical scribbler-person says in that droll little La Compana. There is a drawing of a young man and a young lady under the title Gente Elegante, and this is w’hat he says : “You may call her Elena or Julia or Maria — it’s all the same. In all haunts of the fashionable you’ll find her — San Bernardino, El Paraiso, etc., are the theatres of her operations. She doesn’t know how many eyes a needle has, but she can tell you the exact color of the skirts which la bclla Otero puts on when she 22 CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS dances. She doesn’t know the Credo, but she never misses church, prayer-book in hand like the Queen Regent. If you should ask her on what day our inde- pendence was declared she wouldn’t know what to reply, but on the other hand she remembers perfectly when the Princess Chimay ran away with a violin for baggage. . . This way of shutting Julia or Elena up like a doll for the men to promenade past her cage, rolling their roving eyes, seems strange to us, but here again let us postpone discussion, for the present, of a custom of hundreds of years, though in passing we might glance over this certainly extraordinary letter addressed to the newspaper El Combate. At the head of it are big initials which we will call X. Y. Z. These are the initials of a young man who has made me the victim of his immoral and stupid persecution. He is a phantom which follows me everywhere, and wearies me with his gross attentions. To free myself from this troublesome insect I wrote to his father to interfere, and liberate me from such a pretentious fellow. To no avail. Then I went to the Prefect of this city with a formal repre- sentation, signed and ratified by myself. It was equally useless. The Quixote of my window redoubled his attentions, and last Saturday I had the misfortune to meet him in going from the Plaza Lopez to Las Animas, and to endure the artillery of his glances. 23 THE OTHER AMERICANS I am resolved as the result of all this, if he passes my window again, to publish the letter which I sent to his father, and a copy of the accusation which reposes with the Prefect of Caracas. And you may be sure, X. Y. Z., that your name will be printed and your description given in a way that you will not forget all your life. A. B. C. So the men may not always stare successfully, and little Maria thinks a bit for herself these days! A little time, and will the New Woman have come also to Caracas? On Sunday evenings the band plays in the Plaza — at other times in the week, too, here and over in the Paraiso, but Sunday evening is the best. Then every one is dressed up and feeling chipper, the little hooded victorias go rattling and twinkling by livelier than ever, and this cheerful national institution of our south- ern neighbors performs before its most engaging audience. The statue of Bolivar stands in the centre of the Plaza, in an open tiled place where the tiled paths come together and cross. At the opposite end of the broadest of these promenades, on a sort of dais reached by a flight of curved stone steps, the band plays, and up and down in front of it, past Bolivar’s statue and back again, the crowd strolls and chatters and smokes cigarettes. That is to say, the men do — the young gentlemen back from school in England or Switzerland or the States, dressed for the evening, on their way to dinner, perhaps at one of the legations, regarding the scene with a certain detachment and condescension; the young town dandies, with their 24 CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS bamboo sticks and absurdly long, slim, yellow shoes, a few Yankee drummers, slapping each other on the back with conscious hilarity and talking, half in fun, in their horrible Spanish; a German or two, conces- sionaires, perhaps, of some great rubber plantation in the interior, tall, huge, blond and comfortable, stalking side by side, heavy walking sticks under their arms, talking art, philosophy and rates of exchange; these, and the substratum of mestizos, in their shabby white, staring apathetically. And on either side, just at the edge of the light and back under the trees, are the families, Papa and Mamma and the young ladies, all in a row in their best dresses and ribbons and gloves. Charming are the little ninas, with their hands in stiff, little, white gloves or “mitts” laid primly on their laps, and their great shy velvety eyes turning slowly this way and that, without any more sign of recognition than though those wicked men-creatures promenading by were so many pictures of animals in books. There was something about them, their dressed-up hats, and their shy, little, gloved hands lying stiffly parallel, that was exactly like the jeunes jilles which French artists paint, just such little girls as Mr. Shinn or Mr. Glackens might put into a picture of a park. They will tell you that Caracas is not what she used to be in the old days before the price of coffee went down, before the canny Mr. Castro had taxed sugar and things as they are taxed now. Everybody was rich then, one must believe, and the fountains weren’t dried up nor the Carvallo gone to seed — when Madame 25 THE OTHER AMERICANS Carreno was playing and Rojas and Michaelena paint- ing, and the cable, now cut out, brought real news. Every one will be rich again, one must also believe, when the Government is better and foreign folks with money aren’t afraid to invest it, and all those Eldorados in the interior are opened up. Venezuela was the only one of the Latin- American Republics which wouldn’t play and send a delegate to the Rio Conference, and, as I write, people in Caracas are expecting any day to see the present dictator deposed. Yet I dare say that life moves on in the little capital in much the same way. The tunes from the operas thrill just as much whether or not there’s a delegate at Rio, the seiioritas’ eyes are as bright and the mountains as beautiful. It is a perfect place to play with life, cloistered away, so near to the real world, and yet so far. The real world’s manners are here, but none of its problems. All things are reduced to a scale so small that big general things become individual and personal. People who have money have made it easily, those who haven’t it expect none. There is no striving, strenuous middle- class. There are plenty of poets, but they do not hear the world’s rumble and noise; they sit on a park bench, write verses for albums, or devise epigrams withering their rivals and enemies. They hear that their country is being ruined, and they write about the eyes of their women and compare their mouths to strawberries and ripe pomegranates. When the President defies France they look up at the brown mountains and say: “We 2G CARACAS AND THE VENEZUELANS could hold out ten years up there,” just as the sleepy creole in the park at La Guayra looks up at the little fort on the hill and says: “ Surely, sehor! With that we could blow the French out of the water!” Superimposed on this quaint world is the tinier world of the sophisticated — the legations, the chosen, who have travelled and been educated abroad, the exiles of commerce — a toy world more or less typical of every South American city. Within it people dress for dinner, read the latest magazines, and live super- ficially much as they would here or in Europe. They drift along placidly, with the gentle raillery of those as much at home in the new country as in the old, and able, at will, to smile at one from the standpoint of the other. In their pretty villas and courts they are like people living in conservatories. Strange lost sheep blow in now and then — tourists, conces- sion-hunters, adventurers, correspondents — they take them as they come. There is the feeling that one can always go back if one wants to, the real world seems like the city during a summer vacation. Its absence gives each echo of it a new significance and charm. Every “ dress suit” and evening gown acquires a sort of romantic significance. A lady driving along the Paraiso in a hired carriage is as much of a personage as a lady in a crested victoria driving up Fifth Avenue or through the Park. You drop into “La India” after the band concert for a cup of Caracas chocolate, with the same emotions that you might take supper after the theatre at Sherry’s. It 27 THE OTHER AMERICANS is always before one, changing things and charming them — that great battlement of mountain shutting out the northern stars, and beyond that the fever- filled coast, and beyond that the days and days of languid trades and blue sargasso sea. CHAPTER III THE ROYAL MAIL AND PANAMA There are many strange ways of getting about in South America, but I doubt if any of them brings a more complete sense of contrast than comes with walking up the gangplank from the wharf at La Guayra to the deck of a Royal Mail. It is almost as hard to get out of La Guayra as to get into it; one must call on the prefect to demonstrate that one is not an escaping regicide, pay one’s going-away fees, deposit in gold enough to meet quarantine expenses at the Isthmus, so that the steamship agent may violate the company’s order to accept no passengers for Colon; and, after pecking at a villainous garlic-greasy luncheon on a hotel balcony looking out on the Caribbean, skirmishing through smelly streets hardly daring to draw a full breath, and awaiting with the gringo’s panicky dread the bite of the yellow-fever mosquito, one has just about forgotten the pretty little capital over behind the mountains, Bolivar Plaza, and the hooded victorias twinkling through the dark, and is ready for comic-opera Latin-America at its wildest. Then you step across a bit of planking into the British Isles. It is no less than that. Your luggage 29 THE OTHER AMERICANS is brought by a barefoot mestizo, sputtering Spanish frantically, and laboring apparently under the obsession that you have robbed him or that the steamer is going to sail without you, and it is taken by a sandy-haired Cockney steward, who says: “Ticket, sir, if you please, sir,” and “Thank you, sir,” whether one gives him half a sovereign or tells him that he ought to be hanged. You leave behind the desayuno of rolls and cafe con leche — hot milk and native coffee, black as ink — and approach a breakfast of toast and orange marmalade, eggs, cold joints, bloaters, and Yorkshire brawn. The decks are lined with steamer chairs whose occupants seem as unaware that the steamer has touched at a new port, full of sights new and strange which they may never see again, as they are of the existence of those reclining on either side of them. They do not see the theatre-curtain town, nor the wonderful brown mountains. They are reading the romances of the Colonial Library, just as they were five minutes after the ship left Southampton, just as they would be if they were sailing east on a P. and 0. to whatever queer corner of the Orient. At five o’clock, of course, there are tea and biscuits, and the Colonial Governor, on his way “out” to his new post, tastes, sets down his cup, and forthwith summons the head steward: “What is this?” he demands, and the steward, wetting his lips and almost turning pale, ventures the opinion that it is tea. “Tea?” rumbles the Colonial Governor. “ Tea ?” He regards the portly steward as though he were some 30 THE ROYAL MAIL AND PANAMA eccentric insect. “Now, my good man!” he begins, straightening' up, one hand on the hip, “I have drunk tea for forty yeahs, and in all parts of the world, and I know ” At six-thirty the bugle blows. The Major’s big bulldog-toed tan boots, which look as though they had tramped over many miles of fair green, cease their steady pound up and down the deck, the young men rap their pipes on the rail, the young women put down their Colonial novels. At seven all emerge, dressed as though they were dining out at home instead of dozing westward through the tepid Caribbean in the dregs of the northeast trades. Soda bottles begin to pop, the squeaky little orchestra plays “The Lost Chord,” and airs from the latest Gaiety Theatre success, and the Colonial Governor and the Colonel, at the captain’s table, rumble in the fine, sonorous parlia- mentary manner of the Dreadnought's coal consump- tion, the native question in Bengal, and the laboring men’s lack of interest in Nonconformist schemes, as though they were reading aloud from The Spectator or The Saturday Review. It was inconceivably British — that ship. I mean that its Briticism was of that incredible sort, which, like the complementary kind of Americanism, one expects to find only in the caricatures of novels or the stage. One could imagine it sailing round the world forever and peeping into all the world’s strange and wonderful ports, and still the steamer chairs would line the deck on the opposite side of the ship from 31 THE OTHER AMERICANS which things were to be seen, still the heads would be bent complacently over the Colonial novels. There were several locomotive drivers on their w T ay to a West Coast railroad — fine stalwart chaps, with that wonderful combination of sturdiness and stupidity which is rarely so well exhibited as in the face of the British working man. I happened to speak to one of them of “the Canal.” “W’at canal is that?” said he. I told him that the United States was trying to dig one across Panama. “ Aouw” — he said, “are they buildin’ a canal there?” with that peculiar accent of the question which seems to imply that probably that is exactly what they are not doing. Two ladies sat at the captain’s right — austere, scarcely youthful females, who dressed in black lace each night. They might have stepped out of a Du Maurier drawing in Punch. Any one who was ever housed in that antique and flea-bitten caravansary which stands across the plaza from the cathedral at Panama — up to last May, at least, triumphantly the worst hotel in the worst of all possible worlds — will understand how it was almost with grief that a few days after we had landed one saw these poor creatures there nibbling at its villainous table d’hote. It was almost shocking a few days later to catch a glimpse of them on the sun-blistered dock at La Boca, gently bred apparently, certainly inexperienced, jostled by sweating coal-passers and negro porters, picking their way, timorously, to a shabby little half-freighter bound up the Mexican coast. They could not sail for several 32 THE ROYAL MAIL AND PANAMA days, and meanwhile they must exist there, with donkey engines wrangling all about them and coal- dust flying, and bake in one of the hottest ports of the world. It was not until we were well down the Peru- vian coast that a young American engineer, to whom they had appealed one day in Panama, told me what it all meant. They were on their way to San Francisco. And to compass a journey, w r hich by way of North Atlantic liners and Pullman cars might have been made in rather less time than a fortnight, they were to travel thousands and thousands of miles, touch at half the fever-stricken ports on the Western continent, and consume, first and last, probably all of two months. “But what on earth — ” “Well,” grinned the young engineer, “they said it was the only way. They’d understood that transportation was still so crude that it wasn’t safe for women to try to cross the interior of the States!” It seemed to me not the least interesting thing about the fever-breathing strip of coast between La Guayra and Colon that ships like these should be steaming along it only a stone’s throw, so to speak, off shore. I thought of it as we lay at the dock one morning at Cartagena, when, with thunder-claps crashing all round us like exploding shells and that rain which only the tropics know, filling all the world beyond the deck awnings in one solid steamy waterfall, the if-you-please- sir-thank-you stewards began, promptly at eleven o’clock as usual, to patter from chair to chair with their vanilla biscuits and little pink ices. And I 33 THE OTHER AMERICANS thought of it every’ time I looked overside and saw the flying-fish spattering away from the bow, and re- called that behind that jagged brown shore-line were the snow heights and the steamy jungles of the Orinoco and Colombia, and not so very far away Indians as naked and refreshingly savage as any in the world. There are two ways of seeing this northwest corner of South America and traversing the several thousand miles that take one from the asphalt and cabs of Cara- cas to the asphalt and cabs of the capital of Peru. By one way you go cross-country, cut your way through jungles, ford rivers full of alligators and snakes, shiver on mountain passes higher than any in the Rockies, get bitten up by all sorts of troublesome insects and elected to a geographical society when you get home. By the other way, one coasts along effetely in some such mailboat as this, and endeavors to content one’s self by reading “ Westward Ho,” and consular reports, viewing the mouldering dungeons of Cartagena, and speculating about the days when pirates rejoiced in these waters and the Inquisition roasted people on red-hot iron mattresses. If these lines should chance to fall beneath the eye of a Colombian, I hope he will not think that it was any passionate attachment to the society of a steamer-chair which prompted the writer to deny himself the more arduous and more interesting pilgrimage, nor that this mere coasting trip was intended as any affirmation of the notion that the Republic of Colombia is not to be taken seriously. But we have but one life and there are limits to things. 34 THE ROYAL MAIL AND PANAMA There are few cities in South America, for instance, which the wanderer who strays into these parts would rather get a glimpse of than Bogota, the capital of Colombia. So few people from the big world ever visit it that it is almost like some buried city of Tibet. It lies in the interior, ten thousand feet up in the air — so far up that though within five degrees of the equator its average temperature is like our spring. Buried away, as they are, the people of Bogota have preserved more of the Spanish life than their more accessible neighbors. It is away up here that the sonorous tongue of Cervantes and Calderon is spoken most perfectly. Bogota is the centre of that interest in things literary which is perhaps the most typical characteristic of the Colombian when contrasted with his neighbors. It was after he had been at Harvard that a young Venezuelan told me that Bogota was "the Boston of South America,” and, to hear South Americans describe it, one might almost think that Bogota reproduced the days of the precieuses. If you ask the name of the best novel written in South America, you will generally be told that it is "Maria,” a story written by a Colombian about Colombia; the delegate which the Colombians sent to the conference at Rio was one of their favorite poets. Yet to get to Bogota, even after one has left the steamer at Sav- anilla, takes two weeks’ travel up the Magdalena River, and by mule-back across the mountains; there is no way to get out except by the way one came — M the best a whole month gone. 35 THE OTHER AMERICANS It is inaccessibility such as this which has always been Colombia’s great drawback, and which has done much to prevent it from reaching a stage of civilization in which the country as a whole could be taken seri- ously. Colombia is about ten times as large as New York State, and, excepting the Caribbean coast and the broad llanos of the eastern part, sloping down to the Orinoco and Amazon, the whole land is one tangle of valleys walled in by mountains, anywhere from ten to twenty thousand feet high. One can look from one neighborhood to another, to reach which by the cir- cuitous trails would take days. There are practically no railroads — communication between the capital and the various departments is by horseback, and about the vividest idea the outlying people get of the national administration is when some representative of it comes round to put up the taxes. They write and read a great deal of poetry in Bogota, but the folks who do it are only a tiny oligarchy, superimposed on the country’s untrained mass, sloping down grade from merely illiterate mestizos to out-and- out savages. Only about one-third of the people are white. Of the future importance of the country, there is, of course, no doubt. Its minerals, in spite of the hundreds of millions the Spaniards gathered up, have, in the modern mining sense, scarcely been scratched. It has coffee and rubber and woods, and several million cattle are now ranging in its eastern llanos. It will be the nearest country to the Panama Canal, and it is only five days from New York. But 36 THE ROYAL MAIL AND PANAMA even the present chronicler must admit that, in spite of its upper class, Colombia, together with Ecuador, and, in a lesser sense, Venezuela, is one of those Latin- American countries which are, in a modern sense, scarcely house-broken. The velvety breath that whis- pers through the palm trees of the Caribbean would woo the soul away from an iron statue of a Puritan Father and make him forget his country, yet one can scarcely refrain from smiling at the three little toy ships of Colombia’s navy, dancing in the sun off Car- tagena, or at a land where for a few cents of almost any sort of money, you get a handful of bills in change. It is hard to be quite serious when you spend three days in a little flea-bitten shack on the beach, and the hotel proprietor, with a low bow, hands you a bill for $900. The disadvantage in coming to the* Isthmus from any such respectable and unsuspected port as South- ampton or New York, is that one is compelled on arriving to go to a Panama hotel, instead of being hustled away to quarantine. The long arm of Colonel Gorgas and his men, which descends alike on the solitary stegomya basking in the rain-barrel, and whole shiploads of people embarked at ports a thousand miles away, had made La Guayra a suspected port, and whoever had come from there must be quaran- tined until the six days, during which the fever de- velops, were past. Our British acquaintances, there- fore, went to Panama, where, until the west coast mail-boat sailed, they could enjoy some of the worst of Spanish-American cooking and awake of mornings to 37 THE OTHER AMERICANS watch the insectivora crawling up the mosquito cur- tains of their beds back to their daytime lairs. We, from Venezuela, were bundled into a sea-going hack and driven through darkest Colon — which resembles a fishing village on Jamaica Bay when the tide is out — past the big hospital, to a frame cottage, new, screened, and fresh as paint. We thought at the time that we were rather roughly used, but one night of freedom in a Panama hotel a few days later gave us precisely the feelings of the man in the music-hall song who asked if they wouldn’t put him back in his little cell. It was really a delightful place. A certain breeze wanders off the Caribbean, so soft and sweet that body and spirit fairly dissolve in it as in some faint, exquisite music. But it is a furtive breeze, as difficult to grasp as the shadow of Ting-a-ling in Peter Pan. It particularly likes corners. I mean the outside corners of houses which have a porch. It will blow on people it knows, and who know the precise angle it likes, and make them wonder why any one should think it un- comfortably hot in Panama; but if they presume a bit and move so much as a hair-breadth to one side, it goes out like an electric light and leaves them gasp- ing on what might be a tin roof on the very hottest dog-day at home. There was one of those corners on the porch at Quarantine where you could tilt your chair back, put your feet on the porch rail, watch the ships sailing into the Caribbean, and shiver agreeably at the stories of disease and death the other prisoners told. We always talked disease and death. By day, with 38 U. S. quarantine station on the beach at Colon. The white man’s burden-carrier bound for Panama. THE ROYAL MAIL AND PANAMA pipes alight, clad only in pajamas, with the coral drive round our little bay blazing in the sun, it was cheerful enough; but toward evening, when the mosquitoes began to swarm over from the marshes in clouds, and one felt, in spite of what the doctor said, that at least one or two of them must be stegomyas, we listened like children hearing ghost stories, or shipwrecked sailors talking about sharks while clinging to a raft. There were only six or eight of us — a black-and-tan family bound for Panama, some beach-combers, and the rest from the second-class were housed in an adjoining cottage — and to the others, quarantines, eating qui- nine and driving the fever out of one’s carcass was part of the day’s work. One was a Canal employee; he had had the fever in Havana, and had a certificate saying that he was immune, but he had sailed from Savanilla and had been ordered to Quarantine, with the rest. One was a young engineer on his way home from the Nicaragua banana country; you were bound to have more or less malaria, he said, if you had to work in the “bush,” but he got a couple of months in the north each year, and that seemed to pull him through. Only once had he “come near to croaking,” although that, to be sure, was a pretty close squeak. They measured him for his coffin, and in the thoughtful way they had in that little native hospital, brought it in and set it beside his bed. “The good thing is,” one of the others said, “you’re always out of your head. If you get well all right, and if you don’t, why you go off without knowing it — 39 THE OTHER AMERICANS and that’s all right, too.” He had just come “out” from home — a young Scotchman, scarcely thirty, yet with nearly ten years’ sendee behind him in every sort of fever-cursed land, from the Gold Coast to the Far East. He was a commercial traveller, and he had been down the west coast of Africa somewhere when the "house” had cabled that the man who covered the Caribbean country had died at last, and he must go over and take his place. "He went off two months ago — at Maracaibo,” explained the young Scotchman; "he kept at it too long.” This young man, too, had had his measure taken after the natives had brought him down several days’ journey to one of the little ports on the Gold Coast. A ship happened to be in port, and, as steamers didn’t pass that way very often, his baggage was packed up and sent aboard, and a cable sent home that his case was hopeless. He had had about every disease in the list of those with creepy names which whisk one off in a night, and his face showed that he had not spent his life looking out of a club window. Yet he was not what is called a hero. He was an agent for a firm of whiskey manufacturers. While our baggage was being inspected on the wharf, I had noticed two very solid- looking leather boxes among his luggage, bearing ini- tials not his own. "Yes,” he said dryly, when I spoke about them afterward, “they have seen a good bit of service out here. They belonged to the other man.” 40 THE ROYAL MAIL AND PANAMA You run across them everywhere down here, the soldiers of that strange legion which is always in active service, always on the firing line, yet without a flag and without a name. They are through the jungle ahead of the railroad and over the passes before the engineers. They know the Kaffir and bushwhackers’ slang names for food, and to sell a bit of cotton cloth or a phonograph they are ready to speak more lan- guages than a Russian diplomat. They cross deserts and ignore pestilence, and the things that amateur explorers write volumes about are not mentioned when they run across a mail-boat and send back to the “house” a report of the day’s work. They don’t get any medals or any cheers or any pensions, and they are lucky if they get their name in the paper when the time comes for them to “snuff it” in some far-off jungle, under any flag in the world but their own. Although prisoners, we could walk along the beach for about the distance of two city blocks to a certain stump beside the water, and if any one passed that, the little German doctor would call from the porch, and the big Jamaica negro policeman, in khaki and a brown helmet, would start toward us, beaming his superior and sphinx-like smile. He was a wonderful person, very proud of his position, of the distinguished personage whom he called “Uncle Som,” and he spoke the most elegant phrase-book English with a British accent that made the most precise of us feel small and colloquial. It was superb to hear him ask the negro driver of one of the rickety Colon carriages, “Suh — 41 THE OTHER AMERICANS what is yoh tariff?” or to watch him stride in majestic- ally from the other house and request, “If I am not incommoding j t ou too much, steward, two moh bottles of yoh aerated watahs.” If all the Canal negroes fitted into their places as perfectly as did this benign and efficient personage, the problem of labor would not be perplexing. I had my first glimpse of the Canal negro when I took the steamer at La Guayra. She had touched at Trinidad and Georgetown, and her steerage decks, fore and aft, were packed with Barbadoes negroes. They were husky, strong-looking fellows, like most West Indian negroes, black, and smooth as seals. Some were beautiful, in their chocolate statue fashion; tall, with narrow waists and fine shoulders that showed through their torn shirts like chocolate-colored bronze. Mr. Rowland Thomas, looking down from the upper deck, might have mistaken several for his “Fagan.” By day they sprawled in the sun like turtles or amused them- selves with absurd games, crawling along the rails like monkeys or begging for cigarettes from the cabin pas- sengers with the peculiar Cockney whine of the negro of the British West Indies; at night they danced on the deck while two or three pounded on the hatchway with sticks, precisely the same sort of tomtom song, I dare say, that their relations were beating at the same moment in the heart of the Congo jungle. It was difficult to associate them with hard and per- sistent labor; they seemed, as much as the palm trees, a part of those sleepy isles the steamer had left behind, 42 THE ROYAL MAIL AND PANAMA with their sunshine and their tobacco and coffee and the rank molasses-sugar smells. They were merely happy tropical animals. Then one day we sighted the Isthmus. Instantly there was a grand scramble. Out of tin trunks and paper bundles came duck suits and rakish flannels, Panama hats with silk-scarf hatbands, barber-pole ties that would have made a Yale sopho- more envious — all the conglomeration of British hand- me-down clothing which could be* accumulated in such a place as the Barbadoes, where British clothing is as cheap as it is in London. They had elaborated all the little tricks they had picked up from their British masters. The Panamas were carefully turned up in front and down behind, their ducks were rolled up half-way to their knees, flaming silk hand- kerchiefs were hanging negligently out of breast- pockets. They strolled the deck and leaned on their sticks with the air of Broadway chorus gentle- men, and the same shameless, slovenly children who had begged for tobacco now stared up toward the saloon deck with a “who-the-deuce-are-you?” air which seemed to be endeavoring to assure us that we had never seen them before. It was men like these who had come to undertake continuous and exhausting labor under conditions which called for pluck and fortitude of the first order. I do not know how typical this boatload may have been ; others, perhaps, had less of this hopeless mixture of barbarism and cheap sophistication. But when one thought of these black men with H. M. S. Impregnable hatbands running up 43 THE OTHER AMERICANS against an Irish Canal foreman, for instance, the labor problem opened up a few of its vistas. And it was instructive to recall the look of these men two or three days later, when we recognized some of them at work along the railroad — clothes out of sight now, cocky manners out of sight too, just simple, “cagey” Canal negroes, moving so slowly that one wondered how they could keep their balance, carrying shovelfuls of dirt with the elaborate care of contestants in a slow bicycle race. To those who know them, the tropics are not ter- rible, treacherous though they be; even in naturally unhealthy places like Panama, where such work as Colonel Gorgas and his men are doing has been done, there is scarcely more danger to health than in the temperate north. Such work is part of the romance of modern science — to destroy terror, stamp out dis- ease, defeat what amounted to a hostile army with sharpshooters behind every tree, concealed, indeed, in every rain-puddle and water-barrel; and to do it, not with fighting and smoke and blood, but peacefully, silently, with microscopes and drains and mosquito screens. Its importance can scarcely be over-estimated. For it means, not merely making the Isthmus habi- table, but changing the problem of the whole tropics and throwing it open to the white man. All of the men whom I met on the Isthmus, who had work which allowed them to remain indoors away from the sun, seemed contented. There was always a breeze, they said, and in the shade it was more com- 44 THE ROYAL MAIL AND PANAMA fortable than it was in summer in the city at home. Their lodgings were clean and roomy, and the meals at the commissariat restaurants which cost them thirty- five cents and strangers fifty cents, were much better than those supplied by the average boarding-house in New York. The most satisfied person I met was a man who had spent his life in clubs and restaurants at home before he took up an executive position in one of the departments on the Canal. “Food’s good, do nothing at night but sleep, and it’s no hotter than it is in summer in Chicago,” he said. “Gained twenty pounds, and I whistle every morning when I’m taking my bath, and that’s some- thing I didn’t used to be able to do.” These are the cheering things one hears after seeing the Canal and talking with its builders, but few Northerners, used to thinking of “the country” as a paradise in which one rides and plays golf and gets rested and healthy, can journey across the Isthmus for the first time without a certain feeling of creepi- ness, as though one were entering a darkened sick- room sheltering some malignant disease, or an ambush that concealed an enemy. Outside it is only a strip of jungle land. There is an aisle of tropical vines and creepers, pierced by a railroad, wooded hills presently, and the view now and then of a sluggish river. The very stillness and lethargy of it only make more oppressive the weight of tragedy that lies upon it — makes it seem more treacherous. Hopes and fortunes and thousands of lives have perished here, and there 45 THE OTHER AMERICANS lies the jungle, flat and stupid and freshly green, inno- cent as a quicksand. Nature ceases to be our kindly, comfortable mother of the North. One shrinks from her. You do not throw up your chin and fill your lungs; you breathe with a certain dread, as though the very air were poisonous. Through the vines you can see now and then the engines and dump-cars and little cranes left by the French. The hungry vegeta- tion, with the relentless sureness of a python swallow- ing a rabbit, has all but submerged them. There is something horrible and uncanny in the inevitableness of this tropical growth, outwardly so fragile and so frail. From the tops of rusty smoke-stacks and steam- shovels, pale tendrils flutter and swing in the breeze, pretty and careless, and they seem like the little waves lapping about some dead thing in the water. . . . It was sunset time when we rode through the Cu- lebra Cut. Work had stopped, and beside the fresh gashes they had gnawed in the red clay of the hillside, the South Milwaukee steam shovels — almost alive and personal they seemed, so wonderfully did they bring into the jungle the strength and sure sweep of that life of the North — rested for the night. The army of workers were returning home. At every station folks poured into the train; clerks from the division chiefs’ offices, young engineers with red clay plastered all over their boots and puttees, sweat coming through the khaki between their shoulders, and that tired look across the eyes that comes to white men who have to work and worry in a tropical climate. With them, 4G T FIE ROYAL MAIL AND PANAMA returning from marketing or visiting, were their sis- ters and wives and young lady school-teachers in summer shirtwaists. Everybody seemed to know everybody else. It was like a commuter’s train going out to Jersey at six o’clock. The young engineers leaned over the backs of the seats and chatted with the school-teachers — some of the wives and sisters brought out candy boxes and passed them around. “Hello, Mrs. S., how’s everything? . . . Well, she said ... Yes, he’s going to get a month’s vacation and run up to Utica for . . . See you at the dance, Friday . . . We got the worst of it cleaned off now, and just as soon as we burn the brush off, we’ll turn stock in here, by jiminy, and make a meadow of the whole damn jungle. . . . Lucille’s just got all the music, an’ it’s simply . . . Can’t you come over to-night?” . . . It is hard to explain to one who has not first felt the creepy spell of a fever neighborhood, the hideous in- humanity of the tropical wilderness, just what such ordinary talk from these ordinary people meant in such a place. It seemed to quiet the noisy shouting about graft and plunder, and make it only the red- faced wrangling of a day; for the moment it was the voice of that young, strong, clean nation, which had tackled this job, the sign and promise of the finished work. The cool of evening breathed into the car windows, ravines sank into shadow, wooded hilltops glowed in the sunset; and the treacherous jungle lost its treachery and acquired a sweetness and humanity. 47 CHAPTER IV THE WEST COASTERS Sailing out into the Pacific from Panama, the Isthmus lies behind, so low and narrow, and understandable, that as you watch the jagged backbone of the continent disappear into the mists on either horizon, toward Honduras and Colombia, it seems almost as though you were looking at a relief map, and that if you should climb to the top of the mast, for instance, you could view both continents from Alaska down to the Horn. This is the beginning of the real South Amer- ica. And after the third day out, when the ship crosses the Line, the rest of the world seems very far aw r ay. One is aware of stepping into new pastures as soon as one boards the steamship at La Boca. In the North Atlantic, at least, there is nothing quite like these quaint arks that meander down the long highway from Panama to Valparaiso. Large as our smaller ocean steamships, but with an extraordinary amount of deck space, and the staterooms all on deck, they carry everything from mail to fresh lettuce, and perform the functions of a houseboat, freight steamer, village gossip, and market gardener. Your beefsteak of to-morrow stands on the hoof gazing up at you 48 Hoisting aboard “the beefsteak of to-morrow. THE WEST COASTERS from the hatchway below, and on the upper deck, be- side the shuffle-board, barnyard fowls, housed in a double-decker coop, blink reproachfully through the slats. The captain is likely to be a British “coaster,” the officers English or Chilian, and the stewards Chilian rotos, who look as though they would be charmed to stick a knife through one’s ribs for half a bottle of pisco. There are no tourists in the North Atlantic sense of the word, and the inhabitants of the ship, practically all of whom speak Spanish and stumble along at least in one or two other languages, are Ger- man, Yankee and North-of-England drummers, engi- neers bound for railroads and mines; now and then some little swarthy army officer, or a native merchant travelling with his wife, pallid in her rice powder, awed and quite frightened to death when she goes into the ship’s cabin with all its strange men. It is this part of the ocean, between the Isthmus and Peru, which suggested to the old Spaniards the name Pacific. It is like a mill pond. And these strange galleons, with their chicken coops and unhappy steers and unbranded inhabitants, mosey along through the heat-shimmer as though there were no such thing as hurry in the world. An engaging laxity pervades one’s ship. It was always a mystery to me just how ours was navigated. There was a “game on” in the cap- tain’s room continuously, and no matter at what hour one awoke at night, one always seemed to catch the chink of chips coming down through the ventilator from the bridge. The other officers invariably left the 49 THE OTHER AMERICANS table before the meal was finished so that they could appropriate the deck golf-implements and keep them until the next gong rang. We rarely, big as we were, did more than eight knots, and whenever it was found difficult to make our next port before sunset, we would slow down and come in the next morning. It is a trifle over three thousand miles from Panama down the coast to Valparaiso, and the journey ought to be made in ten or twelve days. It now takes — although the Peruvians are organizing a faster line — anywhere from three weeks to a month. It is about fifteen hundred miles from Panama to Callao, and our journey, with stops at Guayaquil and little ports along the coast, consumed a fortnight. Slow as they are, express boats cut across the Gulf from Panama to Guayaquil, and all that one sees of Ecuador is the tropical banks of the Guayas River and the walls of Guayaquil. There is always fever here. There were twenty-one cases the day we touched, ac- cording to “El Grito del Pueblo,” and if “The Cry of the People ” admitted that many, so the old hands opined, there must be at least fifty in the town. We con- tented ourselves with surveying it from afar, in which way it is very pretty, and listened to tales about all the good men who had “snuffed it” there. There are some sixty thousand people in Guayaquil, and the town is the one doorway from this almost forgotten country to the outside world. About one-third of the chocolate which the big world uses comes through Guayaquil, and, like Colombia, Ecuador has plenty 50 THE WEST COASTERS of rubber and vegetable ivory and things in the valleys and montana land of the interior. But it is as yet the least finished of the South American republics, and in spite of such interesting places as ancient Quito, where the unhappy Inca, Atahualpa, used to eat off gold plates, and where to-day you will find plenty of agree- able and quite modern people, the population of the country is only about 1.5 to the square mile, and what with Indians and mestizos, less than one person out of every ten is white. When the ship sweeps down the Guayas River on the swift Pacific tide and passes the town of Tumbez — where that gifted ruffian, Pizarro, landed four hun- dred years ago to conquer an empire with one hundred and eighty men — green shores are left behind. For nearly two thousand miles southward, until close to Valparaiso, the coast line is as bare as a desert of Arizona. On this western slope of the Andes there is no rain. It is always in sight from the steamer unless veiled by mists — bare, tawny, with the ramparts of the Andes shouldering up and up, level above level, pale and amethystine, to the white snow-line. Along the foot of this rampart, pasted, so to speak, on sand- flats or tacked into the hillside, are little towns, each walled away from the other, each the gateway to the steamy interior, or to a fertile valley made by the melting snows, and set in the midst of a wilderness of bare rock, like a green tape tacked on yellow carpet. All the Peruvian coast is situated much as Boston and New York and Philadelphia would be if the Rocky 51 THE OTHER AMERICANS Mountains rose up from their suburbs, and walled them away from the rest of the country. You may leave Callao, for instance, at breakfast time, and, riding on an ordinary railroad over which freight trains pass daily, emerge from the car early in the afternoon, breathless and shaky, in the frigid air of Galera Pass, one thousand feet higher than Pike’s Peak. Some- times a little arm of narrow-gauge railway reaches over behind the mountains for the green things of the other slope, and the sugar and cotton, but there are no connections north and south. And so it means a good deal w T hen a ship comes in. Down past these shore towns — Paita, Pacasmayo, Salaverry, and the rest — our lazy galleon dozed in the warm sunshine. Sometimes there were a dozen lighters full of freight to give or take; sometimes a few score casks of rum and one lone passenger carrying his bed with him would delay us half a day. Sometimes we swung at anchor for hours, while the Peruvian doctors with sheaves of thermometers took the temperature of every one aboard, and, mustering the passengers in the music room, and the crew aft, felt everybody’s pulse. Except at Callao, there is scarcely a harbor on the Pacific north of Valparaiso, and at all these little ports along the Colombian and Peruvian coasts ships anchor half a mile or so off shore and handle their freight in lighters. Away off here, these boxes and bales and casks — with their “Kilo 68 — Bordeaux — South Mil- waukee — Hamburg — F ragiles — Via Panama — Chicago” — become almost flesh and blood. We would lean on 52 THE WEST COASTERS the rail while they came thumping up out of the hold, swung overside with the warning “A-fra-jo!” — watch- ing by the hour, just as one might sit at a cafe table and watch the people go by. International trade be- came something intimate, human, and touchable. There w r ere no exports or imports ; there were Panama hats and sewing machines and milling machinery and fresh chocolate and cotton cloth and pineapples. A sheaf of polo mallets bound for Quito went off with the rest at Guayaquil. Every sling-load had its new whisper. The fascination of barter seized everybody. We all became Phoenicians. Before the anchor chains w’ere taut, shore boats loaded with sweets and fresh fruits — “pines” and chirimoyas and Panama hats, and candy made of raw cane-sugar and wrapped in banana leaves — were bobbing all round us. Five minutes after the gangway was let down the ship was a floating bazaar. Below, steerage and stokers were buying fruit and dulces, and the flat cakes of unleavened, pie-crusty bread which the native women of the west-coast countries are forever offering you. Along the deck they were bargaining over everything, from Panama hats, as fine as cloth almost, to unsmokable cigars, and romances which would have turned the hair of Mr. Anthony Comstock white in a night. Each place had its characteristic product. Thus Pisco gives its name to a white brandy much affected all along the coast; other places had their fruits or the curious sugary native chocolate. Guayaquil and Paita are the places for Panama hats. 53 TEE OTHER AMERICANS Buying a hat on one of these boats is an elaborate game. One strolls along the deck, languidly, until, passing a group of fellow-passengers, each shouting at the vender in ferocious pidgin-Spanish, the hat man catches one’s eye and, observing that one is a person of taste, selects a superior specimen from the bottom of his box. How much? Setenta, sehor. What ? Heaven and earth! H ombre! And one strolls on down the deck and looks over the rail, more languid than ever, at the far-off lavender mountains. And yet, in the most natural way, half an hour later, he runs across you. Promptly out comes a hat, your hat. He always remembers, no matter what you call him, treasures not the slightest ill-will. Mvoee feeno, sehor! And only thirty-five — just cut in half. One is not in- sulting now, only tired and sad. Hei-i-gh-ho! How hot the day is! What — a hat? No — no — too much — too much. And again you stroll away. Several times this is repeated. At last the great bell aft begins its warning clangor. The winch-engines draw up their chains, the lighters cast off. The prosperous-looking Indian dames — very fine with their black hair oiled and combed tightly back, their freshly laundered calico dresses trailing the deck — descend the gangway, baskets empty, dulces and chirimoyas all sold. Their boats, affectionately named — Los Tres Hermanos — La Rosa Maria — La Joven Victoria — sweep up on the shoulder of the swell, and their husbands or sons swing them, laughing, into the stern. Breathless appears the hat man. Sehor! Sehor! The hat — here it is — only twenty 54 “For nearly two thousand miles the coast is as bare as an Arizona desert.” THE WEST COASTERS now. Twenty? I’ll give you fifteen. The hat man looks as though life were no longer worth living. Still — 0 well — bueno! Here it is. This? No, this isn’t the hat we were talking about — this coarse-grained straw, cleverly enough powdered with sulphur, but wretched at that. Ah! Sehor is right. So it isn’t. Here is the hat — no? Good — Adios! Pleasant voyage, senor! Up rattles the gangway, the lighter-men yell jokes at the stevedores, the smiling native women, their stiff calico waists slipping off their healthy brown bosoms, wave a good-by, and their little boys dro their oars and put their hands to their ears as the big boat whistles and turns seaward to leave them again in their isolation. CHAPTER V THE HIGHEST RAILROAD IN THE WORLD One day after a fortnight of such coasting the ship sails round a bare, brown island and into a hazy, tawny- bluish harbor, full of steamers and masts, with a war- ship at anchor here and there, pelicans swarming about as thick as blackbirds, and such a prodigious aspect of business afloat and ashore in comparison with the toy towns of the desert coast that the drowsy pilgrim feels he must almost brace up to meet the shock of the real world. This is Callao. It is the port of Lima, the capital — only nine miles up the valley by railroad or trolley — and the gateway into central Peru. More than a thousand vessels touch here each year, and through it passes about half of the country’s trade. Earth- quakes and fire have attacked it, the Spaniards bom- barded it in ’66, fourteen years later the Chilians left a little when they got through. But monuments to its heroes are taking the place of ruins of the wars, thirty thousand people do business in this — as it were — “downtown” of ancient Lima, and there is an Eng- lish club, from the balcony of which commercial exiles, reading the home papers and drinking the home drinks, HIGHEST RAILROAD IN THE WORLD gaze out to sea and muse sentimentally on the lights and songs of London or New York, or — according to their temperament — demonstrate to you in what a lot of places millions still are waiting for the plucking here in Peru. The strip of Peru on which Callao and the little coast towns lie is fifteen hundred miles long, and extends from twenty to eighty miles into the foothills. Here are plantations of coffee and sugar and cotton, and fertile land only waiting, as our lands in the West waited, for irrigation to wake them up. Beyond, for three hundred miles or so eastward, is the mountain region with its mines and grazing lands, and then the rubber country of the montanas sloping down to the Amazon. Altogether there is a territory about three times as large as France, and to traverse its tangled valleys only fourteen hundred miles of railroad. As a result, the rubber, for instance, of the eastern slope is carried to Iquitos, and thence by steamers down the Amazon clear across the continent to the Atlantic. Except by mule-back or canoe, there is little direct com- munication between the interior districts, and if, as Mr. Pepper has interestingly pointed out in one of his discussions of the Pan-American railroad, a govern- ment official should be transferred from Lima to the Department of Loreto in northeastern Peru, only about thirteen hundred miles away, he would prefer to journey by steamer from Callao to Panama, from there to New York, thence to Para at the mouth of the Amazon, and from Para by steamer up the Amazon 57 THE OTHER AMERICANS three thousand miles to Iquitos — all in all, a journey of nearly nine thousand miles. Such grotesque eccentricities of travel suggest what it would mean to have the short arms of railway which reach into the interior at right angles to the coast, connected by an up-and-down system, and it is in the performance of that function that the so-called Pan- American railroad is really practicable. We shall not, as the lyricists of the Congress of 1890 prophesied, “be able within ten years to buy a through ticket from New York to Buenos Ayres,” nor ship freight from the States through Central America to the other continent; but such isolated little towns as these on the Peruvian coast will be looped together one of these days, and within reasonable limits passengers and freight will be carried north and south where now there is nothing but the mule-road and the llama train. The railroad runs now from Buenos Ayres fifteen hundred miles northward to the border of Bolivia, and on the Fourth of July, 190G, at Oruro, American engineers turned over the first spadeful of earth for a new sys- tem which will eventually connect Peru with the Argentine. Of all the railroads of this part of the world that from Lima up to Oroya is the most extraordinary. It is still, after pictures of its bridges have served as a stock geography illustration for a generation, probably the most impressive piece of railroad engineering in the w T orld. Built in the days when Peru was rich and reckless, it stands a monument of that time 58 HIGHEST RAILROAD IN THE WORLD and of that gifted Yankee soldier of fortune, Henry Meiggs. Meiggs was born in New York State, and after mak- ing and losing several fortunes in the East, he took a shipload of lumber round the Horn to San Francisco during the gold days and sold it for twenty times its cost. He built sawmills and made a great deal of money, got into difficulties again , and finally fled with his family on one of his own schooners, leaving behind him a million dollars’ worth of debts. He went to Chile, built bridges and railroads for the government, and again became a millionaire. Then he went to Peru and started to build railroads there. Meiggs was not an engineer, but he could get engineers to believe in him and work for him, and he had energy and ideas and the courage of his imagination. After floating $29,000,000 in bonds he started the Oroya road in 1869. He did not live to finish it, but he completed the hardest part. He carried it up the eyebrows of the Andes from the seacoast to the icy galleries of the upper Cordillera, and he paid all his debts. The legislature of California removed him from the danger of penalties for misconduct, and he died in Lima in 1877. The Oroya road is not only the highest in the world, but there is no other which lifts its breathless pas- sengers to any such altitude in such an appallingly short space of time. The narrow gauge over Marshall’s Pass in Colorado, for example, climbs to the twelve- thousand-foot level, but to get there from sea level 59 THE OTHER AMERICANS one crosses the continent and creeps up the long ascent from the Mississippi to the Great Divide. To climb as the Oroya climbs, a Hudson River train leaving New York would have to ascend, half an hour before it reached Albany, a distance one thousand feet greater than that from sea level to the summit of Pike’s Peak. It was at seven o’clock on one of those tawny-hazy mornings which come so often in Lima that we started up the Rimac Valley for the roof of this Peruvian world. It was the second week in June — wdnter in Lima — yet the air was tepid and drowsy-warm, a little like our Indian summer at home. For an hour or so we wound through a wide irrigated valley, fat and pros- perous-looking, with plantations of sugar-cane and cot- ton fenced in by mud walls, the roofs of a hacienda show- ing now and then over the green. Beyond that the bare brown mountains — high enough, it seemed, yet really no more than foot-hills — shut in and shouldered upward, tier on tier behind each other, yellow and terra-cotta and tawny-brown, occasionally flashing through a slit in their flanks the snow shoulders of peaks miles and miles away to which we were to climb. Steadily the train — not unlike the old New York “L” trains — creaked and panted upward; downward the busy Rimac rattled merrily. It had a right to. Descending from the snow line, it had watered the llamas and cattle of the bleak table-lands; below that, split into slivers of silver and scrupulously carried along the highline, it- had fed the shelf-like plots of barley and corn of the temperate 60 HIGHEST RAILROAD IN THE WORLD levels; the slivers had joined, split again lower down, watered the orange and lemon trees up among the rocks, joined again and made the electricity for Lima’s trolley-cars and electric lights. And now, at the end of its journey, it traversed this eminently agreeable valley. Even that.it had made. Without the Rimac the old City of Kings could never have existed, the cathedrals would never have been built, all the splendid viceroys and pretty ladies and the mercurial burghers could not have lived. The broad valley narrowed, the naked rocks closed in, the muggy blanket that lies on Lima and the coast thinned and cleared. In the rarer air the nervous pantings of the little locomotive echoed between the terra-cotta walls. Thirty-five miles from Callao — Choisica — twenty-eight .hundred feet above the sea; ten miles onward and upward, another station, four thousand six hundred now; two miles more, five thou- sand now, San Bartolomeo and the first “switchback.” The. switchback is the characteristic device of the road that Meiggs built. When he reached a tight place, instead of climbing up an abnormally heavy grade by the aid of a cog-wheel, or tunnelling and wriggling round circuitously, he simply zigzagged up the face of the mountain in the same way that a man makes a trail. When there is no room to turn, the track runs as far as it can go, then backs out on a “V” and climbs upward until a suitable place is reached to reverse on another “V” and go forward again. The time that is lost in stopping and switching is, of course, very great, 61 THE OTHER AMERICANS but the time and money that were saved in construct- ing the track were also great, and the way a train of heavy cars fairly walks right up the face of a precipice with the help of these “V’s” is startling to see. Seven such switchbacks lift the train over difficult levels, eight spider-web bridges are thrown across the canon, and there are more than thirty tunnels. Five thousand feet — six — seven thousand five hun- dred — over the Wart Water bridge, through the Cuesta Blanca, Surco, Challapa, at last the little town of Matucana, and half an hour for almuerzo, in the clear noon sunshine seventy-seven hundred feet above the sea. It was fete day at Matucana, and in front of the yellow mud church in the tiny plaza a band was play- ing and a young man was enthusiastically setting off sky-rockets and Roman candles in the sunshine. The band was composed of one man and four small boys who had to expend so much thought and energy in supporting the weight of their horns that nothing was left for keeping the time, and the sun showed so daz- zlingly in the crystalline air that the fireworks became only foolish fizzes and an all but invisible squirt of smoke. But the young man knew that the congrega- tion of the little mud church had bought them with their good money, and that the kind saint in whose honor they were being exploded could see the sparks and colored balls, even though they were invisible to mortal eyes, and so he lit them, one after another, in- dustriously and with complete self-forgetfulness, even 02 The little girls of Matucana bearing their gifts from a church festival. A typical mountain town in one of the transverse valleys of the Peruvian Andes. HIGHEST RAILROAD IN THE WORLD to holding the little sky-rockets in his hand and allow- ing the sparks to shower over the bare skin until they gathered courage timorously to sail up a few feet and dive over into the plaza. And the little band tooted bravely on until the last centavo’s worth of powder had fizzed away, and then, with all the small boys of the village escorting it, tramped to a house where the Mayor lived, and we left them there, still wrestling with the tune as the train panted away. The station made one side of the plaza, the little church was opposite, and there were houses on the other sides. It was like a city plaza and a cathedral that hadn’t grown up. In every one of these moun- tain towns you will find just such a little mud church, with its old-world Spanish facade and two or three funny old bells. They seem very real and genuine somehow, as though simple folks had built them with their own hands — as indeed they have, and the same faint musty perfume drifts into the thin Andean sun- shine as floats from the dim interiors of Cologne and Antwerp and Rome. On one side of the toy plaza, between the station and the church, was a house with a balcony overhanging the street, upon which, a moment after the train pulled in, appeared two ladies and a very superior silk parasol. They leaned on the balcony rail under the silk parasol, smiling and talking vivaciously, just as though there were always lots to see and lots of people passing, and that wasn’t the parasol of Matucana, and as though they always stood there in just that politely interested 63 THE OTHER AMERICANS way, whether or not the train came in. They seemed so specially lovely, buried away here in the upper mountains with nothing to look at but that sun-baked little plaza and the endless ascending rocks, that it seemed as though every man who passed beneath the balcony should have a hat with a long white plume on it to sweep from his head; and, urged on by this im- pulse and held back by one’s northern notions of not bowing at pretty ladies until they bow first, it was extremely hard to know what to do. And one wasn’t at all cheered afterward to be reminded that in Spanish- American countries it is the man who starts the bowing, and that undoubtedly the ladies under the parasol w T ere hurt and offended, and confirmed in the belief that gringos had no manners. There was a sort of Christmas tree in the little church, and after mass was said and the fireworks exploded, all the little ninas, hushed but extremely excited, gathered round it, and a pale young woman in black, with sad Spanish eyes, distributed presents such as little girls get in Matucana, I suppose, when they are very religious. When each had a dulce or something tightly clasped, the sad young woman arranged them in line, two by two, and they marched across the plaza, solemnly, w r hile the pretty ladies looked down and smiled from under the only parasol in Matucana. Eight thousand feet — nine — ten — over the Quebrada Negra, more spider-web bridges, more switchbacks, the tunnels of the Little Hell opening at either end of a bridge spanning a chasm two thousand feet deep. As 04 HIGHEST RAILROAD IN THE WORLD the train wound and creaked along the forehead of the mountain one could look down on the roofs of villages miles below, ant-people and ant-donkey trains, and the multitudinous little fields fenced in with thick mud walls which made the valley floor a gigantic waffle-iron. These are tilled now, but above them, on a level with one’s eyes, and up and up, seemingly to the very top of some of the mountains, were the old terraced fields of the Incas, grass-grown now with the turf of centuries. They look like innumerable sheep paths. By means of these pantry-shelf terraces, the patient aborigines used to carry fields right up to the summit in the warmer altitudes, and support such a population as the country has never come near nourish- ing since the conquerors came. Those were glad days of socialism and municipal ownership. All the land that was not set apart for the Emperor or the support of the temples and priest- hood was divided up per capita among the people. It was still the property of the State, but when a man married — and there were no bachelors — he received enough land to support himself and his wife. Another piece was given him for every child. He was not al- lowed to sell or buy, and every year an inventory was taken, and each man’s possessions added to or de- creased according to the size of his family. The old terraces are mostly in disuse now, but the fields and groves of the lower levels still use some of the old irri- gation troughs. They were cut in the rocks by a people who knew neither cement nor iron pipe, but they 65 THE OTHER AMERICANS follow the high lines as neatly as though plotted with a transit — sometimes, as the cars creep along a canon wall half-way to the top, you can see one on the oppo- site side, carrying its silver ribbon for miles along the face of the yellow rock, like a rain-trough running across the blank wall of a skyscraper. More spider-web bridges — more switchbacks — and ever the air growing clearer and thinner and more cold. At Cacray the train was eleven thousand feet above Callao; at Chicla, lower switchback, 12,215; at Chicla, upper switchback, 12,697. The fields and gardens were gone now, the bleak table-land country appeared, and people whose hearts or nerves were bothersome began to have siroclie. The region was not unlike parts of Montana and some of the country along the Yellow- stone and Shoshone — heightened and exaggerated. Vesuvius could have been set on the floor of some of the valleys, and its summit would not have reached above their snow shoulders. Below crawled burros and llama trains carrying silver and copper ore. Along- side and above llamas grazed the bleak flanks after their frugal fashion. The llama is one of those gifted animals which can live on nothing, and by digesting it several times, like a camel, live on it for a long time. He has almost solved the problem of perpetual motion. He doesn’t get thirsty when there is no water, and he supplies fuel where there is no wood. He will carry exactly one hundred pounds with complete indifference and docil- ity, and if you put an ounce more on his shaggy back GG HIGHEST RAIL ROAD IN THE WORLD he will lie down, and until the ounce is taken off receive with equal indifference his driver’s shouts and kicks. Yet it is by such primitive vehicles that most of the ore from these Andean mines is carried to the smelters. At Casapalca, thirteen thousand six hundred feet, was the big smelter of this neighborhood, and there in their mud-wall corral, were these absurd sheep, lifting their ostrich-like necks and viewing the noisy industry with their look of timorous disdain. Fourteen thousand — the chimneys of Casapalca’s smelters were pins stuck in the carpet of the valley miles below — fifteen thousand — six hundred feet more, and the train climbed up and over, and rested on the top of the cold, wind-swept Andean roof. All about were peaks and blankets of snow. From the station you could almost have thrown a stone to the height of Mont Blanc. It was only one hundred and thirty-six feet short of it. But one had little desire to throw stones. One rose painstakingly and walked with care. Fifteen thousand feet is a good bit of a jump to take between breakfast time and luncheon. Some of our companions, muffled in ponchos , had been coiled up like seasick passengers ever since we passed the belt where oranges grew. The only difficulty I noticed was a slight giddiness when I rose and started down the aisle. The man with me drank a cup of hot tea in the little tambo ad- joining the station and went as pale as a sheet. On the other hand, he slept like a babe while I stayed awake all night.. Those who live at such heights de- 67 THE OTHER AMERICANS velop extraordinary lung capacity and brilliant com- plexions, dangerous as it is for them to try to exist afterward in the low altitudes. The young girl who served coffee and lived up here all the time looked hard as nails, and her cheeks were like red russet apples. Behind the station Mount Meiggs climbs up another two thousand feet, whence — through air so crystalline that one might fancy one could walk to the summit in half an hour — it looks down on both sides of the divide. To the west is the long descent, to the east the chilly plateaus and snow valleys of the Andean treasure-land. From the Galera tunnel, which carries the train through to the other slope, it is thirty-two miles — down-hill about three thousand five hundred feet — to Oroya, where the railroad used to stop. And from there it is eighty-seven more across the Junin pampa — where Bolivar whipped the Spaniards in ’24 — to Cerro de Pasco, where the American mining syndicate is pre- paring to get rich. They have spent at least ten millions already in merely getting ready, and the fact that they have threatened to build another Oroya Railroad clear down to the coast suggests the notion they have of the quantity in which these riches are to come. Some of their men were on the train, down from the States on a three years’ contract — to live and work up there, fourteen thousand feet in the air. It seemed like Montana again, on the eastern slope, except that instead of steers grazing on the range there were llamas, and it was characteristic that as we slid down-hill through the gathering twilight I should find 68 At the summit of the Oroya Railroad, 15,005 feet above sea level. Along the line of the Oroya Railroad in Peru. HIGHEST RAILROAD IN THE WORLD myself talking with a Yankee drummer who narrated with heartfelt fervor the difficulties of getting the irresponsible Peruvians to pay for sewing-machines on the installment plan. The sun had dropped behind the sierras when we pulled into Oroya, and it was very cold. In the smoky glimmer of the station-lamps husky white men with northern faces, in corduroys and sweaters, grinned a welcome. They led the way across the street to the gloomy stone barracks that did for a hotel. The air of its rooms, innocent of heat as most lodging places, even in the coldest Andes, are wont to be, pierced the very marrow of bones softened by the lotus air of the coast. But there was a cheerful dining-room with an ample dinner and a cheerful bar-room with every kind of bottle known to the Anglo-Saxon race ranged along its walls, and a little hot stove, in front of which bronzed gentlemen of versatile experience took their turns at standing and telling tall tales of treasure, of the white Indians of the upper Orinoco, how we could, or couldn’t, dig the Panama Canal. Outside the dusk deepened. The burro and llama trains, from who knows what buried valley of the Cordillera, had shed their burdens, and their cholo and Indian drivers, muffled in neck- scarfs and ponchos, were herding them into corrals in the frosty twilight. Light began to glimmer from the low doors of the mud-houses; through one of them, where a handful of dusky heads showed in the glow of a lamp, squeaked a phonograph, and presently a tenor 69 THE OTHER AMERICANS voice singing I Pagliacci sobbed out into the night. It took one back to the capital, down that wonderful slope, from glacier to bleak plateau, plateau to sunny village, village to orange orchard, orchard to steamy plantation, the city and the sea; down, down, valley yawning at the foot of valley — a hundred miles, and always down. The moon came up over the jagged heights that shut in Oroya. It shone so big and near and dazzling bright that one felt one could almost climb the rocks and touch it. The stars hung in the crystalline sky like arc lamps. It was, indeed, the roof of the world. 10 CHAPTER VI t LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS At the end of the driveway known as the Ninth of December, where, late every Thursday and Sunday afternoon, the gente decente of Lima may be seen at their best, stands the monument to Colonel Francisco Bolognesi, who was killed at the battle of Arica during the great war with the Chilians nearly thirty years ago. Bolognesi and his two thousand Peruvians were surrounded by twice their number of the enemy, and when called upon to surrender, refused. u Al ultimo cartucho !" — “to the last cartridge” — said Bolognesi. So the Chilians attacked, bombarding the town from their squadron in the harbor, storming the morro and the height above the town, occupied by Bolognesi and his men. The Peruvians fought as their leader had promised, until their ammunition was exhausted; then they fought hand to hand. Just what happened at the end none of the reports of the battle which I have read take the trouble to say, but what the Peruvian of this generation believes, what the man in the street or the steamship smoke-room will tell you, is that the. Peruvians not only fought to the last cartridge but 71 THE OTHER AMERICANS died to the last man; that Bolognesi’s lieutenant, Ugarte, rather than surrender, spurred his horse off the cliff that dropped sheer seven hundred feet to the sea, while Bolognesi himself died where he stood, and fell with his arms wrapped about the flag. He has become a legendary hero now — this Latin- Peruvian, and his lieutenant, — like that Teuton-Peru- vian, Grau, who performed such prodigies at sea in the same war, and whose statue stands in the square at Callao, nine miles away. On a bookshop wall in Arequipa, far up in the interior, I saw a poster picturing Ugarte spurring his horse off the edge of the cliff. In the fire-engine house at Mollendo — a village of stucco and corrugated iron stuck on a bare hillside of the southern coast, with a thunderous surf forever pound- ing at its feet — I saw a wandering troupe of players one night. It was warm and crowded in the little engine- house, the lamps smoked, and that “aplaudido tenor comico nacional, Sanchez Osorio,” did not seem so funny to us, perhaps, as he did to the inhabitants of Mollendo, who have nothing much to do from month to month but watch the freighters anchored off shore, kill fleas, and now and then bury another victim of bubonic plague in the wind-swept little cemetery on the top of the hill. So we left before the performance was over and went to bed, but just as we were getting drowsy, lulled by the steady boom of the surf — which is something tremendous in these parts — there was a great hubbub in the engine-house across the street, and much stamping and cheers. It kept up for a long time, 72 LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS with quiet intervals in which we could hear a tenor voice ringing out long reverberating words. They were cheering that “notable spectacle” with which the programme had promised the entertainment should end, “a monologue in original verse entitled ‘A Soldier of Peru, or the Martyrs of Arica,’ dedicado a la gloriosa memoria de los heroes Bolognesi y Alfonso Ugarte.” When the war between Chili and Peru began, Peru was the dominant power of the west coast. She was wealthy, her army and navy were supposed to be the strongest, her capital city had all the prestige which attached to the ancient seat of the Inquisition, the home of the viceroys, the aristocracy which preserved best the blood and traditions of the conquerors. When the war ended, she was beaten and broken. Her ships were captured or sunk, her fighting men gone; her seaports, even to their lighthouses, razed, her proud old capital sacked by the invaders. The enemy’s horses had trampled over its parks, the enemy’s soldiers had bunked in its ancient library, and — so they will tell you in Lima — lit their cigarrillos with the illumi- nated pages of precious old books. It was merely an- other of those examples of the old succumbing to the new; vivacity and grace — and, perhaps, the accom- panying incompetence — crushed by fresh strength and preparedness. The Chilians were proud enough in those days to be called the Yankees of South America. They ended the war masters of the west coast. They pushed their coast-line many hundred miles farther north, they 73 THE OTHER AMERICANS took away from Bolivia her Pacific outlet and locked her up inland; they took away from Peru what they went to war to get — her incredibly rich province of Tarapaca. Two more of Peru’s provinces, Tacna and Arica, Chile was to hold for ten years, at the end of which time the people of the provinces themselves were to determine by a vote to which country they were to belong. When the ten years w r ere ended in 1893, Peru, still weak from the war, and further dis- tressed at the time by revolution, had no power to force the holding of this plebiscite. Chile did nothing — the people of the disputed provinces still being strongly Peruvian — to bring it about. Nothing has yet been done, probably nothing ever will be. No- body outside of Peru believes that Chile will ever give up the captured territory unless forced to do so. There are no indications at present that Peru could furnish such power. From the nitrate provinces which Chile took from Peru she has already collected, in export duties alone, some three hundred million dollars ; with what was once Peru’s property she supports her strong army and navy and pays almost all her expenses; nitrate has been such an easy road to wealth that Chile has hardly bothered with anything else. “In twenty-five years more,” so your Peruvian host will talk, as you stand there near Bolognesi’s statue, with the carriage chains jangling by — “in twenty-five years they will take out forty million tons- more of saltpetre — three billion dollars Chilian — a billion and a half of export duties. No nation” — and as he grinds 74 LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS the steel into the wound, in a sort of pride of pain, he throws in with the comparatively little lost through a treaty unfulfilled, all that won by the Chilians, openly, by strength of arms — -“I tell you no nation in the his- tory of the world ever paid such tribute! The greatest war indemnity recorded by history was that paid by France to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War — five billion francs. The tribute exacted by Chile amounts to five billion six hundred and seventy-five million francs, of which our part was four billion four hundred and forty million. And the Frenchmen paid one hundred and thirty-one francs per head. We paid — each man, woman, and child — fourteen hundred and eighty francs. Their indemnity meant only two years’ public expenses; ours meant public expenses for one hundred and forty-eight years!” I do not mean to say that the Chilians were wicked wolves in this war, nor that Peru was not guilty of some pretty shifty business in her anti-Chilian over- tures to Bolivia; I am only undertaking to suggest the Peruvian point of view. Out of defeat and bitter- ness such as this the new Peru is springing, the industrial Peru of sugar and silver, cotton and copper. It is the new Peru which set up a gold standard, which is drilling oil wells, making roads, studying subsoil irrigation, building faster steamships, bringing millions of dollars of American capital to its Andean mines. The statisticians will tell you that the value of Peru’s exports has increased in the past eight years from less than fourteen millions of dollars to 75 THE OTHER AMERICANS more than twenty-eight. And that seems a big and important thing. But your Limenan host will tell you, as you watch the victorias roll by, that five years ago there was scarcely one such carriage and pair in town. “Fifty-four, senor,” says he impressively, “fifty-four in the last two years. You can see the lading-bills in the custom-house.” That, when you think of what it implies, seems important, too. And as we are con- cerned here not so much with statistics as with people, and how they feel and think, I have told of the statue of Bolognesi because, in a way, it is Peru’s very heart turned inside out and set up there in bronze and stone. In most countries in such a public place, where carriages parade and pretty ladies come to take the air and show their dresses, you find the statue of some conquering hero, sword aloft, his war horse rearing, front hoofs pawing the air — the image of martial strength and victory. The statue which stands on the top of this column is that of a beaten soldier; his body is swaying and about to fall, his right hand grips a useless revolver, his left clasps the battle flag — every line suggests hopelessness and defeat. It is he who looks down on the procession as it rolls round and round, on the big Chilian horses stepping high, the young men ogling the ninas as they drive by. The band sounds in the distance. The children, with their backs to the driver, in half stockings and big black patent-leather hats, sit straight and solemn, the pale 7G LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS Peruvian ladies look languidly at space out of their black, sad eyes. And this little parade of the Limenans comes to mean rather more than some others for they, too, have had their Sedan and siege of Paris; they, too, have lost an Alsace and Lorraine. Of all the South American capitals Lima best pre- serves in touchable wood and stone, in the very air of it, the old Spain transplanted by the conquerors. Pizarro himself founded it, in 1535, and started then walls which stand to-day. Through these streets the invaders dragged their precious falconets, and Spanish cavaliers in complete mail, clanked impressively gen- erations before Hudson sailed past the island which is now New York. When a horse was almost as strange a sight in the New World as a dinotherium, Pizarro’s cavalry galloped out toward the enemy with their war bells jangling on their metal breastplates; priests of the Church swung their censers and recited the exsurge Domine as the battle opened, nearly a century before the Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock. Dust had gathered on the parchment records of Lima’s library, its university was old, before the little red school-house of the States had begun. Its history had been written by its own citizens, its clever young men were satirizing their townspeople, and writing verses after the French when Chicago was merely a prairie swamp. And not all of the earthquakes which have shaken it, nor the countless revolutions and wars, have been able to destroy its ancient outlines and antique flavor. The very atmosphere, which blankets 77 THE OTHER AMERICANS the town for a good part of the year in a tawn}', sunlit haze — something more than air and less than mist — seems designed to shut in and preserve the past. One may still see, overhanging the street, carved balconies which the colonists patterned after their native Andalusia; houses with inner courts big enough for palaces; great, spike-studded front doors almost as formidable as the gates of a city. Electric cars whir past mouldering old monastery walls within which life has scarcely shown a ripple of change in three cen- turies. In the Cathedral the sacristan draws back the curtains from a glass case containing the very bones of Pizarro. On the corner of the plaza, to the left from the cathedral steps, is the passageway from which the conspirators emerged on their way to kill him. One, as the legend goes, stepped out of the way of a mud puddle, and the other ordered him back, thinking that one afraid of water was not ready to wade through blood. To the right is the Government Palace, in which they surprised the old conqueror, slaughtered his guard, and ran him through. As he fell he traced in his own blood a cross on the stone floor, kissed it, and died. They knew how in those days. The great war which left the country flat and help- less just as the boom was developing in the Argentine, its inaccessibility, and the comparative lack of oppor- tunity which it offered to immigrants, have kept it back. A few Chinese and Japanese have crossed the Pacific, there are British and German and occasionally American business men, but Peru has received nothing 78 The central plaza at Lima and the cathedral where may be seen the The monument to the war hero of bones of Pizarro Peru. LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS like the stream of colonists which has made Brazil’s Little Germany, Italianized parts of the Argentine, made many of Chile’s nitrate fields like British colonies. Sprouting out of the old Ciudad de los Reyes, never- theless, is the new city. Its young men ride paper chases, its young women play tennis and — after wear- ing the manto to church in the morning — go to the races in the afternoon in European dresses and hats. Its business men have their Chamber of Commerce, which applies the energy Latin-Americans used to ex- pend on apostrophes to liberty to the agitation of com- mercial treaties, customs reforms, and internal im- provements. Trolley-cars hum across the startled landscape from Callao to Lima or down to the bathing beach at Chorillos. On the outskirts of town a modern army trained by French officers — sturdy, broad-faced Indians or cholos, reminding one of Japanese, in white service uniforms — tramp through the eternal dust. In the library, young Peruvians are reading reference books as they would in a city library at home. The University of San Marcos was established by Charles V himself, in 1551, but the new Lima is here also, and the afternoon I was there she and two or three of her sister co-eds sat in a roomful of dark-eyed young men, puckering her brows and taking notes on the history lecture with the rest. In the university’s new medical school, that same day, I saw young Peruvians, under the guidance of one of their countrymen who had been graduated from Cornell, carving up the remains of some poor, 79 THE OTHER AMERICANS half-starved cholos, for the good of mankind. Many of them come down from the interior — these half- nourished brown men — and what with drink or un- cleanness, or the change from the thin, cold air of the Cordillera, die off like sheep. I saw dozens of them that same afternoon in the great “Dos de Mayo ’’hos- pital, wrapped in red blankets, lying side by side down the long wards. It w r as rather ghastly and queerly pa- thetic*, as though the white man’s science and sanitation were somehow prolonging a kind of suffering which one forgets existed before the white man came. Of course the real significance was not at all this: rather that in a country where sanitation was once almost unknown, and even now more die of tuberculosis than of the tropical diseases which northerners dread, there should be a place where poor creatures like these might be decently taken care of. Lima’s best hotel compares, favorably with those in European cities of similar size. At the club round the corner one meets men as well-informed, more polite, and much more acquainted with modern languages than the usual club crowd at home, and finds the world’s papers, from the New York Herald to La Vie Illustree, the London Times to Caras y Caretas of Buenos Aires. At the newspaper office a little farther down the street shock-haired cholos rap the keys of linotype machines with the blase accuracy of Park Row. There is pelota and Rugby football, polo and gymkana races, opera, generally, in the winter, little zarzuela plays almost all the time. And when you 80 LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS buy your ticket you pay in neat silver sol pieces the size and value of our fifty-cent piece, or with a gold piece of the same fineness and value as the English pound. The mere sight and feel of these delicately modelled coins seems to imply stability and inherent orderliness. Through all the old channels, in fact, begins to flow the stream of modern utilitarian life which such com- munities must accept to-day if they would go forward instead of back. As you see the Limenans of a golden-hazy Sunday, trooping to church, strolling about the Zoo or under the stately ficus trees of the Botanical Garden, it is hard to believe that only twelve years ago, when Pierola entered the capital with his revolutionists, three thousand people were killed in three days in these same drowsy streets. It begins — this busy Lima Sunday — with breakfast in one’s room; a cloying-sweet chirimoya, perhaps, coffee and rolls, a little square of the tasteless goat’s cheese so common in Peru, and El Comercio or La Prensa propped up against the coffee-pot. Through the open shutters comes the dull reverberation of the Cathedral bell and the sound of feet shuffling by in the narrow street; from the interior court, upon which all the hotel rooms open, the faint, intermittent click, if you listen for it, of other people’s desayuno spoons. Here, as at home, the Sunday paper is ambitious — even interspersed with half-tones: Queen Margherita of Italy at a charity bazar, a “momento critico en un match de football ” in England; the principals in that 81 THE OTHER AMERICANS recent British romance, young Lord Clifford of Chud- leigh and “la senorita Evelina Victoria Carrington,” leading lady of the company acting at the “elegante Teatro de Aldwych de Londres.” The noble lord (for with a taste debauched by Sun- day supplements we skip for the moment politics and the article on the Triple Alliance and the extinction of the bubonic plague, and after glancing over the cable despatches turn to this echo of the wood-pulp romances of home) had seen Miss Carrington as she shone across the footlights of his native town of Dublin, where “los Irlandeses in their strident, whistling speech, knew him as the Catch of the Season .” He was only twenty-one, many times a millionaire — with what a far-off, queer, Olympian glitter must he shine in the eyes of Mercedita of Lima, shut away from his*world by oceans and con- tinents and ages of traditions — “the .scion of a family which had worn the ermine of nobility for nearly five centuries.” Be assured, however, gentle Mercedita, “not all the noise in the feminine world is made by the female politician. Her evolution has not, we are glad to say, quite destroyed the romance of life.” The young lord promptly fell in love, only to be compelled to tear him- self away from the Irish capital and go to Egypt with his regiment. “Was he really aware of the danger awaiting his heart from the eyes of Evelina? He alone could tell.” None thought of it, it seems, when he returned, presently, older and with the “aureola del vencedor” about his brow. But the “ Diva de Aldwych 82 LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS granted him an interview, en automovil — that machine of the future which already has made history in the realm of romance. In this rapid vehicle Lord Clifford and la senorita Evelina reached an understanding, and four days later abbreviated the marriage formalities with a speed scarcely to be expected of a lord.” “The Aldwych Theatre had one star less, cl peerage una esplendida lady mas.” Glancing down a column headed “Sport” and through a communication on the Dreyfus case signed “Historicas,” one meets, with pleasant surprise, the name “Lady Clare” at the head of what appears to be a short special article, modestly signed at the bot- tom, “A. Tennyson.” It is one of those paraphrases with which thrifty Latin-American editors frequently fill space: “Era el tiempo en que florecen los lirios y en que las nubes se agitan en lo mas elevado de los aires. Lord Ronald, al regresar de una caceria , regalo a su prima Lady Clare una cierva blanca como una azucena .” This is what becomes of : It was the time when lilies blow And clouds are highest in the air Lord Ronald brought a lily-white doc To give his cousin Lady Clare. Lima’s newspapers reflect that modernity which, loosely speaking, increases as one travels southward. They are more like newspapers. There is less fine writing. You may remember our Caracas friend who 83 THE OTHER AMERICANS wrote about a garden party and told of the sunset, and a breeze like vague whispers of chaste amours, and the day wrapping itself in the melancholy of its last adieux. In Lima, a similar correspondent, would rather show his knowledge of the world by criticising his native town. Thus in a communication on municipal art we find him cruelly comparing Lima, to Munich. “Like Munich,” he observes icily, “Lima is quite impossible. At every step we commit offenses against nature and good taste; trim trees in capricious shapes, put quadrilaterals of Moorish motive on top of Greek facades, raise arches behind Ionic columns, so that the former are split by perpendicular lines, and both effects sacrificed. Some of our perspectives are positively cruel. We live in narrow rectilinear cor- ridors, monotonous, unadorned; there is not an exam- ple of industrial art to entertain the casual guest — not a single newspaper kiosk, not a martial fountain, nor a polychromatic column for advertisements, a memorial plaza, a fire-alarm, an automatic scales — none of these mere obviousnesses, so to speak, of prosaic modern city life. “Posts — miles of lowering posts with their bare copper wires! Without Europeanizing .ourselves, as Madame de Stael put it, can we- not transform this absurd old Ciudad de los Reyes, devote ourselves a little more to its embellishment?” Even the most squalid quarters of other capitals have a sort of charm, “wrapped as they are in history and tradition, grimy 84 LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS with ancient crimes and revolutions. Whitechapel, the Marche du Temple, the Barrio de la Vina in Cadiz, the Barceloneta of Barcelona, the famous Boca of Buenos Aires. . . . We, however, lack all this. Our squalid quarters are merely squalid. We have no given type, nothing genuine in form or color here in our world of bricabraqueria ” Respectfully one salutes the coiner of that phrase. It really wonderfully expresses it — bricabraqueria — not the ancient city, nor, perhaps, the Lima that exists behind the great studded doors, but that which strikes the casual stranger’s eye; a diminutive sprightliness of the streets, a certain vivacity and social grace which contrasts with the sentimental melancholy of the Caribbean, Bolivian stolidity and Chilian hardness and hustle. Up and down every street, meanwhile, the faithful womenfolk, their black mantos veiling all but their pale oval faces and their dark sad eyes, flock to mass. All must wear the manto in church — not the demurest bonnet whatsoever is permitted there. The lines of caste are all but lost in this black covering, and side by side they troop into the cool portals, mistress and brown cholo maid, merged in a sombre penitential democracy. More than with us at home, even, the business of getting sins forgiven is put upon the shoulders of women. With them in the dim cathedral kneel a few old men and children, perhaps some majestic states- man or retired warrior, setting an example to the 85 THE OTHER AMERICANS populace. But the young men and sinners roll up and down in open victorias, lolling back with legs crossed, smoking cigarettes, or stand along the curb twirling their limber canes and watching the caterers and carriages drive by. In almost all South American cities women spend, in the almost continuous services of the Church, the time which, with us, they utilize or waste in literary clubs, bridge, settlement work, and what not. One can scarcely walk a block in Lima without passing some musty old church — its alter quaintly lit, perhaps, with incandescent lamps — without inhaling the cool, musty smell of damp stone and incense, and seeing black- robed, penitent women kneeling in prayer. In the heart of the city, spreading over several squares, is the monastery of the Franciscan monks, scarcely changed from what it must have been three centuries ago. One of them took us through the portions open to visitors after we had duly tapped on the spike-studded door and whispered our mission through the wicket — a brown, bright-eyed little fellow, lean as a hound, at once keen and quite ingenuous. There were arched ceilings, painted blue and speckled with stars to represent the heavens, fine old carved choir-stalls, dungeon-passages walled up with rusty bars such as a child might build for his ogre’s castle. Even the little monk could not tell their history, only shrug his shoulders and glide on. It was pretty to see him handle some of the old vestments — cloth of gold which Queen Isabella of Spain herself had pre- SC LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS sented to the order. The cloth on which the gold was laid had been many times renewed, but the gold threads themselves were as beautiful as they ever had been. The modern vestments looked brazen and almost tawdry beside them. There was one crypt-like place in which a flickering oil lamp burned. Why was it always burning there? Ah — many, many years ago, senores, robbers broke into the monastery. And as they came in, intent on stealing and murder, the images of the saints left their altars and shrines and came down here to hide. And when the wicked men saw them — these images of wood and stone, moving and alive — they were filled with pity and with fear, and dropped their booty and fled. So the monastery was saved from profanation, senores , and the place was made a shrine. Of the many Church fiestas , of which so much is made in the South American cities, none is more im- pressively mediaeval than that of Corpus Christi, which fell on one of the days I spent in Lima. The great sun-baked cathedral makes one side of the plaza, the other three are flanked by arcades with open shops be- hind them and balconies overhead. From all these balconies and open windows the crowd hung, waiting for the procession, chattering and laughing, while in the cathedral the organ thundered, the violins sang above it shrilly, and the incense rolled up in clouds. Soldiers cleared the street and lined up along the curb. Flowers were scattered over the muddy pave- ment, and handfuls of rose petals. “All the pretty 87 THE OTHER AMERICANS beatas will be out. Come,” said my host, “we can see better from the balcony of the club.” So indeed they were, gathering in the street behind the banners of their various guilds — pale virgins with their lamps. All wore mantos or mantillas, and each carried a long taper. Some of these tapers had glass shades and looked like “fairy-lamps” on sticks. Here and there the older women — fat and dumpy as is the way of their blood — blinked behind their lamps drolly, like wise old owls. On the club balcony several modern young ladies, ac- companying fathers or brothers, looked down good- humoredly, and, as it seemed, with what might be the vague condescension of those in modern dresses toward those in mantos and black; from the room behind came the sprightly click of billiard balls. The procession emerged from the cathedral and moved slowly round the square. In the midst of it, under a velvet canopy, was a feeble old man bearing the Host. Many little acolytes in scarlet and white swung censers in front of and behind him. The beatas followed demurely, their candles flickering wanly in the daylight; the soldiers, executing a sort of goose- step, fell in behind, tramping down the flowers. Across the plaza, as it slowly proceeded, came the jangling of bells, and little clouds of incense floated away. Sev- eral times the procession paused, for the canopy was heavy and some of the priests were very old. As it neared and passed under the balcony, the young ladies pointed out their friends. “There’s Rosita,” said one. “Isn’t she pretty to-day?” “They are all pretty,” SS LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS sighed our host. “We must make some calls this afternoon. All the Manuelas will be at home to- day.” The procession disappeared into the church. The crowd dwindled away, the pale beatas trooped homeward two by two, carrying their burnt-out lamps — just about as the young British and American clerks were leaving their tennis-courts, and the paper-chasers trotting back to town. On summer Sundays there is a bull-fight. In winter, that is to say, in the months of our northern summer, the Jockey Club races are the event of the afternoon, and the “higgy-liffy” of the capital gathers about the little gingerbread grandstand of the “Hipodromo de Santa Beatriz.” It is an engaging place, quiet and toylike; young Martinez and Montero try hard and wickedly to pocket, ride off, and otherwise embarrass the occasional Master Michaels or Keefe or O’Brien who has ventured here from the States — “second cousin, senor, of the jockey who has win the grand race at your Shipshead last year, no ?” — and the horses, likely to be of Chilian breed, are called lovely rolling names like Quintora and Oro, Ventarron and Amor. After the shirt-sleeves and sweat, peanuts and uproar of our betting rings, it was interesting to see Lima’s little “mutual” betting kiosks with the sign “Le Sport” set over them, and the bettors lining up before the windows as quietly and decorously as they would buy tickets at the theatre. With this system — in use at all South American tracks — a certain percentage of the money laid down goes, of course, to the club, while 89 THE OTHER AMERICANS the successful bettors divide the winnings in proportion to their number. If the favorite is backed too heavily, they may win nothing at all. If you want to bet five soles you go to one window, and if you want to bet ten soles you go to another window, and the clerk within gives a ticket in return and rings up your pur- chase, so to speak, on an automatic machine. The most interesting result to me was the sight of the small-boy capitalists — who would have been stepped on if they had ventured into the betting-ring mael- strom at home or fished therefrom and ruthlessly spanked — marching up to the on e-sol window and lay- ing down their little silver pieces with a great puckering of eyebrows and much savoir faire. As much as the mouldering old walls of Lima they reminded the outsider that he was far from home — these nice little boys, in knickerbockers and broad clean collars and big Sunday-school ties, slapping down their silver pieces and chirping excitedly to the clerk the number of their favorite — “Once!” — “Doce !” — “Cuatro !” — and after the running crowding round the pay-window just as boys at home might crowd round a waffle-wagon or hokey-pokey ice-cream cart. One was taken away again when the horses swung into the stretch turn, and “Amor” (could Love be vanquished by Gold or a Hurricane?) showed in the lead, and the audience rippled out toward him — instead of the nervous yelps of home — a mellifluous “A-mor! A-mor! Ade-el-fan-te A-mor!” After the races comes the carriage parade, and then 90 Small boys betting on the horses at the Lima race track. In plaza at Lima during the Corpus Christi procession. LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS the Sunday evening dinner, which is quite as much a family affair as it is with us at home. They are splendid places for such meetings, these spacious old houses, with their inner courts open to the sky — for it never really rains in Lima — and the rooms opening on the inner balcony. In their con- tinuous summer — although the Humboldt current keeps this coast much cooler than corresponding latitudes on the east coast — these balconies often become merely a continuation of the rooms behind them. They are spread with rugs and set with chairs, and very inviting they look — especially about twilight time — as you are walking home from the races, for instance, and catch, through the outer doorway and the dusk of the court, glimpses of figures and the warm glow of lamp- light. Now would be just the time, were one at home, to look in for a minute, and watch gifted Mary or lovely Jane prepare a cup of tea. But this is Latin-America, where a man bestows, not receives, kindnesses; where the mildest thing, it is feared he would propose, if left for an instant unguarded, would be an immediate elopement; where Mercedita and Olimpia may not re- ceive us unless Mamma — or the whole family — is there. To us, with our North American ideas, it would seem that the relations between young people might be much more pleasant and beneficial if a girl were not taught to assume that every man is an erotic hyena, and men were not encouraged to presume that young ladies have no protection except that which resides in 91 THE OTHER AMERICANS duennas and iron bars — but ages of tradition cannot be changed in a day. Here in Lima families have a regular “at home” day, generally an afternoon, when all may be seen. Outside of these meetings, dances, and glimpses now and then at more or less public gatherings, the young people see little of one another. The embarrassment of a young American engineer or clerk plumped into such an environment from, for example, the boy-and- girl good-fellowship of a suburban towm may be im- agined. If he calls on a young woman more than twice he is likely to be asked to define his intentions. They told me of one young gringo, thus surprised after what he had assumed to be merely a polite call, who replied, “They are perfectly honorable, sir, but remote.” For such men, indeed, Latin- American society, after the first novelty is over, is a bit melancholy. In more ways than one they do not speak the same language. They cannot manage the flow r ery compliments, which are the mere preliminaries of talk, and they are angered and perplexed when they hear young men speak in a w T ay that would be considered impertinent at home. Either shocked or bored, the exiles find it slow sledding. “Habla usted espanol ? No, muy poco, very little, only for business, the railroad, the hotel. Do they like to dance? Oh, yes — they love to dance. And can they dance the cake-walk — dancing the cakky-wak seems to be considered one of the most absorbing of North American activities — and South Americans ask about it with the same roguish smile of intimate under- 92 LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS standing that the American assumes when he ventures a scintillating “Ha estado usted en Nueva York?” No, they are sorry they do not dance the cake-walk, though they have seen it danced — did the young ladies go to the theatre last night? No, they did not go last night, but they hope to go to-morrow night. The new singer is muy bonita, very simpatica — no? Yes, but is she as good as the one who was here last month ? Well, yes, but not so good as the one who was here the month before.” “You can’t even talk about the weather here in Lima,” one young man confided grimly, “because it never rains!” Here and there new ways are creeping in. While 1 was talking with a Lima gentleman in his library one afternoon two of his young daughters went skipping downstairs with tennis rackets. They were on their way to a club court, whither they went apparently unattended. This, for Lima, was indeed unusual, yet there — as with us, where it has done so much — outdoor sport is beginning to open occasional gaps in the dusty old social walls. Young women of this class are quite as well, if not better, educated than their brothers, except when the latter have had the advantage of schooling in England or the States. This the girls rarely receive. They go to the convent schools or are tutored at home. For the common, or garden variety of girl, however, learning is viewed as a dangerous thing. Tradition is against it; the frivolous Latin- American young man is 93 T PI E OTHER AMERICANS made more uncomfortable even than his Northern neighbor by signs of undue cerebration in the opposite sex; even to a gringo the vision of a “brainy” senorita is appalling. They learn to play the piano, to sing a little, to draw and do fancy work; the rest, studied from antique text-books would amount, so I was told by an American school-teacher, to about that necessary to pass the sixth grammar grade at home. These things are better ordered in Chile and the Argentine, where there has been much importation of teachers and methods from Europe and the States, and elementary education in such cities as Buenos Ayres and Santiago is often much like that in our public schools. There are German, English, and American schools in Callao and Lima, but outside influences of this sort find it hard to spread far, especially if avow- edly Protestant. A missionary, who had started a school in which modern English text-books and meth- ods were used as far as practicable, told me that one priest launched a series of sermons directly against her work, warning his congregation that she was possessed of a terrible microbe, which, communicated from her, would attack the brain of its victim and destroy her will power. It even went so far, she said, that in passing her on the narrow Lima sidewalks timorous young women would squeeze close to the wall and put their handkerchiefs to their faces as if to shut out some malignant disease. Tradition and social prestige are on the side of the convent schools, and it is easy to understand why the 94 LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS young folks themselves would rather go there. One American missionary school which I visited was in an old tumble-down house, ill-lighted and damp. It was the best they could get for the time being, and the young woman at the head of it certainly deserved great credit; but one couldn’t deny, even for patriotism’s sake, the charm of the big convent school a few squares away. The old fortress-like walls covered a good part of a city block. Two ladies, evidently just having paid a visit to their children, came out of the cool interior as I entered, stepped into a victoria, opened their parasols, and drove away. Within, everything was spacious and clean and cool — a fine old Spanish building, with massive arches, trees and flowers growing in the broad patio. Once as we were passing through an upper corridor the Mother Superior beckoned to a sort of window in the walls, and we looked down. It was a chapel, the candles blazing about the altar, on the floor below rows of ninas veiled in white and bowed in prayer. Behind us little girls were playing in the inner court; the afternoon sunshine brightened the chapel windows. The Mother Superior, a brisk, terse, Irish woman, brought here, so I was told, that the convent, also, might have an English-speaking north- erner at its head, led the way through recitation and music rooms to a laboratory, finally, with a few phys- ical science instruments. “Not much,” — she smiled good-humoredly, — “but good enough for girls.” If the intellectual interests of these young ladies 95 THE OTHER AMERICANS are neither broad nor piercingly acute they have, more than most of our own would, the charms of their deficiencies. Amongst our reasoning maidens of the north there is nothing like their childlike delight in little things, their frank unselfconscious coquetry. Big brother, tiptoeing into the doorway, brings his hands together with a tremendous clap, and grown-up Lolita and Elena and Luisa jump and scatter like startled quail, laughing, affecting prodigious alarm, not frightened, yet, as it were, loving to pretend to be. Even Mamma looks up with a quick, girlish smile and half puts her hands to her ears. In the blood of all, young and old, is an instinct for chivalrous romance, fine words of courtesy and compli- ment, inherited from the days when folks signed letters “ beso las manos y los pies de Ud . — I kiss your hands and feet” — even when writing challenges to their bitter- est enemies. Sometimes, as in business letters, this trait seems merely amusing. In more human relation- ships, however, it has often a very tender and gracious charm. Two old ladies, old friends, chanced to meet one day at the house of an acquaintance of mine. They were at an age when to speak of their infirmities was natural, yet, instead of settling down for a dis- cussion of the symptoms of rheumatism, each began, in highly figurative language, to minimize her friend’s age and accent her own. “I am but a withered leaf,” one would say, for instance; “a brown and wrinkled leaf blown hither and thither by the wind. . . .” “Ah, no, my dear friend, you are a flower that brings fra- 96 LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS grance and refreshment wherever you go. . . “If I am a flower I’m only a faded old flower, no longer any good to anybody.” “Ah, my dear friend, even the faded rose retains its perfume. . . These South American maidens flirt — if so brutal a word must be used for such a guileless effervescence of animal spirits — as birds sing or little children clap their hands. There was a Venezuelan lady, a buxom and vivacious matron, who, after tremend- ous struggles with her English, finally managed to pronounce to one of us the magic word “Huyler’s.” Through goodness knows what circuitous channels it had reached her across the Caribbean. If he would but send her a box when he got home, she managed to explain, between ripples of laughter at the funny- sounding English words and the delightfulness of the idea, she would think of him — and both hands were pressed passionately to her heart — with every single piece she ate! The guest promptly answered, of course, not only that the box should be sent, but that he didn’t need candy or anything else to remember her until the crack of doom. And so on, and on, with killing glances and much laughter — her two children watching her gravely the while, her husband at her side highly entertained and very proud of his wife’s repartee. Meanwhile her unmarried sisters were being thrown into ecstasy because another man promised to send each of them, by way of recuerdos, some picture post-cards from Panama. In Lima there was another such evening, a Sunday 97 THE OTHER AMERICANS evening family dinner, when big and little, the married sister, and the fiances of the two older girls gathered about the table in the feudal South American way. How the men were made to blush and look at their plates as the younger girls, more nimble at these things, laughed at their attempts to speak English! "What do you think of heem, senor! All he can say is ‘Good-morning — how dough you do? Ye-e-s? Dough-you-like-Lima?’ He has estudied all hees life an’ he can’t spik a whole sentence of English!” And away they went in ripples of laughter and quick Spanish phrases — and one doesn’t know how musical a tongue it is until one has heard it spoken by young girls, or, best of all, the little children. And, then with what tremendous drollery the men got back at their tormentors by plaguing them about their suitors, especially little Lolita, who, it was solemnly insisted, could get no one but a Chinaman — Un Chino, un Chino! 0, Lolita, Lolita! The dining-room opened on the patio, and after dinner we stood by the rail here, under the stars, or from the Moorish balcony in front watched the people passing in the narrow street. Then the young folks played and sang, one of the fiances and the youngest sister, flourishing handkerchiefs, danced an odd native dance, while the other, who had travelled much abroad, illustrated our "cakky-wak,” and told of the wonders of our musical comedies, where "the most beautiful women they have, in the loveliest gowns — each one of them, herself, a famous beauty, is it not 98 LIMA AND THE PERUVIANS true, senor ?”■ — appear, and the ninas, who had never seen anything but the South American chorus ladies, which are like our grand opera chorus, only more so, listened open-eyed, looking every now and then to their guests for confirmation. There is indeed quite another side to the Latin- American family life than the barred windows and medievalism of which we hear so much. The mingling of gallantry and domesticity, this cloistered coquetry — benign parents, arch senoritas, roguish big brothers and sons-in-law, all chattering frivolously and good- humoredly together, is very charming. It is a fine thing to think about life and to reason out a scheme of living. But it is also something not to have made it such a heavy duty that one is afraid to smile thought- lessly lest something should fall. After you have said your good-night, once at the door upstairs and again in the street, to those laughing down a “ Buenas noches!” from the balcony, there is still time to look in at the theatre and see the last tanda of the night. Three or four of these one-act plays, generally farces, are put on, and one may buy a ticket for each, or reserve a seat for the whole evening. Most of them come from Spain — tiny classics some are, that have been played for years in little zarzuela theatres all over the southern continent. Nowadays many are adaptations from English. They were giving an abridged Geisha lasting about an hour while I was in Lima, but by far the most popular piece was that “ comico-Urico-bailable farce” entitled ‘The Eden 99 THE OTHER AMERICANS Club.’” The Eden Club was adorned with such dis- paraging mottoes as “Marry and Be Sorry,” “Matri- mony is the tomb of liberty,” “Matrimony is a blind alley with no way out.” It was a place where hus- bands could gather and do all the things that they could not do at home. The piece began with the initia- tion of a new member to entertain whom various dances were given much after the manner of our musical comedy songs which describe the girls of various coun- tries. Each national dance was received with appropri- ate interest and applause, but when the orchestra swung into the grand old tune of “ Hiawatha” and La Yanki appeared dancing the “cakky-wak,” the house from parquet to gallery — where the little cholo boys were baking against the roof at five cents a head — went wild. When the curtain goes down on the last tanda, Lima’s busy Sunday is over. There are no blazing restaurants, as in Buenos Aires. As the audience shuffles home through the silent street, the great spike- studded doors are bolted and the balconies dark. No one is abroad except the little policemen, or some lone inspector in French uniform riding his cavalry horse in slow majesty up the deserted street. The drowsy hotel watchman climbs out of his blanket and takes one’s key from the rack. The rest of the night is silence, broken only at the hours when the policeman’s whistle wails at the street crossing below, and is answered down block after block until it dies in the distance, like the call of sentinels watching over a sleeping army. 100 CHAPTER VII ACROSS LAKE TITICACA TO LA PAZ There are moments during the gringo's introduction to Bolivia when he would almost give his letter of credit to anyone who would make him warm. His friends tell him of mines rich beyond the dreams of Pizarro, of railroads that are going to do what the transcontinental lines did for the States, of the sturdi- ness and backbone of this mountain people. It’s a great country, his friends say, they’re a wonderful little people, and the next boom that strikes South America is going to strike here, and all he can do is to nod sympathetically, wrap his arms tighter about his chest, and dream that in some far-off forgotten clime people are still smiling, still comfortable, and warm. Bolivia — I speak now of practically all except that eastern part which slopes down to the tropical forests of the Amazon and Paraguay head-waters — occupies somewhat the same relative position to South America that a roof-garden on the top of the Metropolitan Life Building would occupy to New York. It is the highest inhabited country in the Western Hemisphere, the South American Thibet. On its northern border, at 101 THE OTHER AMERICANS an altitude of 12,500 feet, one steams across a lake seventeen times as large as the Lake of Geneva in Switzerland — the highest body of w r ater which has steam navigation — and from here southward along the plateau bearing the cities of La Paz, Oruru, and Potosi to the Argentine line, in a crystalline, piercing atmosphere that dries and burns the unaccustomed skin, people are living and working at heights which, at home, are supposed to be reserved for mountain climbers, condors, and eccentric sheep. In the States, the ride up Pike’s Peak is generally considered something of a strain. Pike’s Peak is 14,500 feet high. I met a young American mining engineer at Oruru who told me that the entrance to his shaft was between 17,000 and 18,000 feet, and that the places where he and his men had been working w T ere so near the sky that the angels’ feet stuck through now and then. Inasmuch as the country lies between 10° and 23° South Latitude — about as far from the equator as the West Indies — the Bolivians assume that they are living in the tropics and need no stoves. Inasmuch as the entire western slope of the Andes and most of this table-land is as bare of timber as the interior of a marble quarry, and coal costs wholesale in La Paz some $30 gold a ton, it would make little difference whether they assumed this or not. The result is that, except for cooking, such a thing as a premeditated fire is almost unknown. People live and work, even give dinners and go to the theatre, in a temperature which 102 ACROSS LAKE TITICACA TO LA PAZ would make outdoor New York in October weather seem like a conservatory. The Indians and half- breeds, which make up from eighty to ninety per cent, of the population, wrap themselves in picturesque homespun ponchos, and are quite serene. The whites endure, and, when they can’t, sit in their overcoats. If the somewhat academic suggestion might be vent- ured that Bolivia can scarcely accomplish anything in literature or art unless a coal-mine is discovered, for the fundamental reason that no matter how many fine ideas a man has he cannot write or paint unless his fingers are warm, the Bolivians could reply, I sup- pose, that as soon as the railroad is finished into the forest country there will be wood for everybody; that there are other things to worry about while roads are so bad, and tin and silver running what they are a ton, and that meanwhile possibly enough lyricism is already being emitted by neighbors to the east and west and on the Caribbean. Like all places at high altitudes, there is a great difference between the spot where the sun’s rays directly shine and that in the shadow. At a place called Uyuni — where I was colder for longer than at any other time in my life — on the way down to Chili from La Paz the mercury on the porch of the little railroad hotel stood at 4° above zero Fahrenheit at seven o’clock in the morning. The water in the pitchers was frozen into stone, and there was absolutely no fire anywhere in the hotel except in the kitchen. There was no heat in the cars, and the sun — warm enough 103 THE OTHER AMERICANS outside — happened to shine directly behind the train. It thus remained, thanks to the insidious curves of the track, until nearly noon, while the lone Chilian drum- mer and I, the sole occupants of the car, marched up and down the aisle, singing, whistling, and waving our arms, in a state of acute suffering. After such a morn- ing, up here on the table-land country, it will be balmy spring at noon, and actually hot toward the middle of the afternoon. I asked an American railroad engineer, who was sleeping with his construction gang out on the pampa in a tent on nights like these, if one got used to it after a while. “Oh, yes,” said he, cheerfully, “you get used to it. You don’t get warm.” It is not with any desire to exploit the personal calorics of a lone gringo who went into Bolivia dressed, perhaps, less for its June than for ours, — June is, of course, midwinter south of the Equator — that I have thus accented this possibly trivial characteristic of the country, but solely out of admiration for the vigor and fortitude of the Bolivians. Your friends do not need to tell you that they are a wonderful people. If they were not, they would not be there at all. If one may say of this land of Bolivia that it is on the roof of the Western world, one might also say that the only way to get there is by climbing the fire-escape. When the war with Chili ended — the same war in which Peru lost her nitrate provinces — her strip of sea- coast was gone and she was walled up in the interior. Although Chili is now building a railroad through from the port of Arica on the Pacific, and American engi- 104 Mount Misti looking down from its nineteen thousand feet on the roofs of Arequipa. The Buried Valley in the desert in which the ancient town of Arequipa lies. ACROSS LAKE TITICACA TO LA PAZ neers are at work on a system which will connect La Paz with Buenos Aires and the Atlantic, there were, when I was there, only two really practicable ways of getting to the capital. One was by way of the Chilian port of Antofagasta — three days by rail and two by stage across the pampa; the other, and the one generally taken, even by Chilians, was by way of the Peruvian port of Mollendo — two days’ journey by rail, a night by steamer across Lake Titicaca, and a few hours’ climb by rail again up to the rim of the mountain pocket, at the bottom of which lies the ancient city of Our Lady of Peace. It is a climb all but as high and quite as wonderful as that up the Oroya Railroad in Peru, and of the in- teresting things which it reveals, three stand out from the rest. One is the monkish city of Arequipa and Mount Misti, the dead volcano that looms up for some nineteen thousand feet above it; one is this extraor- dinary sky-parlor lake, and the third is the railroad itself. The gifted Yankee Meiggs built it — as he built the Oroya — through a country the greater part of which is as bare as a stone quarry, without fuel or water or food, where even a sage-brush or a cactus would seem luxuriant, and a rattlesnake cheerfully human. It is 352 kilometers from the coast to the shores of the lake, and for 187 kilometers of the way — about 115 miles — it climbs steadily upward to a height of 14,666 feet. There was not then, nor is there now, — 1908 — any wharf to which steamers could tie up at Mollendo, and 305 THE OTHER AMERICANS passengers are taken ashore in small boats through a sort of Niagara gorge gateway of rock, which gives to mere landing some of the noise and a good deal of the excitement of a rescue at sea. And every rail and tie for that road, every detached bolt and plate of the little steamships that now navigate Titicaca, had to be landed thus; every drop of water to be piped down, as it is piped to-day, from the mountain streams far inland. Leaving Mollendo, the train trails out over the desert and up and up till the sea lies below like a blue floor, falls below the horizon presently, and the conical snow-capped peaks of the Cordillera come into vision. There is one glimpse over a rock rim of a valley — one of those almost dramatic snow-watered valleys laid like a strip of pea-green tape among the stones — then sand and volcanic rock. The sand-storms of centuries have dusted the earth’s bleached countenance, even the mountain peaks, with a whitish, leprous film. Sometimes one even mistakes it for snow. I have never seen, even in our Southwestern desert country, any- thing so dead-looking as these dusted peaks and flinty ribs standing out without shadow or relief in the clear blazing sunshine. It is as though life had left them and forgotten them since the day of creation, and the haze was not so much any common, earthly covering as the very dust of ages of empty years gathered upon them. All day the train climbs through empty, echoing halls of rock; then, all at once — in one of those hidden val- 106 ACROSS LAKE TITICACA TO LA PAZ leys which the old conquerors seemed as fond of seek- ing out as though they were ingenious promoters pro- viding surprises for travellers of years to come — the town of Arequipa; trees and gardens, a running stream, and oxen at the plough, a sun-bleached plaza, and a yellow cathedral, friars in sandals, white robes and brown, taking their sunset walk along the canal ; schoolboys playing English “footer” in the dust, toy tram-cars bumping through the cobbled streets; on the bill-boards a notice of to-night’s biograph show, and of that “viejo y famoso remedio ” — Perry Davis’s Pain Killer, or, as they have it here, Matadolor de Perry Davis. Arequipa is the ecclesiastical stronghold of Southern Peru. Of the thirty thousand people who inhabit this ancient oasis, at least one out of every fifty is in the service of the Church; there are four monasteries and three nunneries, and the whole town is as antique as a piece of Inca pottery dug up out of the ground. It is the home also of several higher schools of learning — an ideal shelter for that fond bookishness so often found in isolated South American towns. Here, for in- stance, in the evening paper, “La Bolsa,” the entire front page, except for advertisements, is devoted to a review of a book of poems, “Vibraciones Psiquicas” and others, by one E. Zegarra Ballon. The reviewer, who regrets that “La Bolsa” has offered him only three columns, evidently does not admire Sehor Ballon, nor his friend Arispe, who, “since he has been editing cablegrams of fifty-one words for ‘La Prensa’ of Lima, 107 THE OTHER AMERICANS considers himself a prosista,” just as Ballon considers himself a poet. He tears his verse to pieces, phrase by- phrase, pounds away mightily at “anterior asonants,” hemistiches, and the like, and finally, collecting the phrases which particularly get on his nerves, he re- quests his readers, amigos mios, to repeat the following litany: Glacial frescura . . . Oh, Zegarra Ballon! Dias oscuros . . . Oh, Zegarra Ballon! Jazmines lacios . . . Oh, Zegarra Ballon! Bellos cenidores . . . Oh, Zegarra Ballon! etc. And he concludes by inviting them to read on Friday Chapter III of the thirty which Cervantes for- got to write; which tells “ how Don Quixote came to the city beneath Mount Misti with his faithful squire in search of those horrible giants, Arispe and Zagarron, of his meeting with these geniuses of journalism and poetry, and of the ill success which they had with him of La Mancha.” Three things especially interested me in Arequipa: the dusty Old-World atmosphere, snow-capped Misti always brooding there, and the Harvard Observatory, which stands on a rise of ground overlooking the town. The telescope here takes care of the southern sky as the one in Cambridge does of the northern — trailing about the heavens each night after the variable stars. It is 108 ACROSS LAKE TITICACA TO LA PAZ not really, in the street-corner meaning of the word, so much a telescope as it is a huge camera. A plate is exposed and the stars shine upon it. The longer the exposure, the more stars eat through the film, as it were, and leave their mark, and by exposing it for many hours the resulting print looks like a drawing in stippled ink. In this way thousands of stars which could not even be seen through a strong telescope are located with precision. By putting one plate over another, eyes trained for this kind of work can tell if there are new stars, and when such a discovery is made the new star is catalogued and filed away for reference. Every clear night the big telescope is opened for the starlight to shine in, like a well waiting for the rain, and the young New Englanders stand by, watching the clockwork and the crossed hairs by which the plate, turning with the heavens, is kept at precisely the same points, each having his trick at the wheel, so to speak, like men at sea. This little oasis — the house with its brisk cheerful- ness of wood, the hedges and tennis-court, the very twang of the New England accent — might have been sent down from Massachusetts in a box. From the upper veranda you can look down on the yellow walls and church-towers of the town, the tawny flanks of mountains that blaze in the afternoon sun like the yellow mountains Maxfield Parrish paints, and Mount Misti lifting up its mysterious and creepy head as smooth almost from floor to peak as some titanic tent. From our chairs on the veranda the crater was about ten miles in an air line, and through a field telescope 109 THE OTHER AMERICANS we could plainly see the cross that was planted there when the twentieth century came in. There was tennis on an asphalt court at the Observatory — one feels like a dweller on Olympus playing under the gaze of Misti in that crystalline air. English-speaking folk would come up on horseback from the town, and afterward there would be tea in the twilight of that blazing, un- earthly light. With the Old-World town below it, and Misti watching by, this little oasis stands out in one’s memory — a different, unexpected thing, complete unto itself in all this alien wilderness, like a ship at sea. The priests say their masses year in and year out in the town below, more mines are exploited, politicians rage, drummers, gold-hunters, heathen, imagine vain things, but up on their cloistered mount its inhabitants pursue their quiet way, resting through the heat of the day, playing their home games as the sun goes down, at night, when all the rest of their alien world is asleep, working away through the still hours with their glittering dust-cloud stars. As you leave the coast and climb to the colder levels, the temperament of the humans changes with the air and landscape. The mountain people are sturdier and more phlegmatic, less vivacious and eager. Some such contrast is the easiest generalization to be made of Bolivians as compared with Peruvians ; it applies even half-way up the slope to such a buried city as Arequipa compared with Lima and the coast. On Arequipa, too, broods the spell of the ancient Church. By the time I had dined the evening I 110 Looking across the central plaza at Arequipa. Gateway leading to the cathedral entrance, Arequipa. ACROSS LAKE TITICACA TO LA PAZ arrived and started forth to look at the town, it lay dead and silent under its cold stars, the only sound the rush of mountain water in the open drains. But there was light in the cathedral, and within on the floor — for there were no pews — knelt, it seemed, all the women in the town, like so many black-birds in their sable mantos, whispering and crossing themselves. Here were the lights and the ambitious glitter and the antiphonal choruses echoing through the arches, yet outside no background of noise and busy worklliness to put it in its place. It was as though all the town were turned into a cloister; as though, having no opportunity to sin, it were determined to carry out the other end of the bargain at any rate, and fancy itself condemned. The flesh was not altogether neglected, however, that night, and toward nine o’clock, a few squares away, a lonely little band, muffled in ponchos and neck-scarfs, tooted in the frosty air, calling the men-folks and the irreligious to an exhibition of the American biograph. The latter has become almost an institution in parts of South America. Where no other theatrical enter- tainment is to be had, one will generally find a biograph show. “All the world ought to have one,” an ad- vertisement in the paper read that night — “I. Fam- ilies: For its modern repertoire of operas, zarzuelas, etc., to pass happy and diverting moments without going out of the house in the evening. II. Merchants: To attract the attention of the public to their estab- lishments. III. Proprietors of haciendas: To amuse their workmen on Sundays.” Ill THE OTHER AMERICANS There was so much Indian blood in the audience that night, as is always the case in the interior, that it suggested a crowd of Japanese soldiers. Broad- cheeked and stolid they sat while the great world flickered before them. From Norway to Damascus we jumped, from Jerusalem to Paris and Madrid — the fountains playing at Versailles, Hebrews kissing the Wall of Lamentations, a “pony” ballet in a musical comedy, skeeing in Norway, with fresh-cheeked girls sweeping almost out of the picture and into the audi- torium, the snow spraying from the skees, the wind blowing their hair across their faces, laughing as they came. There was a royal bull-fight at Madrid — even the sweating flanks of the bull panting up and down, the pretty bonnet of some tourist which, in the excite- ment, had insisted in bobbing in front of the camera. I am not an agent for any picture-machine, but I must confess that it seemed rather wonderful to me, this very glitter and pulse-beat of Europe up here in a stoveless theatre among a lot of Indians. And I re- gret that the audience showed much more enthusiasm over a Byronic young man who gave an imitation of the battle of the Yalu on a guitar, and stood in the cobbled court outside wrapped in a velveteen cloak and gazed at us superciliously as we started home. Between Arequipa and Lake Titicaca the leprous desert gives way to grassy table-lands and yawning sinks, like dried-up lakes, from the rims of which, as the train creaks round, you can see ant armies of sheep grazing the bottoms a mile or so below. There are 112 ACROSS LAKE TITICACA TO LA PAZ llamas and alpacas up here, and wild ducks and other water-fowl. It is as though — and this is the feeling one has all through the country from Titicaca down the Bolivian plateau — this were a new world, having all the physical conformation of our common seaboard world, and set on the very top of it. Here, for instance, is this extraordinary lake, something like 135 miles long and 70 miles wide, and over 1,000 feet deep at its deepest. Snow peaks climb up into the blue all about it as though they had forgotten that they were beginning not at the sea level, but at 12,500 feet; you take a little steamer with stewards and state-rooms and all the rest of the ocean paraphernalia in miniature, and ride all night and part of the next day — people even get seasick if it’s windy. It was on one of the islands of Titicaca that its illus- trious progenitors are believed to have started the Inca race, and the ruins of the Temple of the Sun still are there to prove that this is true. All round the lake rise terraced fields in the Inca fashion, with little brown villages and church-towers here and there. It re- minded me, in its narrower parts, of what the Mohawk Valley might be were it half-full of water; and very lovely it was with its cultivated shores and water-fowl and Illimani and Sorata and their snow-capped brothers glistening in the sun. From the Bolivian side of the lake it is a two hours’ railroad ride through a chocolate-colored country, furnished with prehistoric monuments and herdsmen in ponchos, to the rim of a valley, at the bottom of which, 113 THE OTHER AMERICANS with a dramatic suddenness for which the old conquerors never prepared more skilfully, appear the roofs of La Paz. They lie more than a thousand feet below, and one could, as the phrase goes, almost drop a stone on them. No railroad could make such a descent, and you reach the town — together with the freight that has been lightered, loaded, and unloaded goodness knows how many times in crossing the Isthmus, riding through the Mollendo surf, getting over Titicaca — by serpen- tining down on a trolley-car, the power for which was supplied when I was there by imported coal at $30 “gold ” a ton. La Paz started out in 1548 as Nuestra Senora de la Paz, but after the battle of Ayacucho, which about finished Spanish rule in South America, it became La Paz de Ayacucho, so that the “peace” now referred to is that which the battle brought. It has sixty thousand people, and they live in very solid stone houses up and down hills so steep that there is almost no practical use for a horse and carriage. All the work and the burden-bearing are done by cholos or Indians, who have the good taste to dress themselves in homespun ponchos in beautiful reds, browns, old roses, and greens, which, when sufficiently soiled and sun-bleached, take on all the soft richness of Oriental rugs. The result is that every vista of narrow cobblestoned street is brightened and enriched by them, and when one thinks of La Paz one sees these satisfying ponchos — like poppies growing in a field of grain. 114 ACROSS LAKE TITICACA TO LAPAZ There are a great many Indians in La Paz, and they and their extraordinary fiestas, when they dress up as cows, Empire dandies, and what not, and dance in front of the cathedral, give the town a color which rather sets it apart from other South American capi- tals. The Indian women of the better class — the various grades of Aymara, Quichua, and cholo are too complex to be explained here — are great belles and wear curious little round straw hats with narrow brims, silken shawls on feast days, and an assortment of skirts that make them almost as broad as they are long. Whenever they have saved enough money they invest in another skirt, and popular tradition is that these are put on, one over the other, and never taken off. The result is not only extraordinary to behold, but something which keeps them warm, satisfies their vanity, and performs the functions of a savings bank. There is a story told of a British premier who, when the British minister was ridden out of La Paz on a donkey, ordered a fleet to proceed to the Pacific at once and shell the town ! When he was informed that it was several days’ journey inland and two miles up in the air he decided that a capital whose location the British Government did not know could not exist. The minister to Bolivia was therefore recalled, and no diplomatic relations existed between the two countries for some years. It is a curious fact that, in spite of its isolation and its unspoiled Indians, and the troops of llamas that are as common in its streets as electric 115 THE OTHER AMERICANS cars on Broadway, La Paz is, by reason of the great mining activity in Bolivia, unusually cosmopolitan, and the cafe of its principal hotel toward the end of the afternoon buzzes with more businesslike-appearing men, perhaps, than any other place on the West Coast outside of Valparaiso. The sight of them was surprising and exhilarating away up here in the air, as was the dining-room full of folks chattering almost as much English and German as Spanish. It was a very excellent table-d’hote they served us that night, even though Irish stew was spelled “ Airistiu ,” and the vast room into which I was presently ushered — possibly because the govern- ment of half the town had gone across the pampa to Oruru to dedicate a new railroad — with a canopied bedstead, was almost as imposing as those which are reserved at home for visiting princes of Abyssinia or Siam. Bolivia has enormous resources, a sturdy people, and almost no debt. All the country needs is a continua- tion of stable government and better means of com- munication. It is more than three times as large as France, it has rubber, coca, coffee and cocoa, and its mineral wealth is incalculable. The mines of Potosi, from which Spain took six hundred million dollars worth of silver before Bolivia became independent, a hundred years ago, are still yielding. There is copper and gold, but the stake now raced for, and that which is bringing in the skilled preparedness of modern min- ing, is that very precious non-' ‘precious” metal — tin. 116 ACROSS LAKE TITICACA TO LA PAZ Few countries have this metal, and Bolivia is one of them, and the quantity of it already in sight is one of the main forces behind the development, upon whose threshold this hermit country now stands. CHAPTER VIII A FOURTH OF JULY IN BOLIVIA If you ever crossed an Arizona desert in a covered wagon — lashing the fagged, sweat-clotted horses for- ward foot by foot, until you reached the water tank at last and skimmed off toward the horizon with the Over- land ; if you ever struggled through the northern woods in winter, with your mittens freezing the moment you paused, no food or matches in your clothes, until, some time in the night you stumbled on station lamps, met the confident shine of steel rails and sank into the blessed, steam-heated Philistine embrace of a Pullman car — you will have difficulty in reading what Mr. Ruskin had to say about railroads with the proper superior thrill. What a railroad system might mean to a country three times as large as France, shut away from the sea in the upper stories of the Andes and traversed by little else than mule-paths and llama-trails, is not hard to imagine. Such a hermit country was Bolivia in the days w r hen Don Quixote told Sancho Panza about the mines of Potosi, and, such, except for two arms of railroad, it is to-day — although the mines of Potosi still yield, syndicates and steam and 118 A FOURTH OF JULY IN BOLIVIA smelters have replaced llama-trails and Indian slaves, and the old stories of silver and gold bid fair to be repeated of tin. And on the Fourthof July, 1906, at the town of Oruru, in the centre of that twelve-thousand-foot table-land, which stretches between the heads of the Andes from Lake Titicaca to La Paz down past Sucre and Potosi to Argentina, they began to build the railroad which is to change things. It will put ore trains and pas- senger cars up in this thin-air mine country, open up the tropical forest country of Eastern Bolivia and connect the plateau cities with each other, with Buenos Aires and with the Pacific. The wealth of the country will be opened to those ready to develop it; the cold plateau cities, which scarcely know what fires are, may be able to warm themselves; the government will cease to travel about on mule-back, and little- old-Bolivia-up-in-the-air will be a hermit no more. At least that was what the Government party thought, and the blonde young Yankee engineers who were on the job, and, one supposes, the New York bankers who were putting up the money. The Presi- dent, a good part of the army, the diplomatic corps, most of the business men of La Paz, and the Arch- bishop himself travelled nearly two hundred miles across the bleak pampa to turn over with due dignity the first shovelful of earth; and because North Amer- icans were building the road they chose to do this on the Fourth of July. “If,” said El Tribuno, “the Sixth of August, 119 THE OTHER AMERICANS 1S25, marks the beginning of our political independence, the beginning of our industrial independence, which is an indispensable complement of the first, will be marked by the Fourth of July, 1906. “Jul} r is the month of great events. Foremost is the anniversary of the independence of the United States of North America, indisputably the first of the younger peoples, and one of the mightiest Powers on earth. “Here is a race which, casting from it the lyric dreams of the Latin soul and looking at life in another way, would seem, by the success with which it dom- inates present-day civilization, better to have under- stood the destiny of humanity and to have discovered the key of gold to unlock all those problems which have troubled the world for so many centuries.” My own personal and physical understanding of what the Ferrocarriles de Oruro a Cochmnbamba will bring to Bolivia began some one hundred and eighty- six miles up the frozen plateau when the bi-weekly stage started from La Paz. The stage line was owned by a young Scotchman, who had changed his first name to a Spanish equivalent, “Santiago,” because, as you would readily have understood had you heard him imitate it, he didn’t like the Bolivian pronuncia- tion of “James.” One could travel with the mail all day and all night at a gallop and reach Oruro in twenty- four hours, or one could pay half as much, sleep at the Indian town of Sicasica and do the sixty-two leagues in thirty-six. I chose the slower way, and at dawn we 120 President Montes and his escort at the end of their two-hundred-mile drive from La Paz to Oruro, across the Bolivian Plateau. President Montes and the Archbishop just after turning the first shovelful of earth on the new railway. A FOURTH OF JULY IN BOLIVIA serpentined by trolley car up from the sink-like pocket, fifteen hundred feet deep, at the bottom of which lies the City of Peace. Frost mist still lay over the town like wool, but the sun had climbed over the far edge of the earth and was flinging its level rays wide over the empty plateau. Something in its cold blaze, in the thin air, as piercing as that of mid-winter in New York, in this table-land lifted twelve thousand feet above the sea, gave one the sensation of walking on the top of the world. Six shop-worn mules and an army wagon waited at the top, and into it bundled the eight of us — two bearded German engineers, a pretty German woman, who was wondering whether her Mann would meet her at the other side of the desert, and several Bolivians — a young man with shifty little black eyes and a way of holding a cigarette as though it were a club, the lighted end inside his palm; an old man and his shy granddaughter, and a severe, middle-aged woman in a shabby black plush coat and a rakish, drooping black hat. She had a fine aquiline profile and keen, dis- illusioned eyes, and reminded one of some of our very literary and rather leathery ladies at home. Most of the time she drowsed, with her head drooping on her breast like some damp bird, a reverie from which she would shake herself to smoke a cigarette, holding it close to her face in her right hand, the elbow supported in the palm of her left while she gazed at it sullenly through narrowed lids. The chariot got under way with a shower of stones, 121 THE OTHER AMERICANS considerable cracking of the whip, and a long whistle with a hiss in the middle of it — a wild, vicious sound, as if of a doom approaching rapidly from behind and about to overwhelm us. A little Indian boy stood on the back step or ran alongside, and it was his duty to keep this eerie whistle going constantly, to lash each mule in turn on its raw spot, throw stones at its head, and supply the same ammunition to the driver. This is rapid transit in Bolivia. From the moment we started, until sundown the next night, except while we slept or paused for new mules and coffee at the little mud tambos along the way, that goading whistle was always in our ears, like the blowing of a steady gale. Whee-ee-ee-eu! Tzs- tzss-tzss! Whee-ee-ee-eu! Sometimes between popu- lous villages we had two boys, sturdy, bright-eyed mites in dusty ponchos , with the crimson-russet cheeks which come to those who live in the thin air and blazing sunlight of the Andean plateau, and hands and bare feet so ground in with dirt that they had become black and leathery, like the web-foot of a goose or duck. One whipped and the other threw stones or picked them up for the driver. They followed us, as gulls follow a ship, from village to village. As tireless they were as gulls, and as free, these brown, bare- headed little coach-dogs, running along for miles and miles. With what an earnest importance they kept to their work, pushed in the gullies, and dug their horny little toes into the gravel — as though they knew they were helping in the work of the great world. No 122 A FOURTH OF JULY IN BOLIVIA master but the relentless gallop of the six-mule team; here to-night, there to-morrow; supper in the tambo kitchen; his bed where his poncho was; the chance — who could tell when? — of a munificent passenger toss- ing out a complete, unlighted cigarette. If one must live in a dried-mud village on the top of the world, how superior and glorious a life! All the way the bleak plateau lay a yellow trough between the horizon mountains, treeless and grassless, with occasional patches of barley in waffle-iron, walled- in fields. Every ten kilometres or so was a baked- mud village, exactly like the one left behind, where one could almost always get hot coffee, pie-crusty native bread, cigarettes, good bottled beer, and clumsy dulces. And that night, when we lifted our half- frozen bodies out of the stage, the poor German lady panting with siroche, there awaited us a cheerful post- house dining-room, warmed and lighted by an enor- mous kerosene lamp, a supper of soup, sardines, mut- ton, potatoes, jam, and what not, that melted into our yawning interiors like the honey of Hymettus. The bedrooms straggled around the three sides of the patio, each with one window and a door opening on the court as from a cave. Two Bolivians from the up stage were already reposing in mine, after having hermetically sealed both window and door. When I attempted to introduce a whisper of ventilation they declared, in vehement Spanish, that I didn’t under- stand the customs of the country and we would die of pneumonia before morning. And as both were able- 123 THE OTHER AMERICANS bodied and mercurial-looking gentlemen with revolvers lying on chairs close to their pillows, we compromised by blowing out the candle, and bolting the door noisily, under cover of which the minority member deftly put his fist through one of the panes of paper which served for window glass, and undoubtedly saved the lives of all three. In the pitch darkness of 4 a.m. there was a knock, and a “Buenos dias, sehores! Vamos! Vamos!” And so up and into our clothes and off again — Whee- ee-ee-eu! Tzs-tzss-tzss! Whee-ee-ee-eu ! — everybody chattering and filled with the excitement and optimism which follow getting up at dark, drinking two or three cups of hot coffee, and starting for a strange place. The curtains were drawn tight for warmth’s sake; in this inner cosiness the runner’s hissing whistle sounds far-away and cheery, like the faint wail of the loco- motive as an express train whirls at night through the rain, and we chatted with the good-natured friend- liness proper to fellow-travellers on the open road, laughing across the light of a couple of dripping can- dles which we took turns holding, like beatas in a church. In the alertness which comes at such an hour, every material happening became something vivid, fine and newly significant — the creak of the carriage, the rising glimmer in the east, the glitter of the cold stars through the curtain flaps, the different noises of the wheels. Once the sound changed and became soft. “Arena!” mumbled one of the bearded Teutons in Spanish, and 124 A FOURTH OF JULY IN BOLIVIA it seemed immensely important that we were pulling through sand. The German lady, recovering from her siroche, began to talk about the lunch — waiting for us forty kilometres farther on — with that affectionate contemplation, almost sentiment, with which the Ger- mans speak of such things. Stroking with a sort of tender melancholy the vicuna rug spread over her knee, she wondered if vicunas were good to eat. One of the bearded engineers nodded solemnly: “Ein junger vicuna schmeckt ganz gut!” said he. Every- body puffed his cigarette a little harder, and nodded approvingly — it was as though in that rocking stage, in the flicker of our feeble candles, we were at a banquet, discussing the bouquet of some exquisite wine. Nothing about that ride was lost — the rattle and the dust, the tawny, vacuous landscape; the very chill and sterile soul of that roofland was worn into our very flesh. And yet one will ride from New York to Chicago, through a country many times fairer, and of all the messages it has to give carry away only a fretful memory of noise and telegraph posts and the wretched air of the sleeping car in which one gets up in the morning. There was something in the old way after all! Dawn crept up over the eaves of the east, the can- dles faded sickly, the exhilaration of the start drowsed away, and we crept into our shells and stayed there. But steadily the pelted mules galloped on; always, like a stage storm-maker, came the windy whistle and 125 THE OTHER AMERICANS hiss of the driver and the cliicos running alongside. One could not sit beside the driver for a few miles without increasing one’s already high regard for mules. Each had a raw spot on his hind leg where continuous lashing had worn through, stones big enough almost to fell an ox rained about their devoted heads and were shaken off like so many flies. The mercurial driver did all he could to impede progress by whipping them about their ears and tangling up his team. Yet, with nothing to back them up but barley straw, they managed to pound on league after league at a gallop, and when they slipped out of harness at last, reeking, the only grooming they got was a roll in the tambo corral till the raw spots were covered with dust. And all this lashing and stoning and shivering and counting the hours that eight people might travel in two days the distance an express train would cover in five or six hours. Burro trains loaded with the precious firewood and tundra moss of the bare plateau trailed past us steadily; toward the end of the afternoon a sand storm en- veloped us like a sudden shower. At last the roofs of a town developed in the distance, and a train rolled across the horizon like toy cars on a board. The world came back as it always will at the sound of a loco- motive bell, and the German lady began to talk of the cities she had seen, of Vienna and New York and Rio, the time she had climbed for edelweiss; and so we rattled into Oruro presently, through streets flaming with the red, yellow, and green Bolivian flag. 126 A FOURTH OF JULY IN BOLIVIA The President himself had taken in a closed carriage the same drive we had taken in a stage. The cavalry had ridden and the infantry tramped it, and they jammed the cafe of the plaza hotel, spurs clinking and swords dragging on the floor, drinking each other’s healths. In upstairs rooms chilly diplomats from countries where fires are known huddled round tiny kerosene heaters, bundled in their ulsters. And at the contractor’s headquarters, excited young engineers, satirical about this Latin “flubdub,” yet proud of their part in it, worked over invitations and arrangements for the banquet the next night, like undergraduates preparing for a “prom.” There were great doings, in short, in the old mud- colored town, even though the Opposition’s paper declared that since its exclusive publication of the “contrato monstruoso which the Government had ac- cepted without revision from the New York bankers, the level-headed portion of the illustrious people of Oruro had been visibly disillusioned about this rail- road business.” They would join in the fiestas, to be sure, as spectators and workers, but they “will not, in any unknowing or servile fashion, act like so many circus acrobats, lest they should find themselves blushing to-morrow when the mysteries of these nego- tiations are fully revealed. “There does not exist in Oruro that frenetic en- thusiasm which some badly informed journalists suppose. The industrial centre in which we live has more understanding and balance than those” — one .127 THE OTHER AMERICANS supposes the politicians of La Paz — “who boast of wielding the wand of progress.” It had kept things stirred up, as Opposition papers in Latin-American towns can consistently be relied upon to do. It had somehow secured a copy of the contract, and this was published with the following ingenious introduction : IMPORTANT SPIRITUALISTIC SESSION One of the principal editors of our paper, who is a good medium and a skilful spiritualist, has put himself in com- munication with the spirits of the street of Las Aldabas in Lima, and by this means has obtained the famous contract quicker than he could by telegraph. We guarantee the fol- lowing to be an exact reproduction of what the spirits said. The Spirit speaks: This introduction doesn’t interest you, Mr. Editor. Mr. Editor: No, good spirit. Let’s get down to essentials. Dictate to me the contract, as offered by the attorney for the American contractors. The Spirit: Here goes . Then followed the contract — that is to say, part of it, for, as the Opposition’s paper was “setting up” the Spirit communication, an incident occurred which “so stupefied us with surprise that we were left unable to decide whether to give vent to our indignation or to meditate sadly on a happening which these serfs of the palace would doubtless call part of their boasted progress, but which,” etc., etc. It seemed that “El sub-director” of the government 128 Cavalrymen of the Bolivian Army on their way from La Paz to Oruro. A FOURTH OF JULY IN BOLIVIA organ, chagrined at learning that his rival was about to publish the document which “will be the shroud of the Montes administration,” armed himself with an unpaid bill which some partisan had turned over to him for the purpose and attached the premises at the psychological instant of going to press. A “villainous attempt, trustrated by producing in- stanter the necessary cash, but not until it was too late to attempt to print more than half the contract. . . . The rest to-morrow, our distinguidos y amables readers. Meanwhile be confident that we are watch- ing these destroyers of the fatherland, who toy with its future as they wouldn’t trifle with even their own haciendas, and with their prefects, police, and sub- sidized press attempt to suppress contracts which hand over without scruple to speculators the treasury of Bolivia!” Except for this faint, jarring note — and there’s always an Opposition paper — the celebration went merrily on. Even the Opposition’s paper, interested in spite of itself in a glorious Fourth, “vehemently urged that the municipal carts and mules in the Plaza Castro de Padilla, be transferred to some appropriate stable-yard, where they would cease to detract from the beauty and culture of Oruro,” and that “the wagon for aguas sucias be painted an agreeable color so that the city’s guests might not be made ill by looking upon it.” And at the gala performance that night of the famous zarzuelas, “Jugar con Fuego” and “El Santo 129 THE OTHER AMERICANS de la Isidore,” although the orchestra and chorus were unprepared — “and our dilettante public will not put up with indifferently rendered music, particularly w r hen they are familiar w r ith it,” — “there was not a 'but’ in Mr. Monte’s tenor singing,” Mine. Ruiz scored a veritable triumph and “the simpdtica Andriu even more than with her artistic skill, enchanted the world with her plastic curves of the Cytherean Venus.” The next morning, at about the time the Fourth of July chowder parties were starting down the bay at home, the frosty air of the plaza was split and shivered with bugle calls and the President, the Prefect, and the other dignitaries in evening clothes issued from the low Government building and marched bare-headed and with tremendous dignity around the plaza to the church. While mass was being said there, and the soldiers in the hotel were drinking salnds to each other and destruction to their enemies, the young engineers crowded into their camp cook-tent on the windy pampa , a mile or so from town — where, a century or two from now, a Union Station may be — and watching the cook bake flapjacks and make cocoa of condensed milk, wondered what the folks were doing at home. It was very cold out there on the pampa, the snow was beginning to sift down from the mountains, and Fourth of July picnics in the North seemed very pleasant things. Some of them had not been as near to civilization as this in months. They had been up in the mines, or surveying, making maps, sleeping in tents with the thermometer round zero, and this opening 130 A FOURTH OF JULY IN BOLIVIA of the railroad, getting into evening clothes again and banqueting the President was something of an event. The company had prepared a gold medallion in honor of the day for the President, silver ones for those in top hats, and bronze ones for the favored populace. There was a silver shovel and pick and a penholder of gold with which to sign the contract. From the tent in which this was to be done streamed the Bolivian and American flags, and hung on it were banners and paper-covered hoops bearing such mottoes as “Nihil sine labore,” and cornucopias from which showered the Spanish words for “liberal culture,” “railroads,” “treaties of peace,” “progress,” and the various other things which the Ins-paper said were, and the Outs- paper said were not, brought by the administration of Excmo. Sr. Presidente Ismael Montes. The wind freshened and the snow was whistling down from the hills when the procession started out from town. The infantry came first, with a great band of sixty pieces. At its head was a squad of diminutive drummer-boys, with white gaiters and stiff little cock- ades and great white breast-straps that vaguely re- called old battle pictures, and a strange aegis sort of thing, hung with little bells, jangling splendidly. The cavalry came after, and the President, in his carriage, last, surrounded by his lancers — white men all — in smart hussar uniforms, their scarlet pennants flapping like confetti against the snow. With that instinct for effect which is born in all South Americans this little army spread out into a 131 THE OTHER AMERICANS great hollow square — nearly a quarter of a mile across, it seemed — the infantry walling two sides, the cavalry and the lancers the third, with the snow-swept space between; the drums rolling constantly and bugles shrilling back and forth across the wind. The young chief-engineer, in professional disdain of Latin finery, strode up and down in sweater and put- tees, the crowd pushed, and just what happened when the President turned the first shovelful of earth I cannot be sure, because a lancer was riding his horse back and forth across my feet. But the Archbishop’s golden crazier showed above the crowd, and everybody cried “Bravo!” and “Viva!” and presently the people fell back and the Archbishop approached the tent, accompanied by a soldierly looking, well-built young man. “Viva el Presidente de la Republica!” said a loud, clear voice, and “Viva el Presidente de la Re- publica!” repeated every one — loudest of all a man standing up in the seat of an open hack, who, so one of the young engineers explained, had fought the railroad hardest of all and wanted to be prefect now. Then the contract was signed, and the Archbishop consecrated that, too, and all those who could get near enough got a medal and drank the health of Bolivia, the railroad, and President Montes in the engineers’ champagne, while the cholo shovelmen, wrapped in their ponchos, huddled aside, stared in their half- melancholy, apathetic way. Then everybody trooped back to town, and the President reviewed the soldiers from a balcony on the 132 A FOURTH OF JULY IN BOLIVIA plaza, each band halting beneath and playing its warriors past, then falling in and marching on out of the square. Last of all, very slowly on their travel- stained horses, came the buglers of the guard, shrilling out the national hymn. Something in its wailing minor chords, in the shrill abandon which the thin mountain air helped give the sound, seemed to make it the very voice of this bleak hermit-land, set in chill isolation above our heavier clouds. All in the plaza uncovered, even the Indians took off their queer ear- flap caps, and a quick protest of “Sombrero! Som- brero!” snatched off the only hat that I saw for an instant forgot. The empty sides of the plaza had filled with troops which had already passed in review, and these stood still until the air was played through. Then the bands struck up, and, considerably to the gratification of the young engineers, one of them was smashing out the “ Washington Post” as it marched away. It was a great day for Bolivia, a “ transcendental ” one, as they would say. And it was a great day for the young Americans who had come away uown here to do the work. Long after the President’s banquet that night was over they were celebrating the Fourth, crowded in a melancholy, frigid bedroom of Oruro’s melancholy, unheated hotel, and the poncho-clad natives, outside in the dark, listened and wondered as they heard them roaring, “Use been working on the railroad,” and reiterating, with tremendous fervor, that the moon shone bright o’er their old Kentucky home. 133 CHAPTER IX THE OTHER SAN FRANCISCO A few minutes after the bandits who row passengers ashore from the steamer’s anchorage at Valparaiso had set us down at the landing stage, I dropped in at the bank and asked a gentleman there what might be the show places of the town. He opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by the jingling of his desk telephone. Whirling round in his pivot chair, he first chastised in English the switchboard operator who had kept him waiting, then talked about nitrate for five minutes with the Chilian on the other end of the wire, left a swift British benediction with the switchboard boy, then replied: "There are none— Valparaiso is a place to work and eat and sleep in.” This was not the whole truth about the city which — painfully so since the earthquake — bears much the same relation to the Southern continent that San Fran- cisco does to the Northern, but it did seem very near it. Its harbor full of ships from all the seven seas, the sun-shot fog lifting slowly from them, the cluster of misty hills up and down which its houses climb, all sug- gest our city by the Golden Gate. But the strident 134 THE OTHER SAN FRANCISCO busyness of what, at first sight, seemed almost a British and German colony, belonged to quite another place. Work was, indeed, what had herded all these Teuton, Italian, English, French, and Spanish folk together; their main thought — other people’s money. You have come, let us say, down the coast, still somewhat saturated with the drowsy sun-drenched air of the Caribbean. You have trekked up into the interior from Mollendo to La Paz and the bleak plateau country, seen the suspended lakes, the llama trains, the poncho-clad natives, the crystalline isolation of that part of the world ; then turned toward the Pacific and followed the railroad down the long twelve- thousand-foot slope to Chile and the port of Anto- fagasta. Directly one crosses the line into Chile one feels the approaching grip of a swifter, busier civiliza- tion — becomes aware that the railroad is one of those far-flung antennae of the keen modern world. The train pulls up at a corrugated iron settlement baking in the desert sun; low barracks sprawl stiffly in the heat shimmer, there is a smoking chimney, many little tram- cars loaded with chunks of what looks like whitish mud. Businesslike men — blonde Britons in riding breeches and puttees; Germans; Italians with black, delicate beards like those of opera barytones — converse tersely through the car windows with men just like them who are riding through; as the train starts, swing on to their ponies and canter off over the pampa again. This is the land of the nitrate oficinas. The whitish 135 TIIE OTHER AMERICANS mud is what the great war between Chile and Peru was fought about; all the energy of Chile is absorbed in it and will be until the fields are exhausted or some near- sighted German chemist, many thousands of miles away, discovers how to make nitrate out of air. Then what will become of the army and the navy and the aristocracy w T hich live off this strange wealth spread out like so much free gold ? No mining is as easy as this mere surface scraping ; to prepare the caliche , as the crude saltpetre is called, separate the iodine, and turn the bulk of the remainder into fertilizer, is as simple, one might almost say, as making coffee or boiling eggs. Over thirty million quintails — a Spanish quintail weighs 102 pounds — are exported yearly. Between 7,000,000 and 8,000,000 quintails go to England, for herself and the Continent: 5,000,000 to France, about 1,000,000 to Germany, about 5,000,000 to the United States. The whole industry is gathered into a trust which regulates the production, there are some sixty oficinas which employ some 19,000 men, and seven seaports depend for their existence on these shipments. The capital invested in nitrates and the railroads to transport it is about $60,000,000, and always remembering the near-sighted chemist, the life of the industry, even without the discovery of new deposits, ought to be at least twenty-five years. Many Chilians will shrug their shoulders and tell you: “ Forever.” Others, more enlightened, even though they consider it a will-o’-the-w T isp which the country has been chasing instead of beginning at the bottom and developing 136 THE OTHER SAN FRANCISCO itself in a sensible, all-round fashion, as sooner or later it must — will tell you: “It’s like a balance, nitrates will go down, agriculture and manufacturing come up.” And pert outsiders throw up their hands and say: “When the nitrates go, the bottom drops out. There’s nothing else here — and there you are.” It is interest- ing, whichever way you look at it — this hardy, mili- tant nation, cocky master of the West Coast, gulping down its easy riches like a boy eating the frosting off his cake. You ride down into the strange leprous desert, then, past a volcano or two lazily smoking, past dried-up salt or borax lakes lying like so much snow; into the nitrate country. Past these corrugated iron barracks, smoking nitrate stills, lines of what might be tomb- stones trailing across the bleached landscape — the boundaries between claims. Presently Antofagasta, with thirty or forty ships lying in the roadstead, wait- ing, as they’re always waiting, at these wharfless ports. A rusty, raw, sprawling town, with young Englishmen who play polo on Sunday morning, and streets and natives which would fit into Williamsburg or Jersey City almost as well as Latin America. Touching at Coquimbo, a bit farther down the coast, you run, per- haps, into a Chilian cruiser, popping busily at a float- ing target towed by a naphtha launch back and forth across the bay. And then at last you steam into Valparaiso harbor — if such one may call this treacherous roadstead, which is a mill-pond when the wind is south, and rises up 137 THE OTHER AMERICANS when the “norther” sweeps into it and sinks ships where they lie — full of masts, funnels, put-putting launches and yelling fleteros. The riveters are clanking away at a deep-sea freighter, standing high in the dry- dock; a ten-thousand-ton mail boat is just getting under way for Buenos Aires, Rio, and the Continent, touching at the Falklands for wool; from the sea-wall come the shrill whistles of big German express loco- motives, and a moment after you step ashore some business man like this one tells you that the only things to do in Valparaiso are to eat, sleep, and work. You have crossed the Line. This is the hemisphere of Cape Town and Sydney and Melbourne and Buenos Aires — the real South America. Valparaiso has about 140,000 people, but as the principal port of the West Coast, and, in a way, the “downtown” for the capital and the rest of Chile, it seems more important than its mere population would indicate. Its buildings are fairly modern, and al- though the newspapers and street signs are in Spanish, and Spanish is the language generally spoken, it has little of the look of the old Spanish-American town. Trolley cars clang through the streets and out to the suburbs, shop windows are decorated with toy rail- roads and pasteboard landscapes like our department stores; lithographs of political candidates are pasted on fences and walls. Out toward Vina del Mar where the well-to-do live in hedged-in villas, I saw a real estate boomer’s sign on a hill newly planted with pine and eucalyptus trees — “Villa Moderna” he 138 Looking past the statue of Admiral Prat toward the landing stage at Val- paraiso. THE OTHER SAN FRANCISCO called his addition, just as he would have called it “Ozone Heights” or “Shadycrest ” in the North. Valparaiso is the home of the famous “Mercurio” newspaper, now published both there and in Santiago, and one of the institutions, almost one of the tradi- tions of Chile. It was at Valparaiso, in 1891, that soldiers of the U. S. S. Baltimore on shore leave got into the fight with Chilian soldiers, which came near resulting in a declaration of war. The Germans have the largest colony, the Italians the next, and there are many Frenchmen; but there are some six thousand Englishmen in Valparaiso, and in a Latin-American town six thousand blond and English-speaking foreigners are very noticeable. Late of a winter afternoon in that favorite caf6 of the Calle Prat, where the bankers and importers’ agents gather, or passing solid old British names on brazen door-plates, and pink -cheeked clerks poring over ledgers under green drop-lights, or in the library of the Albion Club, with a florid old gentleman in the corner reading “Punch,” Valparaiso seems indeed British. One cannot go far without crossing the trail of some Irishman or Briton or Yankee of the hard old days — every chapter of Chilian history is sprinkled with names, opening on the past like tiny, dusty win- flows, through which one just misses being able to see. Chile’s Washington, as he might be called, was an O’Higgins. Pie led the war for independence in the early part of the last century and headed the new government during its first few years. El Almirante 139 THE OTHER AMERICANS O'Higgins is the name of the largest battleship in Chile’s navy to-day. In that navy are the torpedo gun-boats Almirante Condell, Almirante Lynch and Almirante Simpson — all names that meant something in the Chilian-Peruvian war, and if you look back over the story of that struggle, which ruined Peru for the time and left Chile master as she is to-day of the West Coast, you will find plenty like them — Cox, Christie, Edw r ards, Leighton, Macpherson, Rogers Smith, Stephens, Thomson, Walker, Warner, Williams, Wilson and Wood. All officers these, helping to direct ships with such names as Blanco Encalada, Chacabuco, and Esmeralda. In the Alameda is a statue to William Wheelwright, of Newburyport, Mass., who founded the Pacific Steam Navigation Company — which plies between Liverpool and the West Coast — and built railroads for Chile. Here, too, is a statue to Lord Cochrane, the Scotchman who commanded Chile’s fleet in the war with Spain. The navy was one of the revelations of the Chile- Peruvian war, and the Chilians have been extremely proud of it ever since, and have worked hard to keep up its efficiency. Chile’s Annapolis is on one of the hills overlooking Valparaiso — a modern school, with machine shops, guns mounted as though on board ship, intricate models of all the ships in the Chil- ian navy, big airy class rooms, and an athletic field. The cadets are mostly younger than our Annapolis men, but judging by their bathroom I should imagine that they are put through a somewhat similar Spartan 140 THE OTHER SAN FRANCISCO training. This bathroom is an extremely narrow passage, with showers overhead and on either side. The future admirals, so I was told, are marched through slowly in single file, so that each is bound to get thoroughly soaked before he emerges at the far- ther end. A young Chilian bank clerk took me through the school — the sort of boy who, at home, has little more specific knowledge of the navy than that the battle- ships look extraordinarily fine anchored in the North River. This youth and the friend he brought with him examined the models in the glass cases as though they were naval architects. They knew what the ships had cost, their speed and armament, and they argued earnestly about this and that nation’s characteristic type, and what had been learned from the Russo- Japanese war. No less typical, but scarcely as pleas- ant, was their contempt for all things Peruvian — “and we’ll give them another good licking one of these days,” they grinned, “if they don’t look out. They’ve got to get over the idea of making that navy of theirs any bigger.” It sometimes seems as though Chilians took a sort of pride in this kind of bragging, as who should say, “Bah! A man doesn’t want to be too soft and polite; we’re a hard, plain lot dowm here — just mere masters of the West Coast, that’s all.” One of the great advantages of life in Valparaiso for such youths is the absence of a professional fire depart- ment. The glorious privilege of fighting fires is ap- propriated by the elite, who organize themselves into 141 THE OTHER AMERICANS clubs, with much the same social functions as the Seventh Regiment and Squadron A in New York, wear ponderous helmets and march in procession in great style whenever they get a chance. One comes upon these bomberos practising in the evening, on the Ave- nida, for instance, in store clothes and absent-mindedly puffing cigarettes, getting a stream on an imaginary blaze. In any emergency they perform much the same duties as our militia. They threw up barricades and made each of the isolated hills on which the city is set a separate fort during the Balmaceda rev- olution, and they did police and rescue work after the late earthquake. It is the delightful privilege of the bombero to drop his work whenever the alarm is given, dash from his office to the blaze, and there man hose-lines, smash windows, chop down partitions, and indulge to the fullest one of the keenest primordial emotions of man. Inasmuch as buildings are seldom more than two or three stories in height and built of masonry, there is comparatively little danger of a large conflagration, and the average of one fire in four days is “just about right,” as one of my Valparaiso acquaintances ex- plained, “to give a man exercise.” Their only un- happiness, he said, was that there were about fifteen hundred firemen in town, and they were getting so expert that what one could call a really “good” fire was almost unknown. If Valparaiso reminds one of a British colony down- town, it quite seems so on a fair Sunday morning at 142 THE OTHER SAN FRANCISCO the country club out beyond Vina del Mar. This is a race-course, primarily, but the exiles have zigzagged a golf-course across it and laid out grounds for foot-ball and cricket, and the day that I was there all of these sports were going on, while several willowy young girls cantered round the track on absurdly tall horses, and their friends strolled the turf and looked on. Green hills rose about us, a screen of Lombardy pop- lars shut in this oasis, the air was sweet with the smell of grass, and the spicy breath of the eucalyptus trees. It made one think of pictures in “The Field,” of Kipling and the Native Born, anything in the world, in fact, but the con came images popularly associated with Chile. Two little girls with unmistakable German faces and great bushes of flaxen hair hanging down below their shoulders drove by us once in a Shetland pony cart, and as we played golf we passed a pale, dark-eyed lady, the Chilian wife of an Englishman, playing with her little boy and girl on the grass. It was pretty to hear her teaching them: “Lawndon abreedge iss af ail- ing down,” and to see the quaint, formal way in which they joined hands and circled round her, chanting “R-r-eeng aroun’ de r-roosey!” and looking about with the bashful consciousness of children speaking a piece. It was the ingenious device of those who built the Valparaiso race-course to construct upon the hillsides at the foot of which it lies, in addition to the regular grand-stand, a series of terraces bearing little arbors or 143 THE OTHER AMERICANS bowers overlooking the field, like the boxes in a theatre. These vine-covered boxes were all empty when I was there, the races being at Santiago, but several of those in the lower tier had been thrown together, and here a club luncheon was served. Now, mere food is not, perhaps, a wonderful thing, but if you should fly to the planet Mars and the first Martian you met offered you a ham sandwich, that would be a 'wonderful thing. In some such light this luncheon appeared to me after two months of almuerzos in adobe tambos and provincial hotels, and of the inevitable cazuela soup — a stout British lunch- eon, cold mutton and ham and beef, cheese and sardines, and a superlative beefsteak pie. And here, too, were the fathers and sons in their knicker- bockers and Cardigan jackets, slim young girls just in from their ride, talking and laughing their crisp English, snuffing up the fresh air. And it was one of those droll South American con- trasts that with the bare-legged eleven playing Rugby, and the office men saying, “Don’t know how we could )ive if we didn’t get out here once a week,” over behind the grand-stand — there by virtue of paying an admis- sion which only admitted them where they couldn’t be seen, yet paid the expenses of the club luncheon, and of keeping up the grounds for the canny Britons — were the common or garden Chilians. Clerks and men of the street, they were — smoking cigarettes, whisking their limber canes, talking vehemently and gambling with great excitement on the races run at Santiago, 144 THE OTHER SAN FRANCISCO four hours’ express journey away — having their kind of a day in the country and their kind of fun. When you are set down on the landing-stage at Valparaiso one of the first things that strikes your eye is a two-wheeled dray-cart, drawn by two scrubby, sweating horses, on the back of one of which the driver rides, lashing both with a short whip, like an artilleryman galloping into action. This horse is hitched by a trace just outside the shafts, and he is trained to push with his shoulder when the cart is turning away from him, and to swerve off and pull at right angles to the shaft when a turn is made in his direction. He is as clever as a bronco and hard as nails — the sort of animal that will work himself into a lather for you from dawn till dark, and if you should try, unexpectedly, to pet him on the nose, would probably leap over the wagon. There are no drivers nor horses like these in Caracas or Bogota or Lima, and there is a connotative rasp about the whole outfit which is typical of the difference between Chile and its northern neighbors. It is a rugged, raw country, all mountains and sea- coast except the long central valley, and it stretches, a long jagged sliver, from the south hemisphere equiv- alent of the latitude of Jamaica to the equivalent of that of Labrador. The Araucanian Indians, whose blood is mixed with that of a considerable portion of the population, were a race of fighters — very different stock from the tame, phlegmatic Indians of Peru. Many of the early Chilian settlers came from the 145 THE OTHER AMERICANS northern part of Spain. All this, a rugged climate and an environment none too tender, have made the Chilians hardier than their northern neighbors, and since the great war it cannot be denied that they often have the air of a man spoiling for a fight. This swarthy, unhousebroken fellow on the horse is the roto — one of the most interesting social units in Latin America. He does the country’s hard man- ual work and will keep at it all day on a bit of bread and onion and a gulp of pisco. There are no harder workers in the world than these men, so their overseers will tell you. When they get their pay they go off on a drunk until the money is gone. An English engineer told me of the men in his mine, who worked half-naked, like animals, below ground. They were paid at the end of every three months. He tried to get them to put their money in the bank, to save enough so that some day they might have a little capital and shift to better work. They laughed at him. What was the use of working at all, they said, unless you could get drunk at the end? It is this class, doubtless, which accounts for a good part of that river of raw spirits of which Chilian sta- tistics give four gallons to each inhabitant per year. In his recent “History of South America,” Mr. Akers, who was correspondent of the “London Times” for many years in these parts, states that in 1898, Val- paraiso, with its 140,000 inhabitants, had more arrests for drunkenness than London itself with its five million. I saw no untoward signs of drunkenness in 146 THE OTHER SAN FRANCISCO Valparaiso nor anywhere else in Chile, but an enormous amount of alcohol is consumed — in the nitrate fields it is a rather general custom for the oficina to furnish its white men with all they want to drink, free — and in the provinces lawless crimes are frequent and scarcely punished. To hear the transplanted Britons — intolerant ob- servers, to be sure — one would think that committing homicide was an industry and life in Chile scarcely more secure than it has been at times in certain streets of Chicago. While I was in Valparaiso a man of the name of Du Bois had been arrested charged with a series of peculiar murders. The papers w r ere crowded with details, photographs of the prisoner and his alleged accomplices, even cartoons of the chief of detectives, surrounded with red-hot irons and other instruments of persuasion. The murders had been committed some time before, and three men had al- ready been tried, convicted, and sentenced to execu- tion. I mentioned this fact to an English acquaint- ance, as a somewhat sinister commentary on Chilian justice. “Not at all,” he said sweetly. “They can’t make a mistake, you know; any one of these chaps is bound to have committed a murder.” It is the roto who, of late years, has just begun to sit up and take notice. He is not a fool by any means, and he knows enough of what the rest of the world is doing to feel a vague dissatisfaction. It is he who has dug out of the nitrate fields all the wealth which has 147 THE OTHER AMERICANS made his country and the foreigners rich. It was he who fought the battles which crushed Peru and made Chile master of the West Coast. And he can never be an officer; he can never command a ship; he dies as he lives, a beast of burden. And so they have strikes in Chile, now, quite as modern as ours at home. A few years ago there was literal war in the streets of San- tiago because the Government tried to raise the import tax on Argentine beef; shortly before that a mob of steamship strikers fairly terrorized Valparaiso for a few hours, and with interesting discrimination — having the same grievance against both — burnt the offices of the Chilian steamship company and spared those occu- pied by a British steamship company — there being danger of foreign intervention there. While I was in Santiago the printers’ and lithographers’ strike, and other labor troubles of the obreros — the me- chanic class above the roto which has its labor unions similar to ours — were important parts of each day’s news. This dawning consciousness of power, this creeping of industrial problems into a society which was originally aristocratic and patriarchal, is one of the most interesting social phenomena of Latin America. The thought of the good-natured Bolivian Indian — who will carry a trunk two miles on the top of his head for ten cents — going on strike, or the subdued cholo of Peru, or shifty mestizo of the Caribbean organiz- ing labor unions, seems amusing or grotesque. This roto, however, is a different sort of person. He is not 148 fHE OTHER SAN FRANCISCO merely poor, or good-natured, or subdued — he is a scarred fighter who has survived a hard battle. A man who will work all day for a gulp of raw spirits, fight like a Spartan, endure cold and fatigue without whimpering, rob you or knife you without a qualm, and is just begininng to get hold of trade-unionism, is interesting. If one were to devise a coat-of-arms for Valparaiso — one had almost said Chile — one need go no farther than this characteristic sight of the Valparaiso streets — the two-wheeled dray-cart, the wiry, straining horses, and the swarthy driver lashing them to their work. In a way they express the spirit of that raw city, and are as appropriate to Chile as the llama and palm tree to the seal of Peru. I3V CHAPTER X SANTIAGO: THE METROPOLIS OF THE ANDES Toward dusk, when the lights are beginning to appear in the shops and the newsboys are calling out the last damp edition of “Las Ultimas Noticias,” and the great snow-covered wall of the Andes to the east blazes in the afterglow, the young men of Santiago gather in the neighborhood of the corner of Huerfanos and Ahumada streets to watch the young ladies go by. They are dapper and very confident young men, com- bining in their demeanor the gallantry of their Span- ish inheritance with a certain bumptiousness rather characteristically Chilian. They stare at those who pass — some in mantos, some in French dresses with Paris hats and “undulated” hair — and in Spanish murmur, half audibly, such observations as, “I like the blonde best,” or “Give me the little one.” And as they still retain some of that simplicity which, in the interior, causes a stranger to be watched as though he were a camel or a calliope — they will stare even at the gringo, comment on the cut of his clothes or facetiously compare his blunt walking-boots with their long, thin ones. They are rather irritating sometimes, these Huerfanos-corner young men, es- 150 SANTIAGO pecially the young officers in their smart German uni- forms, and one dreams of home and a Broadway policeman marching down upon them leisurely with a night-stick and fanning them away. But the young women do not mind it at all ; indeed, if they did not rather like it they probably would not so arrange their shopping that, two by two, from the Plaza down past the Hotel Oddo, round the corner and back again, they must so often pass this way. And you will not make yourself at all popular by sympathiz- ing, for they would only laugh and say: “Oh, they’re all right. That’s only their way of beginning. They’re quite sensible and nice when you come to know them.” There are ways and ways, and in South America a girl who may not receive a formal call from a man without having her mother and half the family in the room at the same time may blandly listen to repartee which would make our maidens gasp for breath. One night at the opera in Santiago a somewhat distinguished per- sonage looked in for a moment at the box where I happened to be. Had you called upon him that after- noon he would have expected you to come in top-hat and frock-coat and discuss affairs of state with punc- tilious dignity, yet the first casual remark this middle- aged statesman made after bowing to the young ladies in the party was to tell the older he couldn’t wait any longer, and she would have to marry him at once. “Or” — and he nodded toward the other sister — “be my sister-in-law.” The young girl smiled lazily and continued fanning herself. A moment later, when he 151 THE OTHER AMERICANS was reminded of the man who was about to visit Japan and, on being asked if he intended to take his wife with him, replied, “Do you carry a sandwich in your pocket when you go to the Lord Mayor’s banquet?” she still smiled and fanned lazily on. They are sometimes very beautiful, these Chilian women, with the same pale oval faces and velvety dark eyes of their cousins of Lima, but, as a rule, with more vigor and vitality. Something in their inheritance, perhaps, more likely, the colder climate seems to have cooled a little the vivacity which comes out in the tropic north; indeed, the beauties of which they are proudest are tall, slow-moving creatures, vigorously shaped, but marble-pale and a little melancholy. At this time of day, when the carriages are rolling about to diplomatic teas or waiting outside some shop which has received a consignment of dress goods by the last steamer, you see them in European clothes. The Chilians will tell you that, as July is mid-winter with them, they get Paris styles six months before we do in the States; by the same token, English-speaking exiles tell you that the Chilians are always, at least six months late. Which are right it is not for a mere male to say — the result is very satisfactory, at any rate. Most women — and in the morning even the Europeanized ones — wear the manto, that graceful euphemism which shields the poor and disarms the vain, hides bad taste and clumsy waists, and, wrapped round the head and nipped in in some marvellous fashion at the nape of the neck, envelops all femininity 152 SANTIAGO in gracefulness and mystery. Some of these mantos are of the sheerest cashmere, and their beneficent office is vividly revealed once in a while when the drooping, slender mask comes between one’s self and the light. It is at dusk, particularly if the band is playing, or if it is Sunday, that the promenade begins round the Plaza, a block away from Huerfanos and Ahumada — a row of spectators on the inside benches, on the out- side young idlers and officers two or three deep; be- tween two shuffling concentric circles, in one of which are the wicked and predatory men, in the other, the shrinking senoritas, two by two, or hanging on the arm of a protector. Every man who can sport a top-hat and a pair of saffron gloves, if it is Sunday, all of the women, except the very austere ones, gather here and circle round in that armed neutrality of the sexes which is the tradition of their blood. At this hour, when the unearthly light from the Andes, which here climb up to Aconcagua’s twenty- four thousand feet, has not yet quite faded away to darkness and the city lamps; when the newsboys are calling the papers, and the news from the great world to the other side of the earth is still news; when the men are flocking into the Union Club and the Brazil coffee-house and the sidewalks are full of shoppers and the cool mountain air smells of violets and vague per- fumes and the scent of roasting coffee, this Huerfanos corner is a very pleasant place. Within a stone’s throw, one might say, is all of Chile; those who rule and those who own; the representatives of foreign 153 THE OTHER AMERICANS governments, the newspapers, the clubs, theatre, opera. You can look up one street to Santa Lucia, that hang- ing garden of which the city is so proud, and up another to the long Alameda, with its fountains and statues and trees and trophies of the war. In a few hours, a block or two away, the carriages will be clattering up for “II Trovatore” or “La Boheme.” It is a cheerful little corner, the heart of this raw, bumptious, unlovely country — the flower whose roots lie in the baking nitrate deserts, hundreds of miles northward, from which four-fifths of the nation’s revenues come. Santiago has been called the City of the Hundred Families, not because an acute social censor might not double the number or cut that number in two, but because government in Chile is even more a family affair, perhaps, than in any other country of South America, and because Santiago is the capital. After its separation from Spain and preceding the great war with Peru, there were four presidential dynasties, so to speak, of ten years each, each president selecting his successor and seeing him put in office, regularly and in good order. Forty years of orderly government was rather a wonderful thing for South America and during it the rugged little country made money and built its navy and got ready to win the struggle with Peru. Since then, as the spread of commercialism and modern practicality has tended to weaken the sway of the old landed aristocracy, there has been a more or less open opposition between the Families — that is to say, the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, and the 154 SANTIAGO executive which consists of the President and his ministers. Chilian government is of the extreme par- liamentary pattern, and the families have rarely hesi- tated to compel a dissolution of the President’s cabinet whenever his and their policies did not agree. In 1889, in President Balmaceda, a man of culture and of an ambition for his country perhaps ahead of his time, they found one who would not yield to them. Revolu- tion followed, many lives were wasted, and millions of dollars’ worth of property destroyed, and the Balma- cedists lost. Balmaceda, who was a proud and very sensitive man, committed suicide; but there is a Balma- cedist party in Chilian politics to-day. And although Santiago is a city of a Few Families still, in a way, one of the very live questions in the Chile of to-day — with its foreign promoters, its labor-unions, night-schools, incip- ient socialism, and industrial strikes — is how long the country will be ruled by an oligarchy of jealous fami- lies, and when these scattered units will be absorbed into political parties, each with its well-defined policy, which, when it gets in power, it can hope to carry out. Intimate discussion of such questions I must leave to the erudite gentlemen who are at this instant writing constitutional histories of South America, and having thus hinted at the general social and material outlines of Santiago, return to the more immediate subject of these chapters, and what Mr. Barrett Wendell would call the glittering phantasmagoria of the outside world. Santiago has about four hundred thousand people, or about one-tenth of the population of Chile. It lies 155 THE OTHER AMERICANS in the wide central valley of this long sliver of a coun- try, some two thousand feet climb from the coast and Valparaiso, with the Andes hanging like a beautiful drop-curtain at the eastern end of every street. It has many newspapers, the best quite as good as those of cities of similar size at home, a large university, many academies and schools, parks, and an art museum. Its citizens ride in trolley-cars, go to the theatre and opera and horse-races, and talk to one another and Valparaiso over the telephone. There is at least one hotel well-kept and comfortable, and equal to what one would find in an average city of similar size in Europe. In short, it is a city, with a city’s material obviousnesses. Without gaping at these in detail, it is perhaps sufficient to say that, if the journey down the West Coast and across to Argentina were represented by a sort of isothermal line, climbing up and down the various latitudes of modernity, somewhat after the manner of those charts with which nurses record the temperatures of fever patients, it would swing upward in a fairly consistent curve from the comic-opera Caribbean, through Peru and Lima, with its mixture of antiquity and modern bricabracqueria , through Chile, hungrily scraping easy riches from the nitrate fields, to Buenos Aires, and about midway on this line you could mark a dot for the city of Santiago. What manner of life is flowing by here, thirty-three degrees below the line, in this ninetieth year of Chilian independence? I know of no better way to glimpse, at least, a cross-section of it than by glancing through 156 Nitrate vats at an “oficina” in the north of Chile. From nitrates comes most of Chile’s income. The railroad station at Santiago. These horse-cars have long since been replaced with electric trolleys. SANTIAGO these damp, newly made mirrors of the passing stream, otherwise known as afternoon papers. There are a great many of them here in Santiago, and some very good ones, and the North American, unaccustomed to cities which are their countries in a sense that none of our separate towns begins to be, wonders who can read and support all of them. There is “El Mercurio,” which everybody has heard of, and its afternoon edi- tion, “Las Ultimas Noticias”; “La Lei,” “El Ferro- carril,” “El Chileno,” “La Patria,” “El Imparcial,” “La Reforma,” “El Porvenir,” “El Diario Popular,” “El Diario Ilustrado”; there may be others, but these, at least, I gathered up one evening from the* old cholo newswoman who stood on the steps of the post- office. So, suppose one surprises the first newsboy who approaches Huerfanos corner by buying out half his stock, and then crossing the street to the Brazilian coffee-house, where men gather at this hour, just as they do after the offices close in the cafes at home, and where for a few cents you can get a plate of little biscuits, and coffee, that somehow never tastes nor smells quite the same the other side of the tropics, and cast an eye over the news. Here, first thing, on the front page of “Las Ultimas Noticias,” in scare type that cannot be escaped, is an AVISO AL PUBLICO!! The Printing, Lithographing and Binding Establishments of Santiago have been obliged to close their doors, owing to the ex- cessive pretensions of their employees following an increase in the hours of work which was unanimously adopted by the proprietois. 157 THE OTHER AMERICANS Close by, the Juventud Conservadora publicly regrets, in red ink, that because of the strike and the impos- sibility of having invitations printed, its banquet must be postponed for a week. Farther over the employers print a long statement, phrased in the cold and lucid words which employers are wont to use, amid which stares our own word “ local” alongside “Federation Grafica Arturo Prat, 485.” Here, then, in our City of Families, in a country founded by Spain and saturated with patriarchal traditions, comes the trade-union and strikes, or huelgas, as they would say. The young British bank-clerk at the next table will tell you that a year or two ago these very streets were literal battle- grounds for a day or two because the government tried to raise the import tax on Argentine beef. There were only a few soldiers at the barracks when the mob rose, “and if,” says he, “we hadn’t got together and kept them from breaking in and getting the guns, nobody knows what might have happened. The soldiers came, though. You could hear ’em pop-pop-popping all night in the streets. They shot three hundred that one night! The mob tried to break into the ‘Mcr- curio’ building, and the men inside fired one volley out of the windows and killed seven.” Here, farther on, are echoes of that restless, get-rich- quick commercialism of present-day Chile — columns of advertisements of banks, with British, German, Span- ish names; of nitrate companies and promotion schemes that remind one of mining advertisements in our Western papers. Yet with it all, one gets a feeling 158 SANTIAGO of being set back in the fifties or sixties, of seeing some- thing that is perhaps a partial duplication of what we in North America were a few generations ago. In spirit the country is still, to a great extent, colonial ; things still date to and from mail-day; there is a quaint antique solemnity in the advertisements of steamship sailings: “On such and such a date the Pacific Steam Naviga- tion Company’s steamship Sorata, 7,000 tons (Captain Hobson), carrying mails for Europe, will sail, touching at Coronal or Lota, Punta Arenas, Montevideo, Santos, Rio de Janeiro, etc., to Liverpool.” Some of the ships go straight over to Australia, where much of Chile’s coal comes from; some to New Zealand, by way of Cape Town; and many stop at the Falklands, eastward bound, to take on cargoes of wool. In foreign news I suppose we are less interested, yet here are two or three pages of cable despatches in “El Mercurio” — twice as much, so that most hopeful of Pan- Americans, Mr. Charles Pepper, avers in his book on the West Coast, as is printed by any North American paper in a city of similar size. As for commercial and other exiles — here are the Alliance Francaise and the ■> Deutscher Verein announcing approaching festivities; the English Club, “by virtue of the power vested in them at the General Meeting of the Provisional Com- mittee, have decided that,” etc., etc. Vida Social, under which Latin-American editors have a quaint habit of printing obituaries and notices of funerals, here includes a wedding, a baile or two; the banquet of the Colombians, last evening, in honor of the anni- 159 THE OTHER AMERICANS versary of their independence — caviar glace, creme reine Margot, filet de Corbine a la Cancale (the corbina is a fish much esteemed on the West Coast), zephyrs de foies gras en bellevue, Perdreaux a la bohemienne, Haut Sauteme, 1890, Chateau de Bouscaut, ’80, etc., etc.; a dinner for poor children and their mothers — another echo of Chile’s growing social consciousness — given by certain distinguidas senoras y senoritas. On the front page of “El Diario Ilustrado” are their photographs, the dis- tinguished matrons and misses, and the dusky little cholo children looking over their soup-bowds out of dark, sad eyes. The muck-rake is still but mildly wielded in these paternal countries, yet at least in the report of yester- day’s session of the congress, one finds Deputy Gutier- rez attacking the government’s management of the state railroad, and asserting that on a certain division out of three hundred and thirty-seven locomotives there were seventy-four distinct types! The editor himself is constrained to admit that the Electric Trac- tion Company is giving abominable service. And from Antofagasta, up in the nitrate country, a correspond- ent complains that murders and hold-ups are frequent and that the police are becoming more indifferent every day. Rates of exchange, activity of the stock-market, movements of Argentine beef — at the opera last night “La Tosca.” “In spite of the bitter attacks on Vic- torien Sardou,” observes the reviewer, “by the more enlightened critics, this old man of the theatre survives, 160 SANTIAGO undaunted, and his dramas are presented all over the world. The unfortunate thing is that a great many who have not the good taste to rise superior to merely popular clamor — Puccini, Mascagni, and others — are led to take their librettos from the plays of Sardou. And the result is, because of the false theatrical- ism. . . .” As for the out-of-doors, there is football; a fond correspondent, writing in the old Latin-American or Caribbean manner, explains, under the title, “Lite- ratura y Sport,” and with examples of the fresh-air regimen practised by Edmund Harcourt, Jacques Richepin, Henry Bataille, and Marcel Prevost, how, of all those who need physical exercise, literary men need it most, "in order to compensate, by a propor- tionate amount of bodily waste, the mental combustion caused by the profession of literature”; and here are the entries and weights, in kilos, of course, for the races to-morrow — Espartana, Miss Polly, Makaroff, King of Hearts, Pierre-qui-rire, Nutmeg, Guerrillero, and columns of racing gossip in Spanish signed “Sport- ing Boy.” Of these newspapers “El Mercurio” is the most widely read, and it has long been one of the show things of Chile. It was founded in Valparaiso in 1827 and in Santiago in 1900, and the afternoon edition, “Las Ultimas Noticias” or “The Latest News” — was started in 1904. The two papers are published simul- taneously, the news columns somewhat different, the editorials the same. “El Mercurio,” like its larger 161 THE OTHER AMERICANS rival, “La Prensa,” of Buenos Aires, is the pet child of a wealthy family, which spares no expense not only to keep abreast of the times, but to give its whole establishment something* of the dignity of a national institution. The Valparaiso editorial offices are more like a club than an ordinary North American news- paper office, the file-room is a sort of Gothic chapel, and the mighty redactor and his assistant sit in carved oaken chairs like a cabinet minister and his secretary. The Santiago building is very much after the manner of the “New York Herald” building in New York, only rather more ambitious. It has an office where the public may consult files; a grill-room, in which tea is served free to reporters, and other food at a nominal price, and there are semi-public lecture and concert rooms. “El Mercurio” also publishes an illustrated w r eekly, “Zigzag,” which circulates all over southern South America, and occupies a position about midway between such illustrated supplements as are issued with our Saturday “Globe” and “Mail and Express,” and such a paper as “Collier’s.” Here you will always find photographs of the baile or wed- ding or dinner of the week — for South Americans take an insatiable delight in seeing pictures of their social doings in the papers — gossip of the races and theatres, poems, translations, and short stories after the fashion of French or Italian weeklies, scraps of the world’s news, ranging from an account of the latest nihilistic attack or air-ship flight to photographs of English musical comedy beauties or of some member 162 SANTIAGO of our pagan aristocracy with a prize bull-terrier in her lap. “Zigzag” has a three-color cover, and a North American superintendent to look after its press- work. Sometimes it is quite grown up, as, for instance, in a series of cartoons published last summer depicting the adventures of a German sociologist come* to study the barbarous phenomena of Chile. The misadven- tures of this gentleman and his dachshund, and his droll misinterpretation of the humors of a Chilian po- litical campaign, were presented with much the self- sufficient good-humor that “Punch” might tell of the adventures of a Frenchman in London. At other times it becomes droll and almost Caribbean, as in a number I recently saw, in which the arrival of Mr. Frank Brown’s circus in Santiago was chronicled, and it was solemnly explained that the Chilian’s partiality to elephants was due to something mighty and martial in the national temperament to which these vast pachyderms specially appealed. There were many things for “El Mercurio” to be proud of, but that which they pointed out with the greatest enthusiasm, perhaps, and which was interest- ing because it suggested so much that didn’t exist in the tropical neighborhoods to the north, was a sign on a door that read “ Vida al aire libre.” It was the head- quarters of a brand-new department, and of the gentle- man who signed himself “Sporting Boy,” and wrote about life out of doors. Life out of doors in the tropics is a serious thing, and not always synonymous with sport ; and, although the English-speaking folk keep up 163 THE OTHER AMERICANS their tennis and sometimes their polo wherever they are, and you will find South American boys playing football in almost every town of any size, there is some- thing strange and vaguely pathetic about such exotic sport, separated from the cool air and fresh turf with which it seems to belong. Here in Chile, however, the temperate zone has come again : a workable atmosphere and the blessed green grass, and with it, too, naturally, and with all these northern exiles and Saxons native- born, the northern love for sport. Almost every day Mr. Sporting Boy discoursed learnedly on “El turf f ranees, its development and progress,” the “Progreso del turf Chileho,” gave “a last word about el match intercity ” or printed a letter from some “distinguido y antiguo footballista.” “Senor Sporting Boy, Mi estimado amigo,” the letter would begin. “That which is past is past. We have suffered, in truth, a shameful defeat; yet what we are to blame for we ought perhaps to accept silently. There are, however, undoubtedly certain things which might well be brought to the attention of the honorable directorate of the Association de Football de San- tiago.” What should have been, it seems, a great intercity match “became merely a mere chance for the portehos (or ‘people of the gate,’ as the Valparaisans are called) to give us on our own grounds a proof of their superior discipline and organization.” The San- tiago team had been well trained. The selection of players made by its captain, Don Guillermo del Canto, was magnificent. The public were confident. The 104 SANTIAGO great day dawned propitiously. But at the last mo- ment it appeared that one player was missing ! The pub- lic protested, the captain searched. The portehos — em- barrassing thought — “observed this lack of discipline. They had preferred to leave behind such good players as Morrison and Mackenzie merely because they had missed one day’s practice at Vina del Mar! The game began, but what had happened? Why were Voiles, Rogers, Hamel, etc., who, two days before, had spoken gayly of the intercity as of a coming victory, not now the same? The cause seemed inexplicable. It was this. The substituted goal-keeper did not guarantee security. There was weakness in that most responsible position, in that point de transcendental importancia en la defensia de un team. The result — but why heap up humiliation? To all the world now it is told, only too eloquently, in the score.” The Chilians are horsemen, too, and great breeders of horses — even the Peruvians import their best stock from their rivals, and in the Paseo at Lima they are Chilian coach-horses which drag the victorias round and round the statue of Bolognesi. Bull-fighting having been abolished in Chile, the races, in a way, take its place, and all the town flocks to the “Club Hippico” on Sunday afternoon. It is a pretty place, with the snow-capped Cordilleras in the distance and the paddock and club enclosure with its refreshment tables and trees — larger than the little course at Lima, more polite and winsome than the big Jockey Club of Buenos Aires. Here, of a Sunday afternoon during 165 THE OTHER AMERICANS the season, the “higgy-liffy” of the little capital dis- plays itself, both in its role of exemplar of the Few Families and in that less conscious but no less enter- taining provincialism which a newly arrived member of the diplomatic corps doubtless had in mind when, on my asking her about her impressions of Chilian society, she said that they seemed to do nothing but eat and get their pictures taken. The club enclosure has all the quiet intimacy of a garden-party. The women wear their prettiest clothes, the men are rigor- ously arrayed in frock-coats and top-hats. They are very punctilious about this, and on the afternoon I was there were much less excited over the races than over the fact that a lone gringo, who, doubtless assum- ing that the balmy day and the sporting surroundings justified his behaving as though it were July at home instead of south of the tropics, had committed the social crime of wearing a straw hat. Men’s jaws dropped as they beheld him, and stately beauties, into whose houses a social outsider could not have broken with an axe, stared, pointed, and giggled like shop- girls. There is less of this punctiliousness at the opera; even in parterre boxes grocer-like papas in business suits may occasionally be observed behind their blooming daughters. The daughters are likely to be much younger than the glittering nymphs who adorn our opera boxes at home, and just a little awkward and conscious of their clothes. But the beautiful ones are really beautiful — tall and dark and pale, with a 166 SANTIAGO certain vague melancholy, as though, perhaps, they were thinking of the great world the other side of the tropics, down below the big shoulder of the earth from which they were fated to bloom and blush unseen. German opera is not admired, but the government subsidizes very fair Italian companies who come out each winter and sing “Trovatore” and “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “Tosca” and the rest. No pale in- tellectuals to frown at the “Bravos” here or shiver at the stretching of a top note! The audience shrieks and thunders, hisses itself into silence, only to break forth again in applause. The first tenor bows and bows, steps clear out of his part and down to the footlights, finally, with a glance at the orchestra leader as who should say “They will have it — just watch me tear it off now!” Up goes his great chest as the high note approaches, the sweat rolls down the grease-paint in the glare of the footlights, the air is fairly trembling with pent-up enthusiasm. The note is taken — held — on — on where does the man’s breath come from? — brought down at last into a swoop, smothered in an avalanche of applause. It’s some fun being a tenor here. Between the acts the young men drift down to the orchestra-rail to sweep the house with their glasses and discuss its attractions. After the performance they crowd in the foyer like “stags” at a cotillion to watch the sehoritas go by, and between times there is a vast amount of that solemn wireless telegraphy of which a society so rigidly chaperoned must needs be 167 THE OTHER AMERICANS fond. There was a young woman in a box across from us, a tall, vigorous beauty, in unrelieved black, who gazed out across the orchestra like a marble statue. The gossip was that she was really in earnest, and the young legation secretary was only playing, and so every eye was on him when he sauntered down to his orchestra seat alone after the overture was nearly done. He was a very tall and gloomily languid young man, and knowing that everybody was watching him and why, and having down very fine that mixture of cold elegance and ennui, which is considered the last word in Buenos Aires, he only made himself look more bored than ever. He would raise his eyelids or a hand with the calculated slowness of a figure moved by clock-work. Presently — and this was what every- one was waiting for — he turned slowly until his gaze met that of the lady in the box and bowed. It was as if he said a glance from her would make him but clay beneath her feet and yet he was so aweary that not even this could make him smile. The statue vouch- safed him a bow only a shade less cold and sad than his. Ever and anon through the evening he would slowly turn, lift his stricken gaze to the box, rest it there with that look of longing unutterable, and as slowly turn it back again. This long-distance coquetry may go on for months, although the principals may have never met. It is what the Chilians call pololear, from the name of a kind of native bee which makes a prolonged buzzing sound. Going to the theatre in Santiago generally means, 168 SANTIAGO as it does in Lima, looking in for a zarzuela or two some time during the evening. These zarzuelas are one- act pieces, most of which, including the companies who play them and the Castilian lisp they bring with them, come over from Spain. Three or four are generally put on in one evening, the house being cleared — except of those who have reserved seats for more than one “turn’ 7 or tanda — between each piece. If you have dined late you can drop in for the second one, which begins about half-past nine generally, and if you have been somewhere else during the evening you can often catch the last one, which starts about eleven o’clock. The arrangement is somewhat similar to what we should have in our music-halls were tickets sold at ten or fifteen cents for each separate “turn” instead of for an evening, and it is informal, convenient, and economical. Some of the zarzuelas are musical, some melodramatic, but commonly'they lean to parody and eccentric comedy. There was one in Santiago called “Popular Books.” The stage was set as a Madrid street with a book-stall in the centre. A simple cus- tomer was about to start a library. The bookseller described one classic after another, in the midst of each of which explanations the principal characters of the book appeared from the wings* and did a short sketch, burlesquing* the main points of the story. There was a scene between Camille and Armand, for instance, at the end of which the Lady of the Camellias stalked off the stage, leaving her blonde wig in her lover’s hands, the latter in an ecstasy of repentance, eyes closed, 169 THE OTHER AMERICANS thinking that his fingers still rested on her head in fond benediction. The audiences are very alert, and will come back in a flash if they suspect for an instant that the people on the stage are trifling with them. That same evening at Santiago there was one heart- wrenching piece, at the climax of which the aged father forgave his erring daughter and clasped her in his arms. The actress who endeavored to depict this maiden was an uncommonly cheerful and well-developed lady of perhaps 175 pounds, and when Simon, the heart-broken old father, gathered her to himself with a gesture more emphatic, perhaps, than paternal, and buried his head in her hair on the side away from the audience, the simulation of grief was too much for the suspicious Iberian temperament, and a voice shrilled down from the gallery, "What’s Simon saying?” — tQue dice Simon ? The most interesting performance I saw in Santiago, however, was not in a theatre but in a school-house, in the morning instead of by lamplight, with school-girls for actresses and an audience of three. It was at a normal school where a number of very earnest young Chilian women were learning how to teach. Girls from the poorer families of the neighborhood came by day, just as our children go to a public grammar-school; in the evening the young teachers had classes for boys and men of the obrero, or mechanic class, and between times they studied books on pedagogy. It would have been difficult among them not to recover speedily from whatever of the gringo's complacency survived at 170 SANTIAGO thirty-three degrees below the line. All spoke English more or less, the principal, a girl of perhaps twenty- five, fluently. One of the first questions she asked was the name of the critical magazine which would best keep her informed about intellectual matters in North America. "The Ladies’ Home Journal” was the only one of our magazines which came to the school. A class in English was reciting — reading an English fable about the wicked condor and the poor little hare, and the use the latter had made of his legs. “Pooair-r- aleetle hare-r-re” — they would read in extreme em- barrassment, for some were quite grown up — “what were you adoing weeth your lace?” It may be em- barrassing, but that is the way they learn English down there, and the way our spoiled undergraduates generally do not learn the languages — by talking them ; so that young men who have never been outside the little interior town in which the seven-leagued gringo meets them, can chat with him quite fluently in his own tongue. After classes were dismissed for the noon recess the pupils hurried into bloomers and flannel waists, and under the leadership of a young woman with that austere springiness which, except in gymnasium instructors, is ne’er seen on sea or land, drilled w r ith dumb-bells and parallel bars. Then they lined up and sang their cancion nacional, and after that in English, “America,” which was a polite attention no Chilian would ever have received in the United States. Then they drew a long breath, smiled up into the gallery where we stood, and sang quite correctly 171 THE OTHER AMERICANS and with tremendous feeling, "My Old Kentucky Home.” It may be that every roomful of South Amer- ican school-girls could have done this that summer, but Mr. Root was then a full month’s journey distant from Santiago, and all I could do was to put myself in the place of a Chilian who should drop into a New York school by chance and have the pupils promptly stand up and sing his national anthem and follow that with some ancient Chilian popular song, and I do not hesitate to say that at least one of their audience was con- siderably stirred. Whatever may be said of the provincial and primary schools — generally weak in Latin- America — here in the capital the well-to-do take care of their own. Sarmi- ento, the great educator of the Argentine, and its president from 1868 to 1874, a friend of our Horace Mann and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and of various enlightened Europeans of his time, spent some of his early life in Chile while revolutions were disturbing his native province of San Juan. Education was the great interest of his life, and the work which was to do so much for Argentina began in Santiago, during this voluntary exile, some twenty-five years before. To- day, in Santiago, in addition to the public primary schools, there is the State University, with 1,700 stu- dents; the Catholic University; the National Institute, a secondary school with 1,168 pupils; and various others of a more or less private sort. Santiago College, which takes girls at the kindergarten age and graduates them eleven years later from a liberal arts 172 SANTIAGO course, the senior year of which includes “English Lit- erature and Rhetoric, Spanish Literature, Geometry, Astronomy, Geography, Sociology, History of Art, English Elocution, Nature Talks and Gymnasium Work,” looks, as one walks through it, like any well- conducted girls’ boarding-school at home. Classes were over for the day when I was there, but in the gymnasium four little primary girls were imitating with a solemnity and abandon, which these little Latins take to like ducks to water; the gestures of the elocution teacher, who waved his arms in front of them. There is nothing they like better. They throw all their romantic little souls into these sonorous periods that fairly speak themselves, until they remind one less of our own children “speaking pieces” than little voix d’or Bernhardts intoning the lines of “Phedre.” There is a boys’ school of somewhat the same class, called the “ Institute Ingles.” It was founded in the late seventies by Presbyterians and now has a Prince- ton man for principal, while most of the teachers are American. There were some three hundred pupils here, about a score of whom were Bolivians. Their school paper, “The Southern Cross,” took one back at a glance to the school papers of home. “Back at the 1. 1.,” began its column of “Locals and Personals,” in the time-honored manner. “Glad to see you. “Hope you had a good vacation. “Gustavo Valengula, brother of Julio, has returned after two years’ absence. 173 THE OTHER AMERICANS “The Boys are practising early this year for the field meet. “The Thunder Football Team has kindly given us permission to use their ground in the Quinta Normal. “The Andean Literary Society has begun its year’s work. “A challenge was sent to the Captain of the Am- mategui Football Club by the Institute, and an exciting game was played, the final score being four goals to two in favor of Ammategui. “Line up: Instituto — Goal, Auget; Backs, Zamora, Robinson (Capt.); Half-backs, Mena, Vallejos, Lira. Forwards, Vergara, Raiteri, Carabantes, Munoz, Qui- roga, etc., etc.” Change a name or two and it might be the Medford “Tiger” or the Cherryville High School “Owl.” This paper had a Spanish and an English editor, and part was printed in one language and part in the other. There was a translation from “The Literary Digest,” and from a “North American Review” article on “Is Literature Destroyed by Journalism?”; an article on scholarships in the schools of the United States and — typical example of the fond faith of Latin America — a translation of the “liberty or death” speech of Patrick Henry. Boys in school nowadays, I suppose, are discriminating and understand that the Patrick Henry kind of thing is antique rhetoric, not to be taken very seriously. They still like that kind of rhetoric down there — “Sehor Presidente: es natural en el hombre alimentar las ilusiones de la esperanza ” — boom out the 174 SANTIAGO familiar words in the rolling Castilian; “ Is life so dear” — “Es la vida tancara 6 la paz tan dulce parasercom- prada al precio de la libertad y la esclavitud? Impedidlo, Dios Todopoderoso /” They have not read, you see, the muck-raking magazines. They do not know of our various frenzied, shamed, and tainted things. They still believe in us. The Chilians have long been pleased to consider themselves the sturdiest people of South America. Before the war with Peru this was probably true, and in a lesser degree it is true to-day. The victory and the the nitrate have not been an unmixed good. The get-rich possibilities of nitrates have spoiled them somewhat for slow, hard work and provided temptations for “graft.” Nitrates have built up the army and navy and provided free schools. But those who get this free education are young men who could per- fectly well afford to pay for it themselves. The Chile of to-day is a Chile of the second generation, less sim- ple, less inclined to get out and hustle. I do not mean that parasitism begins to be an accomplished fact, nor that agriculture and mining and manufacturing will not gradually grow and hold up the industrial struct- ure when the bottom has dropped out of the more spectacular nitrates, as, some time or other, of course it must. But it is a tendency, and this and the growing power of the roto and obrero classes, and the beginning of trades-unions and night-schools and strikes — all this very modern unrest and agitation make Chile interesting. One gets beyond exotic charm and 175 THE OTHER AMERICANS among people who are thinking and working and won- dering why. Here, for instance, close to Mr. Sporting Boy’s talk on football, under the heading, “Una Costumbre Anti- patriotica,” is a typical echo of that self-analysis, un- rest, and criticism which one meets daily in newspapers and talking with Chilians. Pellegrini, one of the ex- presidents of Argentina, has just died, and the leader writer, referring to the tributes to his memory in Buenos Aires, applauds the way in which the Argentines stand up for their own. “It is otherwise,” says he, “in Chile. Ask any of the strangers who visit us. The first impulse of a Chilian of good position, in speaking of Chile, is to say that it is badly governed, its cities scarcely habitable, public men dishonest, society corrupt, that it exhibits all that which is worst on this earth below. We do not exag- gerate. It is a daily spectacle in our most aristocratic clubs. Whenever a new diplomat arrives, a minister or secretary of legation, or merely a casual traveller, you will hear some such conversation as this: “‘You are pleased with Santiago?’ “'Absolutely. Santiago is a most agreeable place. I am delighted with Chile. I am very anxious to know more about the country. I find Chilian society charm- ing.’ “‘You are saying that out of pure gallantry and as a good diplomat. It is really a wretched time to see the country. Everything is disorganized.’ “‘Oh, you are merely passing through one of those 176 SANTIAGO crises that come with progress. That has occurred to many countries.’ “‘No; we have no illusions. The government is enough to make one ashamed. And Congress — and the Santiago streets — and the railroads — how shameful to have such a creature in as Minister of Foreign Affairs ” “‘Why, it seems to me that Mr. So-and-So is a very able statesman.’ “‘No, no. Only a rascal — a bandit — a fool.’ “Whoever has visited the Argentine Republic knows that these things are ordered differently there. Before strangers the Argentinean ” One day a bundle of home newspapers dropped into Santiago — midsummer newspapers full of stories of baseball games, sunstrokes, ice-famines, chowder- parties, politics, big crops, and all the homely, humor- ous gossip from police courts and country towns. It would be difficult to explain to anyone who has not at one time or another become temporarily Latinized just how one felt on opening a Chicago paper to find the editor of the “Emporia Gazette” quoted as remark- ing of the architecture of his face that “there was nothing but features in it,” and to see on the front page a cartoon of a book-keeper — the sort of hard- worked, patient, quizzical office-slave that McCutcheon would draw — poring over a ledger in his shirt-sleeves, while a thermometer near by registered ninety-six degrees, and in a woodeny cloud above his head floated a vision of water, a hammock, a shirt-waist girl, and a 177 THE OTHER AMERICANS pitcher of lemonade. This breath of home and the dog-days coming into that southern winter and the toy-aristocracy, with its quaint mixture of punctilious- ness and provincialism, suddenly made clear, as few things could, some of the fundamental differences be- tween ourselves and our Latin neighbors. It was im- possible to imagine a Chilian editor of Mr. William Allen White’s attainments talking about himself in type with that intimate, half-deprecatory humor. As completely alien to such a place as Santiago was that homogeneity of feeling, that love for people just be- cause they are people, even to the length of taking interest in the common physical emotions, which had made it natural to put on the front page of a great paper the picture of a warm and over-worked young man in his shirt-sleeves. To the South American periodista it would have seemed almost indelicate. His paper is published for an upper crust of people, most of whom think a good deal about the dignity of their position. He and they take themselves seriously. His editorials are written in the grand manner, like messages to Congress. When he wants to lighten the paper he prints illustrations from foreign journals or translations of French novels or letters from very literary corre- spondents. If a Spanish-American cartoonist were to use such a subject, he would get his effect in a purely visual and external way — the poor clerk would be seen melting down like an image of wax or catching on fire. Physical grotesqueries of this sort are typical of Span- ish humor — people getting hanged and kicking and 178 SANTIAGO squirming absurdly, heads being sliced off and looking greatly surprised at its being done, a butcher sawing through a bone and cutting off the ends of his fingers. It is the racial variation of our kicking mules and slippery banana-peels. It would never have occurred to him to sentimentalize the hard-working young clerk, to make his appeal not to his audience’s eyes or sense of the grotesque, but to their human sympathy, for the simple reason that there is no community of feeling in the people about him of which this would be an expression. It is the lack of this atmospheric sense of kinship which often makes young North Americans poorer col- onists than their German and British competitors. They pine away in the chill vacuum between the punc- tilious upper class and the illiterate, impossible, lower world. There is none of our blessed vulgarity — using the word in its most literal and highest sense — none of that cheerful, half-humorous consciousness of common weaknesses and resignation to a common fate. There is no warm, comfortable middle ground. The whole arrangement of society is aristocratic, democratic though it be in name. And yet, if I were to choose from all the Other Americans I met, the one whose experience had most nearly duplicated that of an able and energetic man at home, it would probably be a citizen of this very City of the Hundred Families. This young man was a newspaper editor, and a South American redactor is generally a very mighty person, indeed. Yet he 179 THE OTHER AMERICANS affected none of the ambassadorial grand manner. He was what the South Americans call simpdtico — which does not mean merely sympathetic, but con- notes a general notion of things agreeable, congenial, and winsome — and, at the same time, level-headed, and sensible. He spoke English with scarcely an accent, and, although he had never been in the States, talked about us — the railroads, trusts, insurance, the negro question — with an embarrassing ease and fa- miliarity. Quite frankly and with great good-humor he told about the good and bad that had come from the nitrate fields, the things Chilians of the old school must bring themselves to meet. The government rail- road might interest some of our people. It was badly equipped, carelessly run, and it was impossible to keep up the efficiency of the employees. No sooner was a man discharged for inefficiency than some poli- tician got him his job back again. As for education, he wished that more of the money spent on university and secondary instruction might be put into primary and grammar schools. The result was a kind of intel- lectual poverty. The upper-class boys get their educa- tion free, but what did they give back to the state in return? “They get their degrees,” was the way he put it, “but what do they do with their lives afterward?” It was, indeed, still true that the country was dom- inated by the old families. But this could not last forever, and even now politics was reaching out beyond the pale. As he said this he picked up a morning’s 180 A Corpus Christi procession in the plaza in Santia; SANTIAGO paper and ran his pencil down the list of names of the newly elected senate — Figueroa, Irarzaval, Fernandez, Tocornal — all conservatives these, as one could tell by their names; yet here beside them were two new men, one a shopkeeper, neither of whom had any connection with the old families at all. Indeed, as far as tills went, he, himself, was quite what in the States we should call a “self-made man.” He had come from a poor family in the south of Chile, without money or connections, thinking at first that he was going to be a great literary man. He had written poems in those days, even a novel. Possibly — and unless you have had some little acquaintance with the continent in which every other man who can write at all tries to be “literary,” you can hardly appreciate the quite “American” quality of this half-humorous self-deprecation — one might still find a copy of it in the book-shops. After a while he decided that he wasn’t a genius, and went to work for a newspaper. And here he was at the top — the mighty redactor, au- thor of an “inspired” editorial which the country gravely read each morning, and still a young man, he knew everyone, was received everywhere, could go into the Congress if he wanted to. I had dropped in on this man unexpectedly in a busy part of the day, and I took up an hour or so of his time asking tiresome questions, and yet to the end he be- haved with the good-humor and good sense of the best type of North American, and with the courtesy of the Spanish gentleman. He was almost what is called “a 181 THE OTHER AMERICANS good mixer,” and anything more alien to the tradi- tional upper-class Latin-American than that it is hard to imagine. It is men like this who are the southern continent’s men of to-morrow, who are, indeed, the Other Americans. CHAPTER XI ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS IN WINTER The wall of the Andes begins at the Caribbean and runs all the way down the western edge of South America until it trails off into the Antarctic like a jagged dragon’s tail. It is a very high wall and a very wide one — sometimes scores and sometimes hundreds of miles across — and except in a few places all but im- passable. There is the Oroya railroad in Central Peru, the highest in the world, which will take you from the drowsy tropical coast at breakfast time and by early afternoon set you on the roof of the divide, shivering and breathing fast, fifteen thousand and five hundred feet above the sea. There is a railroad up to Lake Titicaca from Mollendo in southern Peru, which crosses the shoulder of the Andes at an altitude about a thou- sand feet lower, and there is a railroad running down into Chile and the coast from the Bolivian plateau. The only railroad highway which crosses the continent, however, is that which climbs the Chilian mountains to the pass of Uspallata and runs thence across the pampa to Buenos Aires. Some day this will be a through line from sea to sea, and in a dozen or more places tunnel gangs are nibbling under the upper 183 THE OTHER AMERICANS Cordillera; but now it is open only during the summer, and even then the fourteen kilometres over the cumbre, or summit of the pass, must be made by stage. In winter no attempt is made to cross, and from Mendoza, in the Argentine foothills, over to Los Andes on the Chilian side — about one hundred and fifty miles — the road is closed. The Andes in these parts rise to appalling heights, the loftiest of which is Aconcagua’s twenty-four thou- sand feet, and the pass itself is at not far from thirteen thousand — 3,900 metres to be exact. During the win- ter — the months of our northern summer — it is buried in snow, the deadly temporal is likely at any time to whirl down on the traveller, and crossing the cordillera is as different a thing from crossing it in summer as crossing a Montana prairie carpeted with spring violets is different from venturing into it during a blizzard, when a man may lose his way and freeze to death a furlong from the ranch-house door. Whoever tries to cross after the first of June is supposed to take his life in his hands. I want this thoroughly understood. The earth is getting extremely civilized and the num- ber of things reckoned as impossible or even dangerous to do are decreasing every day. No man with any regard for his reputation can be too careful. Before I went to South America the Chilian Minister in Wash- ington told me that he had got across once the second week in June, but only at the loss of one of his men. Acquaintances in Santiago assured me that if one escaped freezing or starvation one was always likely 184 ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS to fall a victim to rotos who, discharged by the tunnel engineers for drunkenness, had become embittered against the world and devoted their lives to hiding in narrow passes and rolling boulders down on whoever went by. And the two gifted reporters of the Buenos Aires “Prensa” — familiar with the country naturally, and students of men — who interviewed the traveller after his arrival in that metropolis, declared in their story the next day that the “ molest ias” and “ penurias” which he had “endured during this via crucis were imposible de narrar and revealed a man of courage and will unconquerable.” That ought to prove something. Lest, however, this should seem merely the reckless exploit of a tenderfoot, I hasten to explain that there was I waiting in Santiago, there was the distinguido canciller norte americano, Senor Root, within a few days of Buenos Aires and the most splendid moments of his continental tour. Through some perverse fate, there was no mail-boat sailing round through the Straits for another week, the voyage would take at least ten days, and the thought of limping into the harbor of Buenos Aires just as the parting salutes were being fired and the Charleston was dropping down the bay, was not to be borne. So here was the choice: on the one hand a week’s wait, a racking fortnight by sea and the probability of missing the festivities in Buenos Aires; on the other, avalanches, bandits, death and destruction, but — the fascinating chance of fairly stepping across the continent, as it were, like climbing over a garden wall. Three days in the snow, the local 185 THE OTHER AMERICANS down to Mendoza and then, if one caught the bi-weekly express, Buenos Aires in twenty-four hours more — five days instead of three weeks. There was no choice here, surely, so I packed up one afternoon and took the train for the foothills. It was the hour when the Andean rampart, blocking the eastern sky-line, melted in the afterglow into a purple and amethyst mystery and became at once beautiful and vaguely fearful; when the newsboys crying the afternoon papers, the dark-eyed Chilian ladies coming out to drive, the crowded sidewalks, the lights beginning to blink in the shops, occasional twilight odors of flowers and feminine perfumes and Brazilian coffee and cigarette smoke made the Chilian capital a place hard to leave behind. The Valparaiso express whirled up to Llai Llai — which you pronounce, cheer- fully, “Yi! Yi!” — and I shifted into the local for Los Andes. I slept there that night at the little hotel whose English landlady sniffed the air as she closed my shutters and prophesied snow, and the next morn- ing, after emptying my trunk and packing my luggage in two of the landlady’s empty potato-sacks, in bun- dles of thirty kilos each, found a corner in a repair-car bound up the line. Laboriously we panted past the zone of farms, above the snow-line presently, and the chill breath from the ice chambers of the upper levels crept down and pierced one’s bones. At last the end of the road and Juncal, at about 7,800 feet — a station, an engineer’s shack, a traveller’s posada, little blots on the expanse of white, far above which, climbing one 186 Juncal, on the Chilian side at the end of the railroad, at an altitude of about 7,800 feet. On the trail from Portillo. The natural bridge of Puenta del Inca, ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS behind another and vanishing in the chill, steely mist, stretched the portals of the Cordillera. There were no burden-carriers ready, although the amateur bandit — a British railroad superintendent — to whom I had paid one hundred and fifty dollars Chilian “to set me down on the other side,” as his graceful euphemism had it, had promised that they were wait- ing all along the line. The trail was too steep and rough for mules. And as the afternoon was fair and I was anxious to push along as far as possible while the weather held, I left the luggage to be brought on as soon as men could be found and started up the trail alone. Juncal diminished to a polka-dot in the snow. The valley sunk and widened, the heads of foothills lower down came out. Up above meandered the trail, like some Jack-and-the-Beanstalk’s path to regions un- known, and beyond it, rising endlessly, peaks and shoul- ders of naked rock and snow disappearing in the steely mist. Occasionally, down the stillness, came a faint tick- tack — the far-carried sound of the tunnelers nibbling into the mountain a mile or two away. And presently, after a climb of seven kilometres and about a thousand feet up, there appeared in the snow some low roofs and walls which looked the pictures of winter quarters that Arctic explorers bring home. Winter quarters they were in this weather, although merely to house the commissary-chief of the tunnel gangs, and likely, as a photograph he showed me later proved, to be buried under forty feet of snow when a 187 THE OTHER AMERICANS temporal came. He stood in the low doorway to greet me, a big, bearded, downright Scotchman, little dream- ing, I dare say, how welcome in this silent wilderness that welcome seemed. It was twilight by now — the hour which the Britisher’s teacup follows round the world. It was ready oh the table and with it crisp British biscuits and the inevitable British jam. There was a fire in the room, which was more than could be said for the hotel left behind in Santiago, an oil stove that kept the place piping hot. There were book- cases on the walls. Kipling, Thackeray and Stevenson, and on the table the “Spectator,” “Pick Me Up” and “The Pink Un.” There was the company’s physician, too — a very Dr. Watson of a doctor, who came in from skeeing, presently, in knickerbockers, ruddy and cheer- ful, and sat down with us to tea. The Scotchman threw up his hands when he heard what I had paid for the privilege of walking, became reassuringly furious when he heard that the luggage-carriers had not been provided forthwith, set the company’s telephone wire burning back down to the trail to Los Andes and on up the pass to Carocoles. What were they thinking of, what right had they to do such things, how could they leave this poor stranger stranded here in the mountains — now in English and in burring Spanish, while I sat back and beamed. When the big lamp had been lit and dinner served, from some recess of that superlative little cave ap- peared our proveedor's wife — "wonder of wonders in these desolate mountains — a gentle*-voiced English- 188 ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS speaking woman, with that clear Northern glance of intelligence and understanding which the gringo some- how often misses in the prettier eyes of the Latin Americans. She took her place at the head of the table, wrapping us about in a certain grateful sense of orderliness and God-fearing dignity, and we dined po- litely and well that night up there in the snow. After the table was cleared we gathered round the stove and smoked and talked mightily of nations and navies and wars, as strange men thrown thus together, are wont to do, and the world seemed a very good old world in- deed, when the three Indians and I started up the trail for Carocoles the next morning with the proveedor waving a good-by. Portillo slipped over the edge of the slope as Juncal had done. In spite of the altitude and the weight they carried — one with the empty steamer trunk, in which a stick and a straw hat rattled lugubriously, the other two with the bag and gunny sacks — they chug-chugged steadily up the slope. We met the Argentine mail coming down — half a dozen poncho-clad burden-carriers who gave a cheery “Bueno’ Dias, senor!” and a grin and a “Ha’ yego” as they stumped away. We struck Carocoles — a roomful of blueprints, an engineer, more tinned meat, more coffee — and then, just at luncheon time, started the steep climb over the cuinbre. It was close to twelve thousand feet now and like climbing a Gothic roof. We took turns breaking trail, each man stepping into the footmarks of the man ahead, and every fifty yards or so the burden-carriers stopped and 189 THE OTHER AMERICANS leaned on their staffs puffing in a strange fashion like steamboat whistles blowing far aw’ay, while the adventurous mastiff which had followed us from Carocoles squatted in the snow, panting and grinning with the greatest good humor. We had been at it stead- ily for perhaps two hours when the leader pointed up the slope. “Cristo!” he said, and a quarter of a mile ahead we saw a figure standing out against the gray sky. It was the statue which the two nations set there w r hen they signed their peace agreement. It stands at the very summit of the pass, over which in 1817 the great San Martin marched his men into Chile to break the power of Spain, on the line between Chile and the Argentine. It is a statue of Christ, standing beside a cross, and on the pedestal two figures in low-relief, sitting back to back, point out over the tumbled sea of peaks and valleys to east and w T est. To the countries who set it there it means or it is meant to mean, an everlasting peace, and to us, too, it meant peace and that the hardest part of the journey was over, and we unslung burdens and rested there for a moment, in great cheerfulness, on the summit of the divide. Then we sat dow T n on our sheepskins and slid down into Argentina. It was done with great eclat. The chief bandit w r ent first, with my legs under his arms, as though we were school-boys together; the other two followed, the packs and the trunk piling snow before them like a plough, a proceeding calculated, one might fancy, to induce strange thoughts in the uneasy 190 ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS stick, umbrella, straw hat and other summer vanities locked therein. At the foot of the slope was Las Cue- vas, one day to be the Argentine end of the tunnel, and another engineer’s camp. Its chief was a Nor- wegian, the proveedor was a Frenchman with a long, delicately curly beard which he carefully sprayed with a perfume atomizer before we sat down to dinner that night, and the mechanical engineer was an American, who had put in machinery all over the world, and who averred that the altitude and the solitude got on his nerves so that a man might come into his room and take his watch from under his pillow before he could pull a gun, even though he “had been born in Boise City and seen a little life, too.” We had just settled once again that night what would have happened had the Japanese attacked Great Britain instead of Russia, when the telephone buzzed and Carocoles called across the summit that another white man was coming over and if I could wait until nine o’clock the next morning we might go down together. A man who could walk from Juncal to Carocoles in one day and feel like cross- ing the curnbre before nine o’clock the next morning was worth waiting for. He came, all right, a lithe, close-knit figure in riding breeches and blue serge coat, swinging down the slope in a fashion that showed he had gone ’cross country before. He had no baggage but a battered kit bag which contained little, apparently, but the trousers that matched the coat. With this outfit he was ready at five minutes’ notice for the town or “bush” and to 191 THE OTHER AMERICANS carry more was absurd. You could always buy clothes, he said, throw them away when you moved on and save enough on baggage charges to buy new stuff at the next place. He was an engineer — that is to say, he had knocked about the world from one construction camp to another — and it was quite true to South America, where a white man with mechanical sense is valuable, that this unbranded maverick, who might have been from his face, a professional bull-fighter or a bareback rider in a circus, was on his way to England to buy hydraulic machinery for some South Chilian mines. He was thirty, perhaps, with one of those sinister, yet not unattractive faces, which remind one of a street-dog whose head is nicked and scarred with many battles. He talked little, asked no questions and laughed, when he did laugh, harshly and rather mirthlessly. He had come from Australia originally, the stick he swung was made of the same wood of which the Fuegian Indians made their bows, and he could ask for bread or its substitute in the lingo of the Upper Nile, the Zulu country, the Transvaal and the Australian “bush.” He spoke of the remote corners of the earth as men do of shops at which this or that thing can best be bought. It was “good” down here in South America now — no use going to the Transvaal any more, nothing in Australia for him. Whatever answered to him for the rule-and-line man’s work or profession seemed something wholly casual, and to be picked up or caught like gold or trout. I was a fool to go back to the States by way of Rio — why in hell didn’t I take the New 192 ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS Zealand boat, touch at Cape Town and see Australia? You could buy a bicycle next to nothing these days and the roads were so good in Australia you could ride all over the place and see everything worth seeing for forty dollars American. We had got two mules, one of which the muleteer wanted to ride and one of which carried the baggage, but the Australian was, as the Los Cuevas proveedor observed, “un diablo a andar ,” and we swung down the slope like Indians. And in that thin air, in the fresh frostiness of morning, nothing less than ropes and levelled guns could have kept a live man on a mule. We had just crossed the roof of the continent, on our own legs and lungs, and the easy slope stretched below — down to the foothills, to the pampa far below, to Buenos Aires and the sea and the long up-trail to Europe and the States. Aconcagua heaved up on the left through a rift in the valley, vanishing into some gray swirling region of mist and snow. Fourteen kilometres brought us to the steaming baths of Puenta del Inca, where a winter- bound hotel keeper dug up a lunch from his stores and a bottle of the spicy Argentine claret to wash it down, and then on we pushed. Toward sundown, thanks to a telegram sent ahead from Puenta del Inca, a fresh mule came picking his way up the trail, and as darkness closed in the snow gave way and we began to rattle over dry stones. This was so exhilarating that when we reached the Paramillo de Las Vacas, where we had planned to spend the night, we saddened the mule- 193 T PI E OTHER AMERICANS driver and infuriated the mules by deciding to push on three more kilometres to Zanjon Amarillo to which the railroad was still open and where we might catch a repair train the next day. Night settled down. Every few hundred yards we had to make wide detours where slides had heaped the roads with rocks. Nothing but a continuous bombard- ment kept the mules moving at all. But the thought of getting back to a railroad, of a lodging for the night — to my disordered imagination even a bath seemed pos- sible — buoyed us on. A lone light presently sparkled down the canon. We reached the deserted station and unslung the packs. We had walked and ridden forty-three kilometres that day — descending to slightly below eight thousand feet — twenty-seven miles, most of it over a rough snow trail which was a succession of frozen muletracks a foot or two deep. We were just relaxing in that self-congratulatory coma which follows such an adventure when the mule-driver, who had dis- appeared toward the one light in the place, came back with the information that nobody would take us in. It could not be possible. Here were two travellers with money in their belts, here was an impoverished Andean station-master, light, fire, food, warmth — no, it must be impossible. I went myself. A woman opened the door, a scant two inches, no more. No, she had no food, no place for us to sleep, no blankets to lend us to sleep outside, not even a bite of bread nor a swallow of wine. No, nothing — absolutamente nada ! And the door closed. Apparently she was afraid of us. There were bandits in 194 ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS the Cordillera. And we were they. It seems amusing now but it didn’t then. It was a vast cosmic tragedy — two heroes poised here somewhere between two oceans, in a rocky desert on a winter night, lame, fagged, no food, no blankets, no one to appreciate their heroism. The mule man came at last to the rescue. A friend of his, he mumbled in his queer lingo, three kilometres farther down the canon, might take us in. Was it possible to propel our battered carcasses three kilometres more? Not weeping, but half-way to tears, as Peer Gynt would say, we packed the outraged mules again and started down the track. Of course one might have known that there would be trouble. You can’t fool all the mules all the time. I got down from mine finally after vainly trying to keep up with the other two by kicking a steady tattoo on his ribs and found that by walking behind him he also could be induced to walk. The instant I came up on a level with his head he stopped as though turned to stone. I had just worked out this system when a light twinkled in the distance, a dog barked, and through the darkness came a clatter of hoofs as the other mules were gal- vanized to life. At the sound my mule started as though shot out of a gun. I just managed to catch the pack behind the saddle and for a hundred yards we pursued this unequal race when, just as we were scrambling up a gully, I was struck in the chest by a cannon-ball. I dropped and rolled down the stones with as much abandon and realism as though I were being employed by a biograph agent to assist in manufactur- es THE OTHER AMERICANS ing a view of the siege of Port Arthur. Then all was still. The events of his past life filed in quick succession across the traveller’s brain, as he stared up at the un- sympathetic zenith. I was conscious of a smell of dust and shrubs, of stars twinkling far overhead. It seemed sad to die there, so far from home and friends, alone, cut off in one’s bloom under these cold Andean stars. Came a call — like a life-belt to a ship-wrecked mar- iner — “Patron! Patron /” It was our bandit, another of those charming professional bandits like the one who had slid downhill with me, leading my mule and want- ing to know if I was hurt. My wind returned. I was not dead, only a tooth-brush in an inside pocket was shattered beyond repair. And we rode on to our lodging for the night, the mule laughing lightly on the way. It was a stone hut like a little cave with a corrugated iron roof and a low door through which shone lamp and firelight. Our host stood in front of it, a mongrel, half-breed sort of fellow, keeping back his dogs. This, at least, should have been a regular bandit and this is what he did. “Bueno? noches, senor!” he said, and cursing back the dogs, he took me by the hand and led me into the hut as though I were a princess. Supper was already cooking on the stove for him and his friends, who, judging by the wine jug and the half-drained tumblers, were preparing to make a night of it ; but they wrapped their ponchos about them and withdrew to one side, wliile he, pressing his hands to his heart with abject 190 ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS apologies for his “ pobre casa,” made us sit down on the only bench. It was drawn up to a shelf-table against the wall on which the bloody head of a sheep, apparent- ly butchered that day, stared lugubriously out of fishy eyes. He brought out some of the unleavened pie- crusty bread and the spicy native wine, while his wife, cutting some pieces from a chicken which had been boiled, head and all, down to the very bill, put them on to broil. If he had been brought up on tales of Spanish hospitality, he could have done no more. Continually he apologized for his poor house, every move made near us was with a “con su permiso,” and when w r e tried to apologize for our intrusion and he heard that the Australian had once worked on the Carocoles division, he said that “to have work for Helmundson was worth four letters of introduction.” He was an Argentine and his wife was a Chilian, but he “knew the Ingleses” and thought they were a particularly fine gente. When we were done he led us with great ceremony into the little whitewashed, hermetically sealed room adjoining, containing the only bed he owned. He brought in a tumbler of water and set it on the box beside the bed. “Siempre bueno ,” he said, looking from the glass to us, and spreading out his hands. And then, when he had us there, two tired white men supposedly with money in their clothes and helpless before him and his friends, he unslung his own revolver, a big Colt’s 44, and with as much care as though he were sighting a cannon, laid it on the box beside the glass of water, with the muzzle pointed toward the door and ready to our hands. 197 THE OTHER AMERICANS We slept the sleep of the weary that night while the bandits, drinking each other’s saluds and wailing the melancholy cries with which the mountaineers drive their mules, sent strange storm-winds blowing through our dreams. The next morning we flagged a wrecking train, and with that intoxicating speed which only those who have experienced for a few days the tragic little- ness of a human’s machinery can understand, swept down to Uspallata. Here we must needs sleep on the station floor that night and wait the next day while the wrecking-crew shovelled avalanches off the track. We — the Australian and an Englishman whom I had met on a West Coast boat and never expected to see again — played bridge, shot at bottles, and vainly tried to lure a neighborhood condor into seeing distance by climbing half-way up a mountain, lying down on a bare rock and pretending to be dead, and, toward sundown, at last started down the ninety-two kilometres to Mendoza. In a tool-car, lit only by our cigarettes, we swayed round canons and over bridges, rolled down through the foothills, and at bedtime climbed out of the car into warm air and what might have been a Kansas county-seat, with a grocery store on the corner and long streets with elms arching over them, lit by electric lights. All our movements the next day were characterized by that exaggerated leisureliness, amounting almost to calculation, that dreamy benignity, which men who have been roughing it for a time exhibit when they find themselves once more lapped in the infinite 198 ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS comforts of civilization. Lazily we strolled across the sunshiny court to the bath-rooms and wal- lowed interminably in stone tubs as big as life- boats, dressed and breakfasted with exquisite care, and drifted about town with a sort of moon-struck purr. It was a comfortable little city of thirty thousand or so, with broad overhanging trees and a certain atmos- phere of the soil, of agricultural vigor and wholesome- ness, different from the average Latin-American town. Its main street was full of shops for harness and farm machinery, and in some of the stores machines were demonstrating as at a county fair. Capable-looking farmers watched them — doubtless from the vineyards round about — and among them were Italians in cordu- roys and with bright handkerchiefs around their necks, a husky, thick-necked breed, different from most of the immigrants who flock to our shores. Down this cobble- stoned street, which was wide, overhung with trees rather like our Northern elms, and named after the great San Martin, they had their corso, or carriage parade that afternoon. Victorias with bells on the tongue and two-wheeled country carts pounded over the cobble- stones at a brisk trot, so that the band, which stood in a circle on the broad sidewalk, was completely drowned out. But the happy farmers and Mendoza’s distin- guidas — vigorous, handsome young Chloes, dark-skinned and dark-eyed, with a shadow of down on the upper lip and painted and powdered regardless — didn’t mind this in the least and rattled enthusiastically on, beam- 199 THE OTHER AMERICANS ing from ear to ear. There was a certain provincial good humor, a rather exhilarating vulgarity about all this which seemed to belong to this country of princely cstancias, of cattle and wheat and wine, of grazing land, stretching flat as a sea from horizon to horizon — the pastoral echo of the raw, splendid metropolis of Buenos Aires. They were thriving, provident folk, these Mendozians, just such a first generation as that which gathered the money for those who are sowing the wind in Buenos Aires to-day. One of their endowment insurance organizations had just celebrated its fifth anniversary — the windows of its office on this same main street were hung with copies of a paper it had published con- taining reports of its progress and portraits of some of its sturdiest subscribers. On the middle page was a large family, all of whom, from the bull-necked father, with his stubby fingers set firmly on his knees, to the baby in arms, had paid up their premiums in advance and were star members of the “Caja International.” One enthusiastic subscriber had contributed a poem: International Strong Box, Institution powerful, Which advances ever gloriously In pursuit of its high ideal. Arriba los corazones! Kada de miedos pueriles! Si hoy nos contamos por miles Pronto seremos milliones! 200 ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS More in the real Mendoza manner was a dialogue between father and little son, which ran as follows : Nino: Papa, give me five centavos. Padre: Why do you want that, my hijito ? Nino: To buy caramels. Padre: Caramelas! Ah, what so wretched things are those caramelas! You will make yourself sick and destroy your teeth. Never eat caramels, my hijito. Nino: What shall I buy then? Padre: Nothing, my boy, because you don’t need anything. Why not put the five centavos which I give you every day to some better use? Nino: And what should I do with them, Papaito t Padre: Put them in a bank which I will tell you about. Then at the end of a month how many would you have in the little bank? Can you count that much? Nino: Certainly, papa; thirty days multiplied by five will give me one hundred and fifty centavos. Padre: Correct — a dollar and a half. That little sum deposited each month in the “Caja Internacional ” will bring you after twenty years a good pension for all your life. Nino: Dios mio! And must I wait twenty years to receive the pension? Padre: Yes — the time is long, but the sacrifice you make is insignificant, and besides, how old are you now? Nino: Ten years, little papa. Padre: Very well. When you are thirty and in the 201 THE OTHER AMERICANS very prime of life, will it not seem a great joy to receive every month a pension? Nino: You do not know, papa, how this idea pleases me! I’ll begin to-day to save all the centavos you and mamma give me, but — a doubt comes to me Padre: Speak, my son, what may that be? Nino: Tell me, papa, if rascals should steal all the money in the “Caja Internacional,” how could it pay the pensions it promises? Padre : That is impossible, for two reasons. First, because all the money destined to pay pensions is invested in great buildings, houses, land, etc., which produce large incomes, and which, as you can very well comprehend, no thief can steal or put in his pocket- book. And, secondly, I must tell you that those at the head of the “Caja Internacional” are all honorable men, who watch its interests tirelessly, and will permit no thefts nor irregularities. This seems to prove it and after the father explains how the pension may be obtained before twenty years by paying a larger premium, the thrifty youngster decides to take out two annuities. “So that I will receive two pensions!” he cries. “One ten years from now and the other in twenty. Oh, what happiness! Thanks, a thousand thanks, dear papa! I want no more caramels, nor sweets, nor toys of any kind!” Except for the sight of this quaint corso, whanging up and down the Boulevar San Martin, delighted with itself and drowning out the band, and of the theatre 202 ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS audience that night with half the young men in the parquet in their hats and a gentleman in a proscenium box, one hand on the hip, twirling in the other the last whisper of “el sport ingles,” a cane fashioned like a golf club, with a silver cleek for a handle — time was lacking to penetrate very deeply into what the Mendoza society editor called “our gran mundo Indeed, it appeared that, at the moment there was a slight slump in the activities of Mendoza’s gay world. “We have heard,” admitted the society editor, with that veiled and con- servative phraseology necessary in communities of moderate size, “a number of conversations tending to devise means to discover some variation in the pro- gramme of our distractions, in order that they may not be wholly and exclusively theatre-parties.” There had been, apparently, a lack of team-work. “It would always be easy,” said the society editor, “to find a solution in those moments of crisis which occasionally assault our social life when, in spite of the general desire, not a single fiesta is realized, if those remedies could be put in practice which the ladies, without troubling much about it, hit upon in their informal gatherings. “According to the ladies, they are more enthusiastic, and if they could act with all the freedom which the masculine sex uses, we should never have to lament those occasional seasons of boredom. They are often overheard to make vigorous recriminations against the young men. “On the other hand, the young men say that it is 203 THE OTHER AMERICANS not enough for them to plan attractive things, for they often find that when, with the best intentions, they have gone to a great deal of trouble and work, they are obliged to abandon the whole thing, owing to insur- mountable obstacles. “The fact is,” concludes the editor, “the blame is on both sides. Let us hope that the good intentions now active may succeed in bringing some new element into the distracciones de nuestro gran mundo .” From this metropolis of the foothills, the biweekly express — a compartment sleeping-car, what looked like an ordinary Pullman, several day-coaches and a dining- car — like an overland train at home except for the unfamiliar width necessitated by the broad trans- continental gauge — hurried us away the next evening toward Buenos Aires. All night we rode and the next morning were whirling eastward at fifty miles an hour across the level pampa. It was raining, all the earth was saturated and hung with mist, and under this mist, although the last week in July, and midwinter, the cattle were still grazing on “green feed.” The prairie was level as a summer sea — once the track was laid for two hundred miles without a curve, as straight as a line ruled across a sheet of paper — from horizon to horizon only grass and cattle and more cattle and more grass. From time to time appeared a station, with shabby buildings clumped round about, a stockade, a grain elevator perhaps, a few bronzed cattlemen in ponchos, boots covered with pasty mud. Nothing else broke the level earth. And after the West Coast 204 ACROSS THE CORDILLERAS deserts, the choked and drowsy jungles of the North, these infinite open stretches, with their brown armies of long-horned steers, unrolling, mile after mile and hour after hour, saturated with moisture, fertile, en- veloped in mists, seemed limitless as a sea, suggested a potentiality and fecundity incalculable. Darkness shut down on the prairie, there came more frequent stations, suburbs at last, then the twinkling extent of the city. A hotel courier in uniform put me into a cab, the cab rolled quietly off to the hotel over asphalt streets glistening under arc lamps and dripping with rain. A hall-boy, and a chamber-maid in neat black and white, led the way to my room and turned on the lights. It was extremely magnificent. The lamps, shaded in rose-colored silk, suffused in a mellow 7 luxuriance the brass bedstead with its counterpane of silk and down-quilt folded at the foot, the window curtains of heavy rose-colored silk, the polite writing- desk with its candle, wax, seal, and carefully arranged note paper bearing the monogram of the house. The major-domo knocked to get Senor’s name and to ask if he had dined. The luggage followed and with it the freshly starched maid, carrying one of the gunny- sacks, still a trifle damp and smelly from the mountain snows. She held it as far as she could at arm’s length, dropped it in a corner and tripped out with lifted eye- brows. It began to be a little lonesome ; gone were the barbarous inns of the provinces where one sent the half- breed mozos away laughing, with a good-natured push on the head. I ventured to the door and peered down 205 THE OTHER AMERICANS into the inner court. The guests had mostly finished their dinners and were taking their coffee there. There were a German father and mother and their tall son, one unmistakable American female voice, the inevitable Britishers. All were in evening clothes, from all ema- nated the tourist’svaguelyirritatingairof ignorance and self-complacency. Dinner was still being served in the room adjoining, the orchestra feverishly playing, and from there and up from the inner court rose a composite breath, of heat, the odor of food, wine, smoke and per- fume, of flowing, aimless talk, the unmistakable breath of a city hotel, of sophisticated wealth and worldliness. It was a long, long way to Las Cuevas and the Cumbre and Portillo, and the walk downhill that frosty morn- ing. We had stepped across the continent indeed, and back into the world again. 206 CHAPTER XII THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS As we were walking home one night along the Alameda in Santiago, I suggested to the young English engineer, whom I had just met at dinner, that after his six months in the mines it must seem good to get back to town again. He agreed that it did, but added that after all there wasn’t much in Santiago for a man like him. He had been buried in a wilderness of snow and rocks, without even a Spanish newspaper to give him a whisper from the world, and he came down from the mountains with emotions not unlike those of a ravening wolf who suddenly finds himself approaching a well- nourished lamb-chop. And he heaved a great sigh and asked if I knew Buenos Aires. “Buenos Aires!” he repeated, in that fond enthus- iasm which overtakes men who have dined pleasantly and are walking home under the stars together, and as this seemed the proper time for that banality, I said that I supposed that that was the Paris of South America. “Paris!” he cried, “Why, man! There’s more life in a minute in Buenos Aires than — why, you talk about Paris — Buenos Aires is Paris given a kick and told to wake up, that’s what Buenos Aires is!” 207 THE OTHER AMERICANS He meant, I suppose, not that Buenos Aires is the second Latin city in the world; not its schools and hospitals and well-kept streets, its convenient trolley- lines and excellent newspapers; not the wheat and cattle that pour thence from the Argentine pampa to help feed the European cities — but that it supplied with particular effectiveness the needs of a voracious young Saxon who had been spending six hard months in the frozen Andes, trying to keep a lot of Chilian rotos from drinking and knifing each other to death. He could see, I dare say, over the trees of that quiet Ala- meda, beyond the Andean wall which shut in our little Chilian world, the Jockey Club “Hipodromo” on a Sunday afternoon; the carriage parade afterward in the Avenida Sarmiento, moving four rows deep, and the horsetail helmets and cuirasses of the mounted police shining in the sun ; the victorias and shimmering parasols flowing through the Recoleta, or the Calle Florida ablaze with lights; the “Sportsman” at din- ner time, crowded with men, with a band booming in the balcony, and on the wall biograph pictures of steeple-chasers and Oriental dancers; theatres, the opera, possibly some such sailor’s paradise as that vast steely blue barn of a Casino, with its art nouveau nymphs and sizzling arc lamps, where French singers, Spanish dancers, German acrobats and English music- hall performers follow one another in dizzj r profusion, and a great mob smokes and shouts its comments in every language under the sun. It is a thumping, cheerful sort of place, this Casino — 208 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS about what our Carnegie Music Hall might be if it were turned into a Folies-Bergere. The Five Broadway Girls appeared the night I was there. They wore blonde wigs, to show that they were English, and sang in a strange, half-Cockney dialect, not quite like any- thing else ever heard on sea or land. For an encore one of them threw on a black velvet princesse gown and while the others, aided by parasols and old-fashioned hoop-skirts, danced a comic background, she paraded along the footlights — “ce qui fait valoir des lignes plutbt appetissantes,” as the reporter of “La Divette” put it in his review that week, “Je vous dis que c’est a voir” — and panted for an explanation of why it was that they called her a Gibson Girl. She did not make a very good Gibson Girl, but she looked well in her black dress, nevertheless, and the audience liked it exceedingly. And as she undulated along the footlights to their applause, it struck me that this — to have one’s drawings sung about by a lady in a blonde wig, sandwiched in between a Neapolitan cantante and a troupe of inter- national wrestlers, thirty-four degrees south of the equator before an audience that yelled its approval in three or four languages was what a mere North American artist might well call fame. Or he even may have seen, beyond those snow}'-, silent Andes, the garish front of the Royal, which lies round the corner from the Casino and just across from the Opera, so that the ninas and their richly uphol- stered mammas may wonder at its lithographs and watch the strange men drifting thither as their carriages 209 THE OTHER AMERICANS wait in line. The orators tell you that South America is the future home of the Latin races, as North America will be the home of the Saxons. In such a place as the Royal, and in music halls like it on the East Coast, one feels as though the hard law of competition had already got in its work and driven hither all the spangled ladies who were unable to keep an engagement in Paris or Naples or Madrid, and whose only art is the ability to articulate a few songs and keep a bodice on while continually giving the impression that it is about to fall off. On the little stage of the Royal they follow one another in melancholy procession, each in the same kind of strapless bodice and stiff, spangle-encrusted skirt, and with the same wriggling of powdered shoul- ders and pressing of hands to the heart, rattle off French songs that all sound exactly alike. When they can sing a few words in broken English or German, an international or cosmopolita is added to their names. The audience smokes and stares, cynical, indifferent, scarcely taking the trouble to applaud, and as their turns are finished they resume street clothes and re- turn to the boxes that encircle the parquet, there to survey critically, occasionally even to applaud, those who come after and now and then to smile at one another across the smoky horseshoe in their curious camaraderie. You will see them again on the French liner going north, in steamer chairs billed to Sao Paulo or Rio, veiled from the ocean sunshine w r ith the solici- tude of the real artiste and treated with much half- shy, half-jocular attention by the younger officers. 210 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS Here in the metropolis they make almost a little half- world, which drives with the others at Palermo, or in the late afternoon through Florida Street, and has its own little paper in which the charms of Suzanne and Lucy and Blondine and Parisette — “triple extrait de chic et de chair, fleuri sur Vasphalte de la grande ville ” — are analyzed with intimate enthusiasm, and their go- ings and comings solemnly chronicled. Of course there are other things in Buenos Aires. There are, for instance, over a million busy people to a majority of whom, probably all this means as little as Broadway, in its narrower sense, means to the greater part of New York. And there is the country itself, from which, more or less directly, these people live and of which it is the hub and heart, in a way that no North American city begins to be; not impassable mountain ranges nor frosty plateau nor miasmic jungle, but level, fertile prairie like Kansas and Nebraska, webbed with railroads and covered with wheat-fields and cattle. Argentina is the fourth wheat-producing country — in a good year it sends as much to Europe as is sometimes sent from the United States — and its vast pampa and a climate which, although temperate, provides “green” feed all the year round, makes it one of our strong rivals in supplying meat to Europe. Some one hundred and fifty million bushels of wheat were raised on these plains in 1906. To Europe from the pampa ranches that year went nearly 3,000,000 sheep and over 2,000,000 quarters of beef, in the form of frozen or chilled meat, in addition to some seven 211 THE OTHER AMERICANS thousand tons of "jerked” beef, and some forty thousand sheep and cattle shipped on the hoof. And practically all of the resulting commerce flows to and from the Buenos Aires docks. They are trim, these docks, masonry basins strung with electric cranes as thick as shade trees on a street. Well over two thousand ocean-going vessels arrive in the year. And not even New York’s wharves, with their far vaster commerce, give such a picture of the vivid bustle and infinite whispering of the sea. For at home, as you ride down West Street, for instance, all you see is a big bow now and then heaving up above the dock-shed and each looks much like another, whether the ship be of seven or twenty thousand tons. But here they stretch out in all their broadside length, with no sheds set between, funnel behind funnel, white bridge towering behind white bridge, as far as one can see, as though very kindly arranged by some municipal Mr. Brangwyn. And one walks along this wonderful street of nations, looking into holds and cabins and forecastle ports as into so many shop windows. Here are Royal Mails from England — the aristocrats of these seas, which swim up and down across the tropics with music and folks dressing for dinner; the big German "Cap” boats — Cap Ortegal, Cap Frio and the rest; the French and Spanish and Italian liners which bring down champagne and aperitifs and opera companies and automobiles, and steerages packed with immigrants from Genoa and Marseilles and Barcelona and Bor- 212 Cranes used in loading and unloading ships at the Buenos Aires docks. One of the basins in the Buenos Aires docks. THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS deaux. One moment the electric cranes are swinging overhead steel bridges in bolted sections out of a New- castle freighter and you listen to Cockney and Scotch, the next you step onto a little island, magically detached from Italy or Spain, or into the smell of Brazilian coffee just from Santos, or of a river boat full of oranges just come down the Parana from Paraguay. These oranges are from the very trees, like enough, which the Dictator Lopez made his people plant when they were fighting the combined armies of Brazil and Uruguay and Argentina. They fought as though they were defending the sacredest principle on earth instead of merely laying down their lives for a gifted young man who had a European education, a French mistress and the idea that he was another Napoleon. For five years they fought until it was almost literally true that there were no men left in Paraguay and nothing in the country but women and children and oranges. The women cultivated these to keep their children alive and it was they and the orange trees which saved Paraguay and put it on its feet. At the granaries, taking in cat- tle or beef, are ships with such names as Highland Laddie, Beacon Grange, Tremaine, and Wistow Hall — you can fairly hear their winch engines singing— “ The West Wind called: — ‘In squadrons the thoughtless galleons fly> ‘ That bear the wheat and cattle lest street-bred people die Here’s Admiral Gallendraza de Lamouraix, stout Baron Berger of Antwerp, Jose Gallart of Barcelona 213 THE OTHER AMERICANS with the Spanish arms on his funnel and flying the yellow and red of Spain — ships and flags from all the seven seas, indeed, except from home. There are, as I said, many other things. There are suburbs, where, of a Sunday morning, with bells ringing from the little ivy-covered English church and little girls tripping to Sunday-school in their best ribbons and freshly starched dresses, you might almost be in England. It seems a long way to Arequipa and La Paz and the mouldering old cathedrals of Peru. One may go out to Hurlingham, and, surrounded by English- speaking people, play tennis and golf and polo, even fol- low the hounds; or up to Tigre, on the river, and sail or paddle or watch an eight-oared crew. There is a very superior Zoo. A baby elephant was there when I was in Buenos Aires, and as he was the first elephant who could claim to be an Argentine, he was very im- portant indeed. His growth and behavior were com- mented on at length in the newspapers, and every sunny afternoon you might see the Hindoo temple and little park in w T hich he and his parents lived, surrounded by critical loungers and children and nurses, with caps and long veils such as French nurses wear. As far as merely material things of South American cities go, Buenos Aires gathers to itself most of the superla- tives. Lima is a little old Spanish town in compari- son, Rio Janeiro, v r ith all its beauty, a city of the tropics w’ith all that implies of drowsiness and lethar- gy. Many little marks of the great city it has — hurry- ing uncurious cnrwds, each unit knowing its own place 214 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS and moving in its orbit; tired little milliner’s maids with their hat-boxes ; quiet regions of wealth, where, oc- casionally, from mysterious interiors, pale men-servants in livery emerge at the servants’ entrance to blink moodily at the bright sunshine. There are downtown restaurants with chops and steaks in the windows, be- ginning actually to have the time-worn, comfortable look and the smell of chop-houses at home. Even the motormen look worried. Every great city has, however, above these common phenomena, a certain overtone, generally caught by outsiders, often inaudible to its own people. And the Buenos Aires that one hears about in other corners of the world, from the man one meets in the steamship smoking-room, the young naval officer who touched there on his first foreign cruise, is always this town of strident pleasure, this Paris told to look alive. Such descriptions may not connote very profound nor ap- preciative observation, but they are true, as far as they go, to that which specially differentiates the metropolis from other South American capitals. For here is what might be were a million mixed Latins lifted bodily oversea, and, retaining all their love of pleasure and display, freed from the intangible dusty weights of an ancient civilization, from the languors of tropical Rio, from the isolation which has kept Lima a city of old Spain, set down in a temperate climate and allowed to build a town to suit themselves. The city of Good Airs was founded nearly four centuries ago, but the Buenos Aires of to-day is as new as Chicago. Here, THE OTHER AMERICANS in the Avenida de Mayo, is a Parisian boulevard, with its lamps, trees, newspapers kiosks — “Le Rire” hang- ing beside “Caras y Caretas” — but where are the boulevardiers ? Here is the musical old tongue of Spain, but the barred windows and fortressed walls and musty cathedrals are long since overgrown and forgotten in a jumble of French facades and art nouveau. Of the six million people which Argentina is estimated to contain, probably half were foreign born. Society, in the narrower sense, is supposed to be limited to some sixty families, but there is no such aristocracy of blood as there is in Spanish Peru, no such approximation to a national literature and music as in Portuguese Brazil. People came to Argentina to make money and they made it, and having done that they flock to the capital to spend it as pleasantly as they can. Comparatively speaking, they have the air and tastes of the new-rich ; that solemn absorption in cutting a dash and those rather ingenuous barbarisms, which the French sum up in their word rastaqouere, are nowhere better il- lustrated than by the rich young Argentines who spend their summers in Europe. It was a Frenchman, indeed, who coined the word rastopolis to suggest to his friends at home his first impressions of Buenos Aires. There is something almost hypnotic in the effect on the Bonarenses of such words as gran, lujo, inmenso. The races are always that gran reunion sportiva, every bride of a well-known family is one of nuestras bellezas mas renombradas; when you go to a party you enter al inmenso hall and climb la gran 216 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS escalera and your hostess is certain to be one of our lujosas senoras. And yet, in spite of all this solemn affectation and display one never quite misses feeling the great, open, wholesome pampa just beyond the city roofs. On the way from the bank to the steamship office, only a step from the Stock Exchange, you walk through Tattersall’s, between rows of Durhams and Herefords, with pedigrees and prizes hanging on the doors of their pens, and Cockney grooms rubbing them down and hissing between their teeth. In more tropical South America, milk, unless safely boiled, is almost unknown ; here, tiled dairy lunches are scattered all over town and people drop in for the little caramel slabs of dulce de leche, just as they spend pennies for slot-machine chocolate at home. There is always good roast beef and steaks, good cream and butter, and the pampa partridges are as cheap as our ordinary chicken. In the busy street with its pastry shops and pelu- querias you can almost imagine that you smell the wind blowing in from the open range ; beyond the smoke and glare of the music hall, freshening and transmuting it, lies always the vision of the pampa, endlessly rich, moist, fertile, immeasurable. And all these lacquered papas and richly upholstered mammas become rather whole- some farmers or shop-keepers, who have made a quick clean-up of it and are now having their holiday. At their best, they are really quite splendid, at the worst theirs is an amusing and rather exhilarating vulgarity. Nothing so well gathers up and visualizes the vari- 217 THE OTHER AMERICANS ous ingredients of this individuality as the Jockey Club races and the carriage parade in the Avenida Sarmiento afterward on a bright Sunday afternoon. It is in character that the Jockey Club should be the most widely known social organization of Buenos Aires. The exclusive club is, of course, the “Circulo de Armas,” or “Circulo,” as it is generally called. Only native Argentinians may belong to it and there, to-day, is effected the political manoeuvre of which you read in papers next week or next month. The Jockey Club is where the stranger is put up, its marble entrance stairs and statue of Diana, its luxurious baths and fencing rooms are town show-places, and when Mr. Root came, for instance, it was the Jockey Club and not a club with a commercial or political name which naturally prepared to give the great ball. Its race-track is in Palermo, at the end of the city’s politest avenue, and thither the city pours on a great day, much as a purely Spanish population would pour toward a bull fight. . . . “From an early hour the Avenida Alvear pre- sented a more than ever animated overture to that great spectacle which unrolled itself in the Hipo- dromo. In the brilliant sun of an afternoon, golden and gentle, a torrent of vehicles, interminable, rum- bling, discharged themselves into the course, covering the Avenue and all its length with movement, reflec- tions anti noise. A dull, incessant rumbling — broken only by the crack of whips and the hoarse and nervous snorting of automobiles, ravenously pushing their im- pertinent snouts in between the multitude of carriages 21J» THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS — vibrated for hours under a cloud of dust raised and spread by the steady stream of vehicles which, fighting for their places, arrived and spread out in kaleidoscopic movement, full of vibrations and prismatic reflections” — thus the gifted cronista of “El Diario,” in a rolling Castilian which these jerky words can but faintly sug- gest, the day Mr. Root was there. I watched the pro- cession that afternoon, at the turn where the Avenida Alvear curves into the Recoleta, until the lancers and cuirassiers came galloping down the asphalt clearing the way. They poured by at a quick trot — innumer- able young men twirling upward the eternal black moustache ; victorias with silver bells, fighting the way with rickety old hired hacks bearing tourists or on- shore sailors; many family chariots — Papa and Mam- ma, overdressed and rather pudgy, facing them, the two little girls, sitting very straight, like expensive dolls, their little legs, bare above half-stockings, doubled under the seat as stiff as any coachman’s. . . . “All Buenos Aires poured toward the Hipo- dromo. Above this swift and restless caravan the spirit of the fiesta floated and laughed in an atmosphere gilded by the autumnal sun. It was a lavish spectacle of con- tentment, of spirits absorbed for the moment in the coming sport — regulars eager to try their palpitos, simple-minded folk who carried the “sure-thing” safely tucked away in their pockets. Dreamers of for- tune, these, lulled by the music of the trot. And out of the vague intonation of all this multitude there came, here and there, like a breath of fresh air, the glimpses 219 THE OTHER AMERICANS fluttering, elegant, of luxurious carriages carrying radiantly dressed ladies, the luminous note of undu- lating ribbons and plumes standing out like a spring- like, feminine bouquet against the black mass of those absorbed by the passion of sport. . . . ” During the races the carriages lined up along the curb facing the middle of the street, for blocks, with mounted police at intervals like cavalry officers. The instant the races were over this stiff line kaleidoscoped again and everybody pelted away toward the Avenida Sarmiento, there to file round and round between the palms and indulge that passion for staring which is one of the common heritages of city crowds. At rare intervals in this “Corso” passed a family — in black, generally, — with faces fashioned after the same patri- cian model, marvellously white skin, vivid black hair, delicate eyebrows and great dark eyes. There is an expression in such faces which reminds one grotesquely of a bloodhound, with his dome-shaped head and drooping melancholy eyes; sad faces — even the little girls with their quaintly barbarous tiny diamond ear- rings and the little boys in patent-leather sailor hats — as if sorrowing, perhaps, for the forgotten days of Spain. More often, however, it was but a procession of expensive human upholstery — smug fathers, con- tented-looking matrons, like Italian orange-women fallen into a fortune, crowding four lines deep, in a sort of splendid chaos. And the young engineer in from the “bush” and the steamship’s under-officers, roaming hungrily about in their hired victorias, drink 220 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS this in, too, and tell you afterward — and with some truth — that there is nothing like it in the world. Before Buenos Aires covered as much ground as it does to-day, the Calle Florida, now the polite down- town shopping street, was the scene of the carriage parade and, with characteristic conservatism — as if in New York, carriages should go down from Central Park at twilight and file solemnly through Twenty- third Street — the parade ends in this business street. It is only wide enough for two rows of carriages, so close together that the occupants might almost shake hands with one another or with the spectators on the sidewalk, and when festooned with lights, as it was when Mr. Root was there, it glares and sparkles like a ball-room. And in this glare, from the lights overhead, from milliners’ and pastry cooks’ windows, the strange procession flows jerkily by — powdery old ladies, blinking in the shelter of their broughams, tourists and sailors, quiet mothers with their children, the chanteuses from the music halls lolling back in their victorias and lavishing smiles. The young men smile back, with cynical good humor, twirling their black moustaches the while, and the line flows on past the Grand Hotel, the Jockey Club, past the “Sportsman” and into the Avenida again, round and round, till dinner time comes, and it melts away. This witching hour having arrived, what vague pre- monitory rays of the evening’s possibilities begin to flash up from behind the imminent horizon of food? Imagine yourself stepping to the newspaper kiosk at 221 THE OTHER AMERICANS the corner of Florida Street and the Avenida and there running an eye down the column of theatre announcements. First of all, of course, is the opera, which means, socially, just what it does at home, ex- cept that “grand” opera, comes in the south-equatorial winter — that is to say, in July and August. German music is not much enjoyed, but all the familiar Italian and French operas are given, and the Italian companies generally contain at least a few thrifty singers who are to be heard in New York a few months later on. The house is not so large as our Metropolitan, and the spectacle not so much “grand” as it is pretty — linda and preciosa, as the South Americans say. Every- thing, even to the scene-shifters in their white stockings and powdered wigs, seems arranged to make a neat and well-ordered picture. The two lower tiers of boxes which enclose the parquet in *he conti- nental fashion, leaving no place for “standees,” are adorned by the members of the Families. The third tier is one black-and-w’hite horseshoe of men; the fourth, w 7 omen, most of whom are in street dress, and in the balcony above are herded the encore fiends, hissers and general trouble-makers. The boxes of the two lower tiers are shallower and more open than those in the Metropolitan and the ladies who seem younger than our veteran houris, sit close together, much as though they w T ere in the front row of the balcony. All seem to be acquainted, the red and gold of the walls enriches this vivacious horseshoe like the hang- ings behind a portrait, and there is about the whole 222 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS something at once brilliant and all-in-the-family which is charming to see. After the opera season is over, and often during it, less ambitious opera may be heard at various theatres. The San Martin, for instance, announces the opening to-morrow evening of its season of French opera- comique; in another fortnight the Teatro Marconi will have an Italian company in a repertoire of thirty operas; the Opera itself is presently to be turned over to a George Edwardes’ company for twenty per- formances of musical comedy. Here, too, on Sunday evening next, the Italian actress, Tina di Lorenzo, begins her Buenos Aires engagement with “Magda.” To-night, at the Odeon Mme. Suzanne Despres, with Mme. Larparcerie-Richepin and a Paris company play “Denise”; at the Politeama Argentino — a sort of Hammerstein’s — Fregoli, the lightning-change man, gives his farewell performance; at the Teatro Nacio- nal, Sehor Podesta’s Argentine company presents sev- eral one-act Argentine plays, and so on down a list in- cluding Italian farce, Spanish zarzuelas, a boy musical- prodigy at Prince George’s Hall, and even an indoor circus at the Coliseo Argentino of Mr. Frank Brown. A great fuss is being made, you will observe, over the coming visit of Otero. This interesting lady had just sailed when I was in Buenos Aires, and on all the bill-boards, in gigantic handwriting, was scrawled the impressive sentence: “ Je suis partie avec ma compagnie — Otero.” When her ship touched at Teneriffe this was changed to “J’arri- 223 THE OTHER AMERICANS verai le vingt-trois — Otero,” and when she reached Montevideo, a night’s journey from the metropolis, all the blank walls and bill-boards bore, above her signa- ture, the single orphic word “ Demain!” I was told afterward that in spite of her inspired press-agent la bella Otero’s visit fell quite flat. It is, indeed, not a public altogether easy to please. It is satisfied with crude “productions,” differing from what is demanded in London or New York just as a “Merchant of Venice” put on by Novelli differs from that put on by Mr. Sothern. But they have a critical instinct common to Latins, the great continental artists are as likely to visit the Argentine as the States, and many who do not come to America at all, but are of all but the first rank in their own country, visit Buenos Aires regularly and present European suc- cesses long before they are seen in New York. Here in Buenos Aires, South American literariness is stiffened and sharpened by a modern tendency toward realism and the scientific point of view. It shows in criticism as well as in political editorials. “When” — to quote a typical comment which I ran across in the “Nacion” one day — “the author busies himself in con- structing artificial decorations, fanciful and false, whose unreality no one can explain, it is impossible to build anything solid and durable. You will have precious miniatures, painstaking engravings which will delight the quintessential taste of dilettantes, but never those great pieces of work which compel universal admiration. In the literature of our country there are 224 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS too many of these works of ephemeral brilliance and circumscribed merit. And we shall presently demon- strate why the time has come. ...” After encountering a point of view so sane and un- Caribbean, it was especially interesting to see a play written by a South American on a South American subject — the four-act drama “Chacabuco” by Alberto del Solar — and to read what the reviewers said about it the next morning. Chacabuco was a decisive battle in the war for independence. It was not a very good play, but no worse than our own military dramas, and by changing Chacabuco to Lexington and the Andes to New England farms, it could, I dare say, be transferred to Broadway with average success. The curtain rose on an Andean camp, the snowy Cor- dilleras in the background, to the right, soldiers sitting round a fire, to the left women working over clothing and bandages and a militant priest hammering on an anvil. There were bugle calls and troops marching across the back-drop, and the scene ended with a really admirable illusion of a vista of lighted tents. In the second and third acts, showing interiors in Santiago, the wicked Royalist general discovered papers show- ing that the hero and the heroine had been communi- cating with General San Martin and he threw the two into prison. A word from the lady would have set them both free, but she behaved as a heroine should, and in the last act Chacabuco was fought off stage and the patriot army rushed in just in time to rescue the two lovers, while the sun of a new day rose jerkily up 225 THE OTHER AMERICANS the back-drop. There were clouds, too, breaking away one after another, and even a tiny, marching army silhouetted against them and moving across the horizon like a child’s train of cars. The piece was such a straight appeal to gallery patriotism that the Latin- American of our popular misconception would have swallowed it with unthinking avidity, yet it was not so received either by the audience or the critics next day. “According,” said the “Prensa,” “ to the assertions of the author and the programme, this is an historical drama. Properly speaking, it is a love story, which unrolls across a long series of episodes of the campaign fought by the arm)’ of the Andes. Chacabuco suggests mighty forces. It is a focus of martial glory which is lit from afar, from very far, by the principal episode of this drama of Del Solar. It would be very hard to tell the story, following all the threads from the first to the fourth act, because the anecdote, the basis of any dra- matic work, has been sacrificed to the exigencies of a brilliant mise en scene. As an historical drama, indeed, it doesn’t exist, and the solemn matron of history has only lent a few trifles of her household furniture which are juggled into those polychromatic 'effects’ which satisfy the easy public. . . . All of the first act, with the exception of the costumes and scenery, was a la- mentable reduction of men and things. The appear- ance of San Martin marching with a regular step as if he were behind a hearse had no logical explanation nor truth to history. Frankly, it was a scene of mario- 226 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS nettes, unnecessary to the principal anecdote, which, reduced to its proper proportions and worked out, might, with its valiant, persecuted hero and its Portia- like heroine, serve as the basis of a work of poetry and real dramatic dignity. ...” It was on one of these evenings — the Hon. Elihu Root having arrived that afternoon — that a perform- ance, far more brilliant than those of the theatre, was played in the streets by the Bonarenses themselves. What that splendid junket meant to South Americans — not to countries in the abstract but the men inside the dress uniforms and under the top hats, and to their wives and sisters and daughters — what an all-pervading thing it was for weeks and weeks — I doubt if even Mr. Root himself could appreciate, wafted, as he was, from capital to capital, with bands playing, lancers clatter- ing in front and behind down endless vistas of oratory and champagne. It was those of us who happened to be travelling in the other direction, who saw this side, who started where he was to finish, and all the way along saw, so to speak, the furniture being dusted and the pies going into the oven, and heard the rumble of his coming from afar. What streets were paved, buildings and ball dresses rushed to completion; what armies of dress-makers, livery men, florists, hair- dressers, and pastry cooks might date their calendars from the year El Ministro norte americano came to town! Many weeks before Mr. Root was expected in Peru or Colombia, in the littlest papers of little coast towns THE OTHER AMERICANS where the steamers stop to lighter a few tons of freight, quaint sheets with their few sentences of cable news, each artfully distributed under a great black head spelling the name of the country from which it came — Inglaterra, Rusia, Estados Unidos, Italia and the rest — you could find each day three things. There was a paragraph about the Duma — for all that it gave of the conditions in Russia that ill-starred body might have been some strange bird; one equally vague, about the carnes conservadas and the troubles at home over pre- served beef, and then, always, the last word about Mr. Root. Who would accompany him, who would meet him, when he would probably come; new furniture from France had been ordered for his quarters in Rio, the Minister of So-and-So was planning a grand ball in his honor in Santiago — down through Mexico on the Galveston cable, up from Chile and Argentina, half- way round the world by way of Europe, these little bits of gossip came sometimes almost the only whisper from the big outside world. In Santiago, more than a month before Mr. Root was expected, one of the afternoon papers bore on its front page this advertisement : CON OCASION DEL GRAN BAILE EN HONOR DE MR. ROOT A las distinguidas senoras y senoritas de Santiago And the distinguished matrons and young ladies were then advised that at a certain shop in Balmaceda THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS Street were laces — real Brussels, point, duchess, prin- cess, etc., acquired under conditions marvellously ad- vantageous, and now to be disposed of at prices cheap beyond belief — “ inverisimilmente bajos!” A fortnight later, in Buenos Aires, they were worry- ing lest — even though the hair-dressers desired by the elite worked all the day preceding — half the ladies should not reach the costume ball before four o’clock in the morning. Furniture and hardware men had their auctions, remates YanJcis; haberdashers, helped by the fact that laundries and dry-cleaners’ shops would be closed during the three days’ fiesta, stripped their shelves of shirts and gloves. The bills brought in to the various governments, the rivers of free cham- pagne, the handful of cigars intended to blaze on the altar of international brotherhood slipped into inside pockets in the quiet of the supper-room while the waiters looked the other way and the strains of “Quand l’Amour Meurt” sighed through the palms! But enough — let’s away quickly, ere we’re below stairs with the muckrakers who have not yet descended on this happy continent. Mr. Root came to Buenos Aires from Montevideo, which is the capital of Uruguay, and just across the Plata River — at this point of its huge mouth a whole night’s journey away. Montevideo might almost be called the Brooklyn of Buenos Aires. It has three hun- dred thousand people and the prettiest women prob- ably in all South America, but it is a drowsy, old- fashioned place, overshadowed by the bigger, showier, 229 THE OTHER AMERICANS metropolis. Montevideo took its distinguished guest very seriously — with, indeed, an almost touching earnestness and awe. For days before he came you could read, posted by the committee of reception on fences and bare walls with all the paternal zeal of a monarch exhorting his subjects, the following: EXHORTACION AL PUEBLO The Committee of Reception to Mr. Elihu Root exhorts the people of Montevideo to embody in the most solemn and eloquent manner possible their part of the tribute of homage which will be paid to this eminent statesman at the time of his arrival in our country. Gracefully to receive such an illustrious guest it is necessary to strike a lofty note of urbanity, for which, the Committee is persuaded, it may safely rely on the people of Montevideo. If such behavior constitutes in itself an expressive demonstra- tion of culture, it ought to manifest itself with special force when our guest is one who not only represents a great nation, which, etc., etc. “If we are not bound by the affinities of race and traditions to the republic of the North,” the proc- lamation continued, in the equivalent of about half a column of one of our newspapers, “if our pasts have not been common nor our traditions and idiosyncrasies the same, the time has now come to join forces for the common good, to make the sentiment of fra- ternity the alma mater of our ideals, to harmonize the national spirit of each of the countries with the American spirit of all, and thus,” etc., etc. And at 230 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS the end the populace was invited to be at the dock when Mr. Root arrived, to help in welcoming him. “I confess,” said the correspondent of “El Dia,” writing from Rio the night that Mr. Root made his speech to the conference, “that to-night, for the first time, I have felt germinating in my spirit a new pride: that of being American. And the conscious- ness of superiority, of dignity and of strength, which comes from this sentiment and which constitutes one of the greatest pleasures [“ una de las mas grandes voluptuosidades ’ ’] that I have ever experienced, is due to the words of Mr. Root. . . .” Already the papers of Montevideo — huge sheets like blankets when unfolded — were filled with stories of Root and Roosevelt and the States. Our politics, the natural history of the trusts, and our literature were described and interpreted. One read with interest of “Enriqueta Beecher Stowe” and “La cabana del tlo Tom,” of Prescott and Poe and Irving, Enrique Wads- worth Longfellow and Guillermo Cullen Dregant! “In contrast to what one meets with in European litera- ture,” said the kindly reviewer, “where all is pessimism, disillusionment, and sorrow, the literature of North America is alive with optimism; it views life good- naturedly, tenderly, affectionately, as if it had confi- dence in the future of humanity. Its authors, with rare exceptions, are not bizarre and violent, they pos- sess the rare virtue of giving delight, of soothing and comforting the mind of the reader— which is, with- out doubt, a sign of mental superiority.” 231 THE OTHER AMERICANS The biographies of Mr. Root, El gran canciller amerieano, exhibited him and his family on foot and on horseback, even contained those inevitable apoc- ryphal anecdotes generally found in obituaries of the great. One was told how Root had left home for New York to seek his fortune as a lawyer. His father desired to give him letters of introduction to influential friends, but the young man spurned them. “I’ll look out for myself,” said he. “I’ll make my own friends without help from my family. I want to find out whether I’m a man or a mouse ! ” Editorials headed simply ‘ ‘ Homer naje ” acclaimed El Ideal Americano, the President’s opinion of “the most skilful man I have knowm in the affairs of our Government” was quoted, and four days later, after a continuous whirl of processions, gala per- formances, banquets, garden parties, and oratory, he and his party sailed away for Buenos Aires, loaded down with gifts as though they had been visiting the Sultan of Sulu. In the height of the festivities a staid old citizen of Montevideo, after explaining that his father was a North American and that he was born in Baltimore, put both hands over his heart and assured me that if I were to perform a surgical operation on that organ, I would find one-half of it beating for Uruguay and the other for the States. At the time it seemed quite a normal and ordinary thing to say. Everybody in Mon- tevideo seemed to feel just that way. If Montevideo represented, in a way, the old Latin America, and received Mr. Root with all the solemn 232 The Avenida de Mayo, Buenos Aires. in iront of the cathedral during Mr. Root’s visit to Buenos Aires. The Calle Piedad, Buenos Aires. THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS homage and self-effacement which the master of some antique hacienda might show toward the guest who chanced to penetrate his isolation, Buenos Aires stood for the new South America, and welcomed Mr. Root as any great city might — splendidly and lavishly, of course, but at the same time with cheerful self-confi- dence, not untinged here and there with good-natured raillery and fun. The only thing that Buenos Aires worried about was to make Rio’s celebration look small, and once the plans were made and appropria- tions arranged, the city — vividly convinced of its su- premacy — awaited complacently to see and be seen. There was no solicitude about “una nota elevada de urbanidad, ,> nor “una expresiva demostracion de cul- tura ”; that was left to the bigwigs on the reception committees, who were expected to look out for all such things. The populace looked on, commenting good-humoredly. “Within a few days,” said “Gil Bias,” “we shall have among us the right arm of Mr. Roosevelt” — alongside was a cartoon of the President, waving his arm in a speech, while from the right cuff, instead of a clenched fist, protruded the compact head and dispas- sionate eye of our Secretary of State — “none other than Mr. Root, Secretary of State, in the formidable land of trusts, multi-millionaires, and sausages. The illustrious Minister will be banqueted, acclaimed, orated at and tired out, all in four days. In four days the most fruitless of diplomacies will cost us thousands of pesos with which we might do many fine things, as, 233 T PI E OTHER AMERICANS for example, pay the county school-teachers, build lodging houses for working men, pave streets, make sanitary the lands along the harbor.” There were burlesque accounts of the reception of Mr. Root, in which the vanities of the local celebrities, and Mr. Root’s own reputation as a man of few words and intense practicality were smiled at. “When they presented Belisario Roldan they told Mr. Root that he was the best orator in the Republic. “'Words/ replied Root. ‘Breath of the wind — pampero .’ “‘He has the voice of gold,’ added the introducer. “‘Gold?’ said Root. ‘Gold? Good metal! Good value, but then, paper money is all right, too.’ “And he remained quite tranquil until Diaz Romero was presented. “‘The Mercury of America/ said the Master of Ceremonies. “‘Thank you/ said Root. “‘Don’t mention it/ replied the other. “. . .At three minutes after eleven the Minister of Marine and Foreign Relations arrived. He saluted and said: ‘God save Mr. Roosevelt.’ Mr. Root answered: ‘Thank you.’ The Minister continued : ‘Have you my book?’ and Mr. Root responded: ‘ Si, serior, tengo su libro de usted’ [“Yes, sir, I have your book”]. The Minister then asked: ‘Have you your table?’ 1 Tengo mi mesa' [“I have my table”]. And everybody was quite contented at having been able to address him in English.” 234 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS It rained the night before Mr. Root was expected and when the morning crept in it was still raining, the cold gusty temporal of the Argentine winter. The blue and white of the Argentine and our own colors had run together, the banners whipped and dripped like washing on the line. It took one back to New York to see the crowd go down the bay: a white Coney Island excursion steamer bearing what passed for the American colony; another, a free lance, careening in its wake; a launch filled with young men in oilskins and flying the flags of all the American colleges — young Argentines, who had been educated in the States. They looked exactly as though they had just come up the Sound to New London. There was even a newspaper tug puffing about importantly with a big red banner, “La Razon — Diario de la Tarde” — which, as “La Razon” was one of the littlest papers in town, seemed an eminently sporting thing to do. The Argentine cruiser which brought Mr. Root from Montevideo appeared presently through the mist, and the fleet of welcomers drew near till we could see Mr. Root and hear the constant banging of the cruiser’s band coming across the water. Then our band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” — only one who had had some experience with that curious national air as played by a picked-up Latin- American band would have recognized it, but Mr. Root had had that ex- perience, and he stepped close to the rail and stood with his hat over his heart until the song was done. Then there was a rather awkward pause. There 235 THE OTHER AMERICANS was Mr. Root; here was a boatful of English-speaking people; only a stone’s throw of water between, yet what to do? Meanwhile, the Argentine Alumni’s launch was getting all the attention by steaming close to the cruiser and playing Mr. Root’s college hymn. It was at this crucial juncture that the Impossible Person in the shabby top hat perched up somewhere near the walking-beam roared out “What’s the matter with Root?” Every one — though extremely embar- rassed at this presumption — gave the usual cry and the Impossible Person, receiving some encouragement at last, at once demanded who was all right, and without waiting for a reply spelled out the words at the top of his lungs — “R-O-O-T — Root!” Some- thing like the shadow of a smile was seen to flicker across the face of the Secretary of State, and it sud- denly occurred to every one that, possibly, after weeks of rhetorical compliment which he could not under- stand, this unmistakably American greeting — the first he had received from the city he was about to enter — w T as the finest and most eloquent thing that could have been done. The I. P. seeing these feelings betrayed even in the eyes of those who had glowered upon him before, felt himself coming into his own. “He saw me,” he remarked out of the side of his mouth, taking off his top hat and mopping his florid brow. The cruiser steamed slowly into the docks where, one behind the other, ships from all the world lay moored, covered with display flags. There were cheers, the crowd sw r armed toward the landing-place, and the 236 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS lancers and cuirassiers cleared the way. The official greetings followed, then the escort closed round the carriages and galloped up the dripping asphalt, the crowds running behind, cheering in the rain. It was interesting that afternoon — while the lancers and cuirassiers were clattering through the streets ac- companying the official visits, and everywhere buzzed the name of Mr. Root — to pick up an afternoon paper, still damp from the press, and to read things like these : “Mr. Root, an intelligent observer of political and social phenomena, will not search for the basis of his judgment in the . . . honors, exaggerated or not, which our Government bestows upon him. ... A poli- tician as eminent and as keen as he knows very well that these international alliances are formed solely under the pressure of the needs of commerce and by the stimulus of selfish interests. ... If he will con- sult our statistics he will perceive that it is with the European nations that we maintain an interchange of products, the United States being our strong rival. Our cereals and our beef, our hides and wool, have no place in the United States — a country which produces and exports these same articles. . . . Let us receive most kindly, then, our illustrious traveller. But if we resist certain tendencies of the Pan-American Congress and President Roosevelt and his illustrious Minister, let him understand that we do so inspired only by the purest patriotism and the highest interests in our country. . . . Our statesmen no longer can shut up in a box, so to speak, the collective thought . . . and 237 THE OTHER AMERICANS interests of the nation . . . modern means of com- munication often give greater efficiency to an experi- enced and practical commercial agent than to a pol- ished ambassador, master of all the arts of Metternich. . . . Let us be sincere; let us be of our own time; let us make a diplomacy of real interests, living real life with open lungs.” To meet opposition so intelligent and unemotional as this, was one of the most instructive experiences which his journey brought to Mr. Root. Toward sunset the skies cleared, and all Buenos Aires poured into the streets, with the good humor which might be expected to accompany the prospect of a three days’ fiesta and a splendid free show. Every- where there were lights. Florida Street was festooned with incandescent lamps, in the Argentine and Ameri- can colors, as though she had hung herself with many necklaces. Beneath this blaze trooped a crowd much like — except that it mostly spoke Spanish or Italian or French — a Broadway crowd on New Year’s or Election Night. Mr. Root was being banqueted in the Government House on the plaza, and the great show of the evening was set for 10:30 o’clock, when the banqueting party were to emerge upon a balcony and watch the firemen march by in a torchlight parade. For hours the populace surged in the plaza below, proud to be ridden back into line by their splendid cuirassiers, shouting out Latin jests to the pastry-cook’s men from the Cafe de Paris who pattered through on their way to the banquet hall balancing trays of wonderful quaking jellies on their heads. 238 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS At last there was a great shout. On the balcony of the palace could be discerned white shirtfronts framed in a blaze of light, the bugles screamed, and round the plaza and past the reviewing balcony the firemen came. They marched like infantry, carrying torches and axes instead of guns. At the head of the line was a bugle corps which counter-marched and drew up in front of the balcony, where, all during the procession, it blared in shrill unison a curious wild march. Pres- ently it sent out a call, one of those wailing, eery calls of which South American buglers are so fond. Those who had passed the reviewing stand continued their march out of the plaza and into the Avenida’s lights. There was a rumble in the distance, and all at once into the glare in front of the reviewing balcony swept the engines — steam up and smoking — hook-ancl-ladder and hose carts, pell-mell, on the dead run. The search- light from the top of the “Prensa” building, which had been swooping back and forth over the crowd, swung down with a fine Latin appreciation of the spectacular, so that it shone down one side of the square and directly on the turn just beyond the reviewing stand. Into this shaft of naked light the horses swept as they rounded the turn, every movement thrown sharply out. Not one of the drivers could see an inch beyond his horse’s nose, but with a determination to do the thing as picturesquely as it could be done, every man of them sent his team down into that shaft of blinding light with as little hesitancy over the reason why as if he had been a trooper at Balaklava. 239 THE OTHER AMERICANS The crowd went wild. The moment the last cart was past the crowd broke, and as if by prearrangement surged over to the balcony, roaring for “Meestaire R-r-roo!” “Viva Meestaire R-r-roo/" Those on the balcony waved their arms and said “Ssh! Ssh!" Mr. Root stood still, waiting, and feeling, one would think, very pleased with himself. The noise was so great when he started to speak that about all that one could hear was the conclusion of his half-dozen sentences: “With all my heart I say ‘Viva the Republic of the United States! Viva the Republic of Argentina!”' The crowd caught nothing but the “Vivas" and the word “Argentina," but they understood that all right and fairly exploded with delight. “Que dice Meestaire R-r-roo! Que dice Meestaire R-roo!” a lot of them de- manded, crowding about as they heard our English, and when we translated what little w r e had heard they went galloping away, repeating it to each other like happy children. And if our taciturn and impenetrable Secretary may have seemed to be losing his equi- librium, to shout out such emotional things as “Vivas!" to such a crowd, one did not blame him. The sight of the blazing plaza and those people — strange to him, unable to speak his language — roaring for him as they did, was enough to agitate a monu- ment. They could not have done more for him had he been one of their own, the commander of their coun- try’s army, returning from a victorious war. There are about six million people in Argentina to-day, and well over a million of these — far too large 240 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS a number for a city which does little manufacturing and for a country whose chief business is raising cattle and wheat — are herded in the capital. Of these porte- nos — the name by which the inhabitants of Buenos Aires have been known since the days when Argentina was a loose confederation and the inland states were continually combating the pretensions of the “people of the gate” — nearly one-half are foreign born. The remainder, however tangled their origin may be, are at least overwhelmingly Latin, and more and more Latin, with each year’s immigration, must the general population become. So many float in and out, particu- larly the laborers who come over for the harvests and return to Europe with their pay, that immigration figures may not quite be taken at their face value. Such as they are, however, they show between 1857 and 1905 a total immigration of 2,461,107, of whom nearly 140,000 landed in that last year. Of these im- migrants 1,488,084 were Italians, 507,853 Spaniards, 176,853 French — that is to say, out of the 2,461,107, 2,172,790 were Latins. Of the rest, Austria, Germany and Great Britain each sent between thirty and forty thousand, there were some 26,000 Swdss, 20,000 Belgians and some 127,000 altogether from other corners of the world. There is practically no aboriginal race left in Argentina, and there are almost no negroes — nothing to correspond to that inert Indian and cholo mass which forms the bulk of such populations as Bolivia’s and Peru’s, nor to the mulattos and mes- tizos which so far outnumber the whites of Brazil. 241 THE OTHER AMERICANS Except for a few Indian descendants — many of the capital’s mounted police have the high cheek-bones and hawk-eyes of the Southern Indians, and fine-look- ing fellows they are — Argentina, and especially its capital, is practically a white man’s country. Nearly forty thousand Englishmen have made their homes down here and brought along with them their church and schools, their foot-ball and cricket and polo. English capital has always been heavily invested in Argentina — it was the depreciation of Argentine currency following a lavish issue of inconvertible notes in 1S90 which sent Baring Brothers into liquida- tion — and to-day the railroads which web the pampa and carry one across the continent to Chile are mostly in British hands. The greater proportion of British colonists live in or near Buenos Aires — at Iiurlingham, for instance, or Belgrano, whence you can see them hurrying in to their offices of a morning just as com- muters do at home. They have two newspapers, the “Standard” and “Herald,” and the Phoenix Hotel, where some live and the newcomers tarry while getting their bearings, is almost as muchaboxed-up fragment of the British Isles as the Royal Mail boat that one steps into from the wharf at La Guayra. It is worth while, after such a day as I have suggested at the races and theatres, to step down the Callc San Martin the next morning before one’s desayuno enthusiasm has evapo- rated into the Phoenix lounging room, just to see the British faces and hear the talk, and — figuratively glancing over the shoulder of some ruddy old gentle- 242 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS man buried in his morning’s “Herald” or “Standard” — catch a few reflections from this little transplanted world. They’re reading the home news, of course, for one thing — “the anxiety felt over Mr. Joseph Chamber- lain’s continued indisposition,” specially cabled and double-leaded; Cambridge’s victory in the University match at Lord’s, the Newmarket Meeting, and Din- nerford’s easy win of the Princess of Wales’s Stakes; the Henley Regatta — if the Grand Challenge Cup had to be won by a foreign crew, toward no one would less grudge be felt than toward the Belgians. They’ve always raced in the English sporting spirit, at any rate, and been welcome. As for sport, however, there’s plenty here at home. Sixteen foot-ball matches were played off yesterday — Belgrano won from Quilines, 2 goals to 0 — “a fast game all through, but science conspicuous by its ab- sence.” Alumni beat Belgrano Extra 2 to 1 in the second round of the cup-tie competition, Estudiantes won from Barracas at Palermo, the feature of the game being the really remarkable goal-keeping of Coe, who went back from forward on account of his bad toe. The Captain’s team won from the Secretary’s in the golf match at Lomas — “the links in tip-top condition and weather fine.” There was racing, both at Hur- lingham and Palermo — a huge crowd at the latter place to see the first of the three-year-old classics. Sport on the whole fairly good, though backers’ backers had a bad time of it. Segura won from start to finish in 243 THE OTHER AMERICANS grand style and “though the stable connection hadn’t let her run loose — as the ticket to her name showed plainly enough — the masses were on Geisha, who ran creditably, but far from brilliantly, and was palpably on the fine side.” Mr. Monsch avers, in the advertising columns, that his is “the only real English restaurant in town,” and he offers as special dishes for this day, Monday: “Roast pork with apple-sauce, boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce and steak and kidney pudding.” Miss Muriel Francis, Typist — can she be really real — awaits work at her office, 65 Congallo. The English Book-exchange offers Winston Churchill’s “Coniston” — the subtle bookseller evidently hoping that many will think this is our Winston — and Mr. Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle” — the last word, it seems, since Zola’s “J’accuse.” Ploughs and disc cultivators, white Wyandottes and Scotch collie pups are recommended and honest Messrs. Coghill and Sidebottom offer ten beautiful Shorthorn bulls, just imported, and three magnificent Suffolk stallions, to which — conveniently arranged for Spanish readers — Mr. David Calder adds “8 sobre- salientes padrillos Clydesdale imported from the “ repu - tadas cabanas inglesas del Marquis de Londonderry .” There have been amateur theatricals at Belgrano. All excellent, of course, but Mr. Brookhouse, “as the frog-eater in that exquisitely funny farce, ‘Id on parle frangais was particularly immense.” The Belgrano Ladies’ Mandolin Club thank those who so kindly assisted in the children’s dance and play held on Fri- 244 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS day last, but beg to remind the editor that he neglected to mention that “ figuring on the stage with becoming prominence were the allegorical personages — Britannia, John Bull and Uncle Sam.” Mr. J. McGavin Greig sailed yesterday for England on a combined business and pleasure trip. He will be greatly missed by his Belgrano Rugby friends. The daily letter from Montevideo, a night’s journey across the mouth of the great Plata, brings the news that the golfing weather has been wretched. The “first function given by the entertainment society at Vic- toria Hall was, however, a great success and listened to by a large audience, including the British Minister and his family.” Mr. H. G. Morton sang “0 Promise Me,” and Mr. Percy Permain of “yours” — so they speak of each other’s bank of that mighty river — “cer- tainly a side-splitting comic vocalist of considerable talent, proved a tower of strength and was recalled half a dozen times or more for each song.” Nothing in Buenos Aires interested me so much as its newspapers, and certainly in few things can it face comparison more confidently. Just what the “189 daily and periodical newspapers” may be of which the statisticians tell— “157 published in Spanish, 14 in Italian, 2 in French, 6 in English and 8 in German” — I cannot say. The ones you pick up from the news- stand, in addition to the two little sheets already men- tioned, which are only valuable for their gossip of the English colony, are “La Prensa,” “La Nacion” and “El Diario,” and possibly “El Pais” or “La Razon.” 245 THE OTHER AMERICANS Of these “La Prensa” is the one best known abroad. When there is an earthquake on the West Coast or a war on the other side of the world or big news in town, “La Prensa ’s ” whistle blows and all the town within earshot knows that something has happened. If you are an Antarctic explorer, a famous scientist, or some other semi-public personage, “La Prensa ” may invite you to occupy during your stay the lux- urious apartments provided in its building for such distinguished guests. If you are too poor to employ a doctor you can go to “La Prensa’s” dispensary. You may take English lessons in its language department or use its library free of expense and if properly ac- quainted be invited to its concerts and lectures. Like its lesser rival of the West Coast, “El Mercurio” of Val- paraiso and Santiago, “La Prensa” is the property of a rich family, which takes as much trouble to maintain the paper’s prestige as it might to develop a new orchid. Its office building, situated on the Avenida de Mayo, only a stone’s throw away from the Calle Florida is fitted up as elaborately as a club. The re- porters have their grill-room, the proprietor his private living apartments — which he never uses — and the presses and all the rest of the equipment follow the latest European and North American ideas. It prints cable news from all over the world and fourteen large pages, the first three of which are want-advertisements set in microscopic type. The amount of advertising of this sort reminds one of the New York “ Herald,” whose position, indeed, it rather duplicates among the papers 246 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS of Buenos Aires. It is the one of which foreigners have always heard, just as the New York “Herald ” is gener- ally the only North American paper which South Americans know about. It is more entertainingly written and far more important editorially than our “Herald,” however, and although it has less political weight than “La Nacion ” — which might be compared to the “Times” — and is less clever and witty than “El Diario” — it is the paper most generally read by the man in the street. “El Diario” — whose courteously acidulous comment on the trade relations between Argentina and the United States has already been quoted — might be called the “Sun” of Buenos Aires. Of all the Buenos Aires papers, it is the cleverest and most entertain- ing. It was anti-American during Mr. Root’s stay, carrying out this policy in its news stories as well as editorials, and by filling them full of realistic color and humor, yet never missing a chance to poke fun skilfully at minor details — the medals some of the reception committee had scraped together, the won- derful hat, “dernier cri ,” worn by one of them, the tremendous solemnity assumed by every one — it con- trived, while being uniformly polite, to throw a light veil of ridicule over the whole proceeding. The New York “Sun” could not have done it better if condi- tions had been reversed and it had put all its star re- porters on the story. If the Honorable Elihu Root took the trouble to carry a bundle of Buenos Aires papers with him, his dry humor must have received 247 THE OTHER AMERICANS considerable agreeable stimulant during the Charles- ton’s long journey through the Straits. Midway between the news stories and the serious editorials of our papers are the cronicas — a kind of writing at which these Latin journalists are particularly good. In these cronicas , half description and half com- ment, they can expend that sensibility of which they have so much, and the way they do squander it, is, to the tongue-tied Saxon, perennially astonishing. Day after day this “flub-dub” — to borrow the slang of Park Row — which our reporters would spend hours of midnight oil upon and probably try to sell to a maga- zine — appears, necessarily dashed off at the reporter’s unthinking speed, yet finished, “literary,” full of atmosphere and feeling. From such a cronica, the description of the crowd going to the races was quoted. The same reporter’s fine Italian hand, if one is not mistaken, is shown in this Agua Bendita Sin Bendi- ciones” (Holy Water that Gets No Benediction), which appeared one afternoon during the week of insistent mists and rain that preceded Mr. Root’s arrival. “ Insistente, fastidiosa , casi implacable ” — the slow, clinging rhythm of the words, detached from any meaning, brings back those melancholy afternoons, when it seemed as though the breath of the pampa itself was drifting through the lighted streets and one could almost smell the stretches of grass, saturated, blanketed in mists, dripping with rain — “Insistente, fastidiosa, casi implacable, la lluvia envuelve hace dias la ciudad en la tristeza de su melopea gris ” . . . The 248 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS whole Argentine, it appears, was enveloped in rain. It had lasted days, was likely to last some days to come. ‘“Maldito tiempo!’ exclaims the city, wet, ill-hu- mored, spattered with mud ...” Imperceptibly, almost, this purely descriptive introduction drifts into a practical consideration of the good such a rain w T ill do an agricultural and stock-raising country and ends with the suggestion that if the President should write to the farmers, congratulating them on the temporal, it would be much more sensible and appropriate than most presidential messages. Here in “La Nacion”is a similar contribution, entitled “La Came es Flaca” (Meat is Lean). Our cronista begins with a description of the crowded streets during the illumination the night before. “We felt,” he ob- serves “a certain intimate satisfaction in beholding such a fiesta, which seemed to bring nearer to realiza- tion that which we have desired for so long, that Buenos Aires should be a great city, not only in population “ La came es fiaca . . . “This phrase was made more interesting by being pronounced by a handsome woman in the full vigor of life — ‘la femme de trente ans de Balzac’ — who was talk- ing to her companion in front of a shop window, whither they had been swept by the crowd. “‘And dear!’ exclaimed her companion. Several people turned to listen, smiling sympathetically, but the two women, absorbed in their own ideas, went on as though no listeners were there. 249 THE OTHER AMERICANS ‘“The kilo which cost forty centavos yesterday, I paid fifty for to-day and they say it’s going up still further.’ ‘“My butcher tells me the same thing. Living is a horror here! One can't live in Buenos Aires!’ “‘Which doesn’t prevent their spending hundreds of thousands on useless things — at least superfluous ones.’ “In the middle of that kaleidoscopic multitude, apparently care-free and satisfied with the present moment, amused and animated by the spectacle, this conversation had a unique interest. No stage manager could put on the theatre stage a piece so saliently true to life, so full of psychological suggestion, and effective because of its very simplicity. For no one could con- vey to the stage the impression produced by this sud- den appearance of household cares in the very midst of the fiesta, in that whirlwind of artificial life ...” Moralizing on the lesson which certain types of poli- ticians might learn from these w r omen — who showed how even a thing apparently so simple as housekeep- ing, required constant thought, not to be cast aside even in holiday moments — the reporter drifts into a con- sideration of the cost of living in Buenos Aires, the effect of recent strikes and boycotts and the sad phe- nomenon that, in spite of prosperity and the brilliance of the capital, prices of necessities are constantly in- creasing. “On this problem,” he concludes, “the luminous torrents of the streets shed no light.” Nor did it 2fiO THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS seem likely that the echo of such conversations would ever reach the municipality. And, after despairing somewhat over the fatuity of past legislation, he wishes that a new municipal regime might be estab- lished ‘'into whose deliberations might enter two or three administrators like those whom he had listened to the night before in the Calle Florida.” For life in the Argentine capital is not all lights and amusement and rather strident pleasure, and I should convey a wrong impression if, in accenting somewhat the note which differentiates it most obviously from other South American capitals, I should make it seem so. It has none of Lima’s charm of antiquity, none of the land-and-water beauties of Rio, but it has some- thing else, made up of graceful compactness and finish, of vigor, sophistication and comfort. There are people who attract, not because they are refined or highly educated or have discriminating noses, but because they are extremely alive. Cities may do the same. Things are done well in the City of Good Airs. There are good things to eat, comfortable rooms to live in, places where a man can get his exercise and outdoor sport. After the tropics, the gringo feels like a man who has been hopping from foothold to foothold in a swamp and steps at last on solid ground. The creature comforts of a capable, wide-awake, well- arranged city soothingly envelope him. The cabman knows where he wants to go, the waiter knows what he wants to eat. The mounted policeman, in breastplate and horse-tail helmet, rides him back with the rest of 251 THE OTHER AMERICANS the crowd and does it so quietly and with such sophis- ticated nonchalance that he promptly conceives a passionate admiration for that policeman and his beautiful horse, falls into the collective pride com- mon to all city dwellers, and is ready to declare that there is no other policeman so fine in the world. The streets are clean and the buildings which line them, however gingerbready their architecture, are held within decorous maximum and minimum limits of height. Everything is near at hand. The hotel, club, bank, drive, the restaurants and theatres are all within, so to say, feeling distance. And this physical compactness and neatness, this continental glitter and activity, set here, oasis-like, combine to give the whole a certain diminutiveness and snug inti- macy. There’s a ‘Tittle old Buenos Aires,” too. Italians, Spaniards, French, Argentines, what you will — here they are, really living out what so many other Latin Americans dream. “Some day” — so solil- oquizes the man across the table, as you sit on a res- taurant balcony looking out at the blue Caribbean, or watching the droll pereza moving an inch a minute along a tree trunk or the lazy mestizos drowsing in the sun — “Some day, somebody’ll step in here and bring these fellows up standing and teach them how to live. They can’t govern themselves and somebody else must. And there won’t be anything here until they do.” At other places and times you hear orators telling what the future will bring; how this continent is the pre- ordained home of the Latin race, which will pour down 252 THE CITY OF GOOD AIRS from crowded Europe to a new-world reincarnation. Well, here it is — and this is the significantly interesting thing about Buenos Aires — this prophecy fulfilled. No one has stepped in — rather all the world has — not as conquerors, but following the same laws which have brought Italians over to dig our ditches and Scandi- navians to our Northwestern wheat-fields. And here is a city, as Latin as Naples or Barcelona, all worked out and swinging along, strong, self-sufficient, and very much alive — the hint of what all Latin America may some day be. 253 CHAPTER XIII RIO AND BRAZIL Go rolling down to Rio, Roll down, roll down to Rio. I’d like to roll to Rio Some dag before I’m old. — Kipling. When the wind blows the wrong way at Buenos Aires something happens to the River of Silver and there isn’t enough water for ships to cross the bar. As long as the contrary airs hold the big boats lie in their basins, quaintly waiting, as at home they wait for the more mannerly tides. So our Messageries Maritimes liner Magellan, due to sail at nine o’clock, waited all that interminable day, while we, up at daybreak and drowsy from the dance of the night before, sat cooped up behind her rail, glaring cynically at the tintype men on the dock who insisted on taking your picture if you let your eyes rest on them for so much as a second, and then broke into a violent Latin sadness if you declined to buy. The reception to Mr. Root was at its height. Once he flitted past us, inspecting these superior docks. A squadron of gorgeous cuirassiers galloped to the land- 9CL1 -WCTX RIO AND BRAZIL ing-stage with him, dismounted and stood at their horses’ heads while he was gone, enveloped him again, presently, and galloped away, swords rattling, horse- tails streaming from helmets, and brazen breastplates shining in the sun. Not permitted to cross the gang- plank, lest at any moment the waters might come back where they belonged, we tramped the deck; digested all the polite French notices, in which Messieurs les passagers were informed that vetements blancs might not be worn outside the state-room except between eleven at night and five in the morning, nor were they to appear at table without collars and cuffs, and they were prayed to cease at eleven in the evening tout chant, toute conversation bruyante which was likely to disturb the other passengers. Night fell, the lights came out, still there was not enough water to float us out to sea. The forbidden city became more and more a paradise from which we were shut out. Down in that glow which lit the whole sky, as Broadway lights it at home, we could see the Calle Florida crowded from curb to curb, a blazing stream of lights and people and polyglot talk; the velvet-footed broughams, the mounted escort galloping here and there — and here we must sit in that silent ship, listen- ing to water pouring from the bilge-pumps into the basin, and watching the “Prensa’s” searchlight swing across the sky. We mooned off, finally, like spoiled children, whimpering because they were sent to bed, and early the next morning, when we awoke to feel the «ea breeze blowing into the open port and saw the 255 THE OTHER AMERICANS lights twinkling on the horizon’s edge, just as they tw r inkle from the Coney Island and Rockaway beaches as one slips out to sea from New York, we were con- vinced that this was, somehow, one of life’s tragedies and that w r e should probably never want anything so badly as we wanted, just then, to be back in that twinkling town. For three days followed the suspended animation of the sea, during which the Argentine capital remained, apotheosized in those retreating lights, a place gla- moured over and gay. Then, one evening, as we were tramping the deck, wrapped in coats and shawls, with minds keyed to the pitch of the metropolis and the brisk south equatorial wdnter, a softness crept into the breeze. It seemed to come all at once, as though we had gone out of one room and into another — the soft, melting, feminine breath of the tropics. There is noth- ing like it in our North; the nearest approach is the air that breathes up from the land after a summer rain. It plays quaint tricks sometimes, makes neat, well- arranged theories seem foolish and absurd, and sends men chasing strange gods. All that night it blew into the hot state-room — velvety and sweet, vaguely sug- gesting steamy, sun-drenched fields; still, indigo la- goons ; forests alive with giant butterflies and shrouded with creepers and moss. The next morning land lay off the port bow — wooded hills rising from the yellow beach — velvety, misty-green. Then came a river, broad, brimming, slow-flowing, up which the big steamer wound. On the bank were huts of thatch, 250 RIO AND BRAZIL dugouts drawn up on the sand, negro women in white cotton slips, showing out here and there against the green. The wooded hills climbed into mountains, im- mersed in bluish haze. Above, occasional cumulus clouds hung suspended, like cotton fastened to the sky. And over all that heat and humid shimmer, and breathing across it that velvet, spicy breath, as of earth newly-washed with rain. The lamps and trolley- cars and asphalt faded away. Again we had entered the land of sun and laziness and languor. This was Brazil — where the coffee comes from. It is larger than all our United States and covers nearly half of the southern continent. From the rub- ber forests north of the Amazon to the southernmost parts of Rio Grande do Sul, measured by degrees, is as far as from the lower end of Florida to the top of Labra- dor; and from the Amazon’s headwaters to Cape St. Roque on the east is as far as from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Ocean steamers run regularly up the Amazon as far as Manaos, and here, a thousand miles inland, is a modern city of some forty or fifty thousand people. Yet a line drawn thence ’cross country to the south- east corner passes through regions as large as France or Germany, which the map-makers mark with little trees as though they were ancients drawing charts of the Indies. It is a country at once old almost to the point of decadence and “new” as Alaska or the Trans- vaal. The lazy, lovely, sprawling capital has its school of fine arts and of music, its little Academy of Immor- tals, its erudite, solemnly lyrical gentlemen, who set 257 THE OTHER AMERICANS down their reflections in French and describe their country’s languors in words that fairly drip and flow — yet eighty-five per cent, of the nation do not know how to read or write. There is the strip of coast with its cities, and the Amazon, and within their embrace the vast, mysterious island — with forests, minerals, fertile lands, endless waterpower — a potentiality incal- culable. The two liveliest impressions which one receives on entering Brazil from the south, which still usurp the attention on saying good-by in the north to the blaz- ing white walls of Recife, come from the Portuguese and that implacable sun. All the rest of South Amer- ica is Spanish, and the gringo, partly Castilianized by this time, is promptly appalled by this grotesquely similar but, as it sounds to him, shambling and slov- enly tongue. Speech is always a mirror of racial char- acteristics, and the difference between these sing-song, throaty diphthongs and the precise, clean-cut Spanish seems to suggest underlying differences between the Brazilians and their neighbors of Chile or Argentina. The Spaniard is aggressive, fierce, volatile, decided, sharp ; the Portuguese solemn, slow, bigoted and determined. The one — as the gifted Brazilian from whom I have tactfully borrowed these adjectives puts it — penetrates. The other infiltrates. This man, per- sistent, determined, and a little sad, was set down in a country of forests and jungles, under the implacable sun — the sun which grows the coffee, makes the African as sleek and strong and happy as in his native jungle, 258 RIO AND BRAZIL while under it flaxen-haired Germans, in spite of mailed fists and state help, drowse and fade, forget the poetry of the Fatherland, and succumb to tuberculosis and anaemia. It has had a great deal to do, in the four hundred years since the Portuguese came, with making the Brazil of to-day, and, whatever colonial adven- turers it shines upon, it will have much to do with the Brazil of to-morrow. With which overture we step into sun-washed Santos, alongside the stone river wall of which our big Frenchman by this time lies. Just over the nearest roofs, on the shady side of the blazing, white-walled street that meanders through the centre of the town, is the “Cafe Comercial.” It is a plain little place, with a sanded floor and tables be- tween which waiters are always carrying little coffee- pots. In one is hot milk and in the other what comes very close to being the best coffee in the world. You drop down at one of these tables, on which little Sevres cups are always waiting, drop a tiny spoonful of the damp native sugar in one of them, wave a hand in a bored tropical way, and the waiter, without question, fills it, just as thousands of other waiters are doing at that moment in Sao Paulo and Rio and Bahia and Recife and other towns along this steamy coffee coast. Then you gaze out at the shimmering white wall across the way, watch the coffee agents — German, British, Yankee, Portuguese — bargaining with each other in the open street, hear, from behind the ware- houses, the hoarse braying of a steamer just backing out into the stream for Europe or South Africa, or the 259 THE OTHER AMERICANS States, sip what seems the very distillation of tropical sunshine and luxuriance, and feel, somehow, as though you were at the very centre of the world. For, in a w T ay, you are. The chances are a good many to one that the brew which warms the arctic explorer, wakes up the Kansas farm-hand, or ends some exquisite Parisian dinner, came in a gunny sack down the road from Sao Paulo to Santos — the small round berries “Mocha,” the large flat ones “Java” — and was carried aboard ship on the back of a big buck negro. Practically all the coffee the Western world uses comes from Brazil. Seventy per cent, of the world’s coffee grows there. In some years — such as 1906, for instance, when nearly fourteen million sacks, over one and one-half billion pounds of it, poured out of Brazil — Asia and Africa together produce only about one-tenth as much. It is a land of coffee. Sweating teamsters and carga- dores, who at home would be trying to get outside the “biggest schooner of beer in town,” drop in out of the heat for a moment at some little cubbyhole with a sanded floor, and slowly sip their thimbleful of black coffee. In Rio’s great shopping street, the Rua Ouvi- dor, the merchants and politicians and journalists who flock into the cafes of an afternoon, do their gossiping, not over cocktail and highball glasses, but over those little white cups. They are so universal, even in shabby laborers’ cafes, that I almost began to wonder if they w’ere not prescribed by the government, like stamps or currency. When the train stopped at some way-station 260 Cargadores loading coffee at Santos. The new Avenida Central in Rio. RIO AND BRAZIL on the road from Sao Paulo down to Rio, the small boys who would sell popcorn or sandwiches or apples at home walked under the car windows with their trays and steaming coffee-cups. One drinks enough in a day to make the very solicitous ink of our hygienic- coffee advertisements turn pale, yet in the humid drowsiness this stimulant seems to evaporate harm- lessly. The natives are used to it, and the gringo’s im- agination, charmed by what seems the very embodied perfume of the tropics, transmutes, whatever it is that coffee oughtn’t to have, into thin air, and he swims on, serene, enveloped in food’s humble poetry. Most of the coffee is grown on the uplands of Sao Paulo, a few hours’ railroad climb over wooded moun- tains and along sombre, velvety valleys, inland from Santos. Here Brazil’s Italian immigrants flock — there are over a million Italians in the state of Sao Paulo — to work in the coffee fazendas generally, and send their savings back to Italy. The capital, also called Sao Paulo, a city of some 300,000 people now, is the busiest and most modern place in Brazil. It supports spacious and active trol- ley cars on some seventy-five miles of its streets, theatres and music halls, “ permanent” billboards which amount almost to mural decoration; there is a large American school, McKenzie College, now in its thirty-eighth year, an American shoe factory, and in the early evening, with the orchestras playing away in half a dozen open cafes, the downtown streets have an un-Brazilian suggestion of Buenos Aires. 261 THE OTHER AMERICANS There are between fifteen and sixteen thousand coffee plantations in Sao Paulo, and were the laws which limit production removed, this one state doubt- less could supply the world. This very lavishness of nature has been one of Brazil’s misfortunes. The Brazilian’s tendency toward fixed ideas having petri- fied the belief that Brazil is essentially a coffee country, everything has been sacrificed to that. There is no diversity of crops, no attempt to encourage new ones. A little tapioca, rice, and corn, a few beans and po- tatoes — enough to keep the planter alive — this and the coffee. Forests have been cleared off and wasted, the soil exhausted and left, new tracts cleared, new virgin fields violated. All through what should be fat and smiling farming country, in neighborhoods long inhabited, one meets such depressing landscapes as Milkau saw in the open pages of Senhor Graga Aranha’s novel “Chanaan”: “The earth was weary and half-cultivated; the coffee- trees lacked that dark-green foliage which indicates vigorous sap, and were colored a pale green, made almost golden by the sunlight; the leaves of the man- dioca plants, delicate and narrow, oscillated as if they lacked roots and might be blown away by the wind. . . . One felt in contemplating this land, without force, exhausted, smiling, an uneasy mingling of pleas- ure and melancholy. The earth was dying there, like a beautiful woman, still young, with a gentle smile on her pallid face — useless for life, infertile for love. . . .” In spite of wasteful methods the crop is so much 262 RIO AND BRAZIL larger than is needed that the state must needs step in and try to lift itself by its own boot-straps by the “valorization” scheme of buying up all coffee offered. This preying on the land is only the inevitable inheri- tance of the old conquerors’ ideal of conquest and spoliation, another of those archaisms whose sweeping out is the task of the Latin America of to-morrow. From Sao Paulo to Rio is an all-day’s railroad journey, north-eastward, down from the cool uplands to the muggy coast. People generally take a sleeping car. Those who, as I did, go by day to see the country, find it not unlike a sort of Iowa or Indiana down at the heels, and toward sunset, wilted, weary, caked with dust, are set down in Rio. It is so perfectly possible to fall in love with the Brazilian capital that, having unfortunately taken the most effective means of not doing so, I feel it a certain responsibility to suggest how it may be done. One way would be to go “rolling down to Rio” on a Royal Mail boat, for instance, with a lot of pleasant people, and, directly on landing, pick out the pleasantest, take the cog-wheel road up the Corcovado, and thence look down upon what, from that giddy height, is one of the loveliest cities on earth. The Corcovado is a rock jutting over the trees, about two thousand feet above the town — so sheer that you look down on Rio and the blue harbor as from a balloon — down two thousand feet of velvet-green descents to the terra-cotta roofs and sun-washed walls and the wheel-spoke streets like lines on a map. Not one of our smoky hives, but a 263 THE OTHER AMERICANS city of villas and palms and showering vines and flowers, meandering about and over the foothills, im- mersed in the blazing tropical sun. The cool, laughing sea envelops it, with what is probably the finest har- bor in the world — not gray, nor green, nor steely, but blue, and bluer yet in the sun. And all about in it islands — agate in turquoise — jut out as though the gods had tossed a handful into the water — one, the Sugarloaf, rising fifteen hundred feet to sentinel the narrow harbor gate. It is — as I heard an American say of the backward look toward Rio as the train climbs to Petropolis — as though one had been taken up into that exceeding high mountain to see “the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” Another way is to go down, as people went to the Pan-American Conference in 1906, and, wrapped in the usual North American ignorance of Latin Amer- ica, and with nothing to dim the comparison, sud- denly have flashed on one the Aladdin’s Lamp Avenida — built by tearing down a two-hundred-foot passage through the heart of the town — the majestic sweep of the esplanade, and all the other municipal wonders about which so many correspondents wrote so much and so feelingly, that I feel a decided reticence in vent- uring to say anything about this side of Rio at all. A third way — and of course this is the real one — is to spend enough time in the tropics to insulate one’s nerves against our avid desire to do something; to be able to sit in a sort of Buddhistic vacuity and not feel that one is wasting time. Coated with this placid 264 RIO AND BRAZIL equatorial film, one would be ready to settle down in some airy 'pension, with a window looking out over the indigo bay toward the Sugarloaf and Nictheroy, to know and understand Rio. I knew a man who had attained this blest nirvana and after a fortnight’s teaching, I could sit with him, silent and content, for quarter hours at a time. “Buena’ noces ,” I would mumble in a far-away voice, dropping in of an evening. “Buena’ noces,” he would murmur out of the twi- light, and then we would lapse into the cataleptic state, sprawled in easy-chairs, satisfied to watch the glow of our cigarettes. If Rio could do that in a few days and make New York’s unconscious violence, for the first day or two after getting home, seem actually a joke, it is easy enough to see how Rio might fascinate one who had lived long enough there to get the tropics into his blood — until the heat and dust and smells of it, the laziness and throaty Portuguese, the very things that get on a gringo’s nerves, would become like the lights of home. The way not to be wholly carried away by Rio — and this is why I began to describe Brazil by mention- ing the capital of Argentina — is to go there by way of the West Coast, to weather the tropics once and return to a “white man’s country,” then make the anticlimatic regression, and to find one’s self set down in this dusty, stifling, ill-arranged town, with the viva- cious lights of Buenos Aires, a thousand miles behind, twinkling through a cool Argentine night. 265 THE OTHER AMERICANS The spoiled traveller is promptly attacked by all those foolish irritations which a city man meets in venturing into the provinces. He is tireless in hunting out things to fret about. The language he abhors. Fancy calling St. John, or San Juan, Sao Joao — which he insists on mispronouncing “Sow Wow!” After the clean-cut Spanish — precise of all things — the throaty sing-song Portuguese seems mere slovenliness. All the just-around-the-corner-comforts of a city seem to have disappeared. Collars wilt like wax, but nobody knows of a laundry. Buenos Aires’s cheap little vic- torias have given way to cabs more expensive than those of New York. Everything costs about twice what it did in the larger capital. Everything from a cigar to a railroad ticket carries — and costs — its rev- enue stamp, and you pay in stage-money made of wretched French paper that tears in two if you look at it. There is no really good hotel, lovely as is the view from some of them. The street-car conductor doesn’t know where the post-office is, the postal clerk can’t find one’s letters, although they’re lying in the jposte restante, and the languid policeman, unable to understand pigeon-Spanish, merely grunts and walks gloomily away. In short, until somebody invites you to spend a cool mountain night at Petropolis, you are in imminent danger of concluding, during those first few hours, that this city of six hundred thousand people is a huge, hot, overgrown village, inefficient and half-alive. Unfair as such a judgment is, yet I am not sure that 2GG RIO AND BRAZIL seeing Rio in terms of Buenos Aires isn’t the simplest way to set it in its place and suggest its personality. For Rio is, first of all, a city of the tropics. And it is as such, and not for what it has accomplished in twen- tieth century utilitarianism, that it — and Brazil also — is most interesting. Much may be said of these accom- plishments — the growth of trade, the new docks, sani- tation, the new Avenida, for which six hundred houses were torn down and which now stretches for nearly two miles as depressingly new and perfect as the newest plaisance of our newest world’s fair. There’s the famous old Rua Ouvidor, narrow, dark, and vivacious, where you may see, as the saying goes, everybody who is any- body in Brazil. It was not built, but just grew, and is very interesting, but an antique compared with the Calle Florida. The usual ’banality of “electric lights, telephones and trolley-cars” can be tacked to Rio as vociferously as may be, the “Jornal do Commercio” and “Jornal do Brazil” print as much cable and home news as the best papers of Buenos Aires, but their huge blanket sheets and small type seem odd and old- fashioned compared with the crisp modernity of “La Prensa,” “El Diario”or “La Nacion.” The same reservation must be made about most things Brazilian. Over all is cast a spell, the union, as it would seem, of that sombre Portuguese temperament and the tropical languor, and the present seems vaguely antique and old. “We are archives of archaic institu- tions with modern etiquettes,” observes the author of “A America Latina,” “a modern glossary designating 2G7 THE OTHER AMERICANS an obsolete world” — and this comment on South American societies, in general, applies far more to Brazil than to the Argentine. Before the things seen and heard and vaguely felt, the endless procession of vague, unrelated things that baffle and allure — semi-antique humans living lan- guidly in the midst of a sun-drenched nature which, by its very luxuriance, might seem to have overpow- ered them — Latin sensibility tinged with African super- stition — vast forests with giant butterflies floating in the breathless air — negro coachmen in top-boots, such as Puss-in-Boots might have worn — dusky, velvet- eyed donzellas — palms, blazing walls and indigo sea — one loses interest in railroads and power plants and the things we do better at home. Brazilians must interest themselves in these things, for therein lies their salva- tion. If I seem to neglect them it is because it seems absurd to visit a conservatory full of orchids and spend one’s time seeing how the steam-pipes are put in. By the same token there is a certain mellowed dig- nity in the Brazilian scene — the natural inheritance of the empire, and doubtless, also, a reaction of race and climate — lacking in the more energetic and modern Argentina. It was only in 1889 that good Dom Pedro — that kindly, cultured, old-school gentleman — was dethroned and shipped off to Portugal. It is only since 1887 that the negroes ceased to be slaves. Brazil’s foremost statesman, the big-necked, able Minister of Foreign Affairs who, as he moved amongst his slender Caribbean brethren at the 190G Conference, looked 2GS The Rua Ouvidor, the principal business street in Rio. RIO AND BRAZIL like the senior partner of some old firm of Wall Street bankers, is still called “Baron” Rio Branco. You can still see in Petropolis the house of the Princess Regent and her husband the Conde d’Eu, overgrown somewhat with vegetation and buried in sombre shade. Rio’s great public library was started by King Joao VI, himself, when the Portuguese court was trans- ferred to Brazil in 1808. There is still a suggestion of the Old World and the grand manner. They have their Academy of Forty Immortals, their politicians are often pleased to prac- tise the politer arts. Senhor Joachim Nabuco, who presided at the Conference and who may be seen any of these fine afternoons driving down Connecticut Ave- nue in Washington, has written his “Pensees. ” These litterateurs may be, as Senhor Bomfim suggests in “A America Latina,” “inveterate rhetoricians whose abundant works are taken as proof of genius.” Yet at least they have a certain way with them. Pompous, grave, they go through the solemn motions. In spite of the vast majority who neither read nor write, Bra- zilians of the upper ruling class are probably more “cultured,” in the narrow literary sense of the word, than our average men of the same class at home. They speak and write French as a matter of course in addi- tion to their ow T n language, and most of them make fair headway with English. They enjoy and encour- age music and painting and poetry. Opera not only comes to Rio each winter, as it does to Buenos Aires, but they have their National Institute of Music and 269 THE OTHER AMERICANS their native composers, one of whom, especially, the late Carlos Gomez, has heard his operas successfully produced in Europe. They have their National Acad- emy of Fine Arts and a gallery which, I am sure, is visited and appreciated by a great many more people than ever surprise themselves by entering the really excellent one tucked away, upstairs, in Buenos Aires’s Calle Florida. The annual salon was opened the afternoon we sailed and I just had time to look in before going to the steamer. An orchestra played with quaint dignity in the lower entrance, and within, in a humid odor of dresses and perfume, was a crowd — ceremonious old gentlemen with leathery faces, dark-eyed, sensitive- looking youths, nice little girls and their older sisters, dusky sometimes, white with powder and wearing dangling crescent earrings — such a crowd as I saw at other semi-public gatherings in Rio — not brilliant, yet with a certain quiet at-homeness and dignity often missed in the Argentine capital. They had the air of having done this thing many times before. Ev- erybody showed his little ticket, and, having none, I walked on until stopped by a guard with a musket. I murmured some foolish sentence about being a vis- itor from North America and instantly he smiled and bowed. “Ah, senhor!” he said, “Norte Americano!” and bowed me in. It was the open sesame which had unlocked so many doors during the summer — a Latin- American courtesy which made pleasing even some of the water-colors of the younger Brazilian Rafaels, with 270 RIO AND BRAZIL signatures splashed across their corners which could be read clear across the room. Pleasant human oases like this, the loveliness which is visible from the Corcovado or to any discriminating bird, Rio has, but of the stern impressiveness of a great city nothing. She lies there in the sun, like one of her own mestizos , indolently reclining, amidst palms and gardens, on the meandering foothills. Laxity and smiling indifference, bodily and moral, is in the air. From the bleak whiteness of Monroe Palace, where the Pan-American Conference met, the main street led through a region of Venetian blinds, from behind which at almost any hour — in French, in Spanish and Portuguese, in broken English — the passer-by was invited to come in. The same sort of a thorough- fare led up to this very Academy of Fine Arts, down which the ceremonious old gentlemen, their gentle daughters and little grand-daughters walked that afternoon. On the news-stands, side by side with the grave “ Jornal do Comer cio,” lay “0 Rio Nu” — “Rio Without Clothes” — calculated to send a Broadway policeman bounding after the reserves. The same cheerful obliquity characterizes the Rio music-halls — it was the one across the street from the Conference building, as it happened, which was one of the few I saw in South America whose depravity was witty enough to furnish its own excuse. And that, I suppose, was because the company was French. They called their review “Pan! ga y est,” and everything in the air of Rio was parodied therein. It began tire- 271 THE OTHER AMERICANS somely. The audience grew restless and a man finally rose in the back of the parquet and began to protest. He was one of those self-important, earnest little men who is bound to get his rights. Everybody could see that and they turned and encouraged him with grins and sympathetic murmurs. Holding his stick firmly, like the honest householder he seemed to be, he called for “Monsieur le directeur ” and having brought that functionary, tremendously agitated, out from the wings, he declared that, for himself and on behalf of the audience, he wished to protest. The programme had announced, “Monsieur le di^deur” himself had promised, that they would give an entertainment full of liveliness, of a piquancy and wit. And look at this — these inane Japanese dancers toddling about in kimonos. Mon Dieu, Monsieur! This is unfair! It is not to be borne ! The manager, suave and solicitous, lifted his shoul- ders and pressed his hands to his heart. Monsieur spoke truly. They had promised an entertainment full of life, of verve, of sparkle. They were desolated to have bored the audience. On behalf of himself and the company he would do everything in his power to please. Was it possible that the interesting things Monsieur failed to see on the stage might be found behind the scenes in the dressing-rooms of Mesdemoi- selles les artistes. . . . Would Monsieur but come — for he and the company prostrated themselves in the effort to please — derriere les coulisses and see? What? Truly? Ah — a thousand thanks! Indeed he would 272 RIO AND BRAZIL come. Como no! Assuredly, yes! Enchante! Con muchissimo gusto! And forthwith the honest house- holder tramped round behind the scenes, the audience delighted, and not yet aware that this was part of the play. The curtain rolled up, disclosing the stage set as a dressing-room, and, sure enough, there were mes- demoiselles les artistes, just beginning to dress for their parts. The honest householder dropped his stick, be- came at once one of the most active performers, and as for lack of liveliness there was no further cause for complaint. Of the various manifestations of atmospheric laxity none is more interesting to a North American than the haziness of the color-line. This land of coffee and sun- shine is a land tinged with African blood. Of the sev- enteen and a half millions of people in the country only some six millions are whites. There were 750,000 slaves in Brazil when the Princess Regent emanci- pated them in 1887, and there are neighborhoods where the negro problem is a problem only in so far as life may be a problem to Africans in their native jungles. You go ashore, for instance, to buy cigars at Bahia. It was a great place in the old slave days, before the centre of industry moved down to Sao Paulo, is a fine place still, with its tall stage-scenery buildings, painted white or pinkish or pale blue, the fronts — an echo of the Dutch visitation of long ago — often decorated with tiles. You climb the narrow winding streets to the upper town, looking out on the turquoise sea. Every- where are negroes — huge women, with enormous choc- 273 THE OTHER AMERICANS olate-colored arms, in white cotton wrappers and tur- bans. They come swinging down the cobblestones, squat beside their fruits and green parrots, lean out of ground-floor windows smoking fat black cigars. Try to take a photograph of one and her broad, shining face clouds over with fear of the unknown, and up goes her apron over her head. In the cool interiors of these houses, with spotless patios and doorways, white folks doubtless there must be, hiding from the sun, but one rarely sees them. Eighty per cent, of the inhabitants are negroes. You feel as though you were walking through a deserted white man’s city held by a black army of occupation. About one-third of Rio’s population are negroes. From blacks who might have been landed from a slave- ship yesterday the African tinge fades out through every gradation of mixed blood up to that of the cul- tured whites of the ruling class. There is, in fact, al- most no color-line at all; comparatively few families into at least some of whose members has not crept a shadow of the darker blood. There was a great ball one night at the Club dos Diarios, while I w T as in Rio, for the Pan-American dele- gates who were about returning home. This is the solid, respectable old club of the capital; all Rio was there, and if not as austerely magnificent as the ball given in the Palace of the Minister of Foreign Affairs — Itamaraty — a few nights later, it was yet a very repre- sentative picture of Brazilian society. There were some of the same nice old gentlemen and their sweet, 274 RIO AND BRAZIL gentle-looking daughters that I saw at the art gallery, and over it all that same air of homeiness, so to speak, of a society older, more staid and to the manner born than would have gathered for a similar occasion in the more brilliant Buenos Aires. The young men, as a rule, were sedate and capable-looking, and there was a restful absence of that Byronic-broker type so frequent in Buenos Aires, of toilettes that ambitiously proclaimed themselves “creations.” If there were few to gape at, nearly all had ease and an air of doing quietly something to which they were accustomed. And gliding about in the waltz, as well-dressed and at ease and as charming as any there, were young women who showed, almost plainly enough to be called mulattoes, the marks of their negro blood. It is not only there, but there is so little prejudice against it, that the most scholarly Brazilians often maintain that the mixture has been beneficial and has resulted in a type better suited to the Brazilian environ- ment than either of the original stocks. They flatly contradict Agassiz and the other northern biologists. The mestizo is lazy, sensual, cruel, lacking in the power of concentrated and original thought, but they ask, How does this prove degeneracy? The type may not be ideal, but were you to compare it, not with the best type of Englishman or Spaniard, but with its progen- itors, the African slave and the lawless adventurer, would you not find it an advance rather than a retro- gression ? The mestizo, they urge, is not analogous to those mixtures which produce hybrids. There is no 275 . THE OTHER AMERICANS physical trait which proves degeneracy, and as for his intellect, is the mule, for instance, any less intelligent than the horse or the donkey? To the solemn, deter- mined Portuguese the African has brought a cheerful sensuousness which, they believe, mellows and quick- ens his intellectuality, and they point to the fact that most Brazilian musicians and artists have been mes- tizos. Whatever one’s own notions may be — and I am attempting no more here than to show the Bra- zilian point of view — one cannot escape becoming in- terested in opinions, apparently backed up by some evidence, startlingly different from ideas accepted as final at home. This Africanism has tinged religion and language, and contributed, undoubtedly, with the climate and environment, to produce that mingling of melancholy, superstition and sensibility, now gloomily savage, now acutely sentimental to the point of being morbid, which is common in Brazilian literature and poetry. Even without it people could not live under the brooding influence of such a land without getting something of its sombre mystery and creepy beauty into their blood. There is a passage in Senhor Gra