we were then playing rather than begin with a failure, but by judicious use of the Chilean contract and my most fluent Portuguese I got the prefect himself to offer us sixty per cent., and having asked and been refused the privilege of charging to his expense the cost of our transportation from São Paulo, just in order not to appear too eager, I agreed. I drew up duplicate contracts on the spot, left a reasonable amount of advertising matter, and still had time to snatch a lunch before catching the next train northward. Yet there are men who believe that business cannot be done in a hurry in South America! It was mid-afternoon when I reached Campinas in its lap of rolling hills, and the siesta-hour was not yet over. I took a tigre, a two-wheeled hack, to the center of town, and having installed myself in a big, bare front room of the principal hotel, with the customary black-beans-and-rice Brazilian diet, began my professional inquiries at once. The rink was a great barn of a place, and in the course of an hour I coaxed some of the negro boys attached to it to hunt up and rout out the manager. He was a plain, businesslike young fellow with almost American ideas of advertising and management, in which he was given carte blanche by the wealthy owner, and we were soon engaged in the preliminary matching of wits. I drew out clippings, old programs, articles on the Kinetophone from American, Brazilian, and Spanish-American papers as they were needed to clinch my arguments, and as he grew interested, we sat down at a table on the gloomy, unlighted stage, where a Portuguese company was mumbling and ranting through the "comedy" they were to sible. I sprang the incredible Chilean contract. No, he would only split even; there we stuck for some time. But the manager was adaptable, and we finally agreed that I should get sixty per cent. of the gross receipts during our sections. It took me all the evening to draw up the contracts with the rink, write the contents of them in English for "Tut" and in Portuguese for Carlos, and detail to the manager our several advertising schemes; but I went to bed at last as highly satisfied with myself as it is well for frail humanity to be. 8 6 In the best room available of the best hotel of São Carlos I could scarcely turn around without barking my shins, and the window opened so directly on the sidewalk that the shoulder of every passer-by seemed to jostle me. The weather was as volatile as a Brazilian, with heavy downpours for ten minutes alternating with ten minutes of sunshine. I waded down into the valley through wide streets reeking in bloodred mud and up to the Theatro São Carlos, the manager-owner of which I at length unearthed, despite the prevarications of his negro servants, in an office over the garage. I had his name signed to duplicate contracts when he remarked casually: "Of course Edison himself comes with the show? Our people will be as anxious to see him as to get acquainted with his new invention, of which I have heard such splendid reports." "Why-er-it may be, perhaps, that he will not be able to get here," I stammered. "You see, he has several little things on hand; besides, he is a married man and-and-" How excellent my Portuguese and my winning salesman manner had become was proved by the fact that in the end I did not have to abrogate the contract for two days at the Theatro São Carlos. I traveled on northward. Contracts for the various towns of São Paulo were in my pocket, and the Kinetophone was booked for several weeks ahead. Soon we were completely surrounded by coffee-bushes, which actually brushed the sides of the train and stretched away unbrokenly into the dense blue horizon for mile after swift mile. Endless and straight and unerring as the files of a welltrained army, up and down over hill and dale with never the slightest break in alinement, ran the rows. Down in the hollow of each fazenda there were long rows of whitewashed huts with dull-red tile roofs, all run together into one or two buildings, sometimes with a church attached. The soil was red, that ubiquitous red which is tracked along the sidewalks and into every shop and dwelling, until the whole town, the children that play in it, and the men that work in it take on a pinkish hue. On beyond Riberão Preto we steamed for hours out of the vast coffee-lined basin on the train which left at dawn and took all day to get to the next town of any size. Coffee-fields at length gave way to brush-covered campo and scattered grazing cattle, the train winding in great curves around slight hills like water seeking an outlet, or a lost person wholly undecided which way to go. Early in the afternoon we crossed the Rio Grande into the State of Minas Geraes. Here we passed one station 3400 feet high, and all but shook ourselves and the cars to pieces as we rattled down again into Uberaba, 2500 feet high, just as the day was escaping over beyond the mountains. The Crystal Heart By PHYLLIS BOTTOME, Author of "The Dark Tower,” etc. SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS I-VIII. From the beginning Joy Featherstone smiled unexactingly at a universe that she loved. She was nine when Rosemary, last of a large family, was born, and Joy knew she could never love anything so much again, not Maude, her companion sister, or Nicolas Pennant, who loved her better than any one else, despite Maude's desire for first place in his affections. Rosemary developed a rare and incurable wasting disease, and the long task of caring for her lay chiefly in Joy's devoted hands. She gave herself completely to fighting the child's unbearable pain, and after her death, she refused to marry Nicolas because of her horror at the thought of having a child who might suffer as Rosemary suffered. Nicolas thinks her horror is for him as a lover, and while Joy visits his married sister Julia, he allows himself to become engaged to Maude. Julia, to whom Joy has confessed her vanishing fear, writes him an explanation, but Joy and Nicolas agree on the impossibility of hurting Maude. HE wedding went off very well. and Featherstone circles usually went Maude made an excellent bride; it was almost a pity that so much brisk competence should be confined to one occasion, but there was nothing in the robust appearance of Nicolas which promised to provide her with a further opportunity. Nicolas stood up to his wedding as he would have stood up to be shot. No one could have told whether he was willing to be either married or shot, but they could be perfectly sure IX that he would go through the ordeal as if he were willing, if he considered it necessary to go through it at all. There was something about Nicolas's will as compulsory as a prison wall within which he condemned himself to solitary confinement. Joy worked up to the last moment of the wedding, and mercifully through everything except the actual service. She had to remember lists of things which still needed the holding together of a careful eye. She dressed the bride and stood behind her at the altar. There were four bridesmaids, but Joy was the maid of honor. She could see Nicolas's unchanging face and steady eye whenever she looked up. He stood like a figure carved out of stone, and even when she could not see him, she knew how he looked. They went through the whole long, old-fashioned service, and several hymns sung with penetrating ardor by their two village choirs. Everything was perfectly in order. The bride and bridegroom were told quite clearly what was expected of them, and about the whole transaction there was that particular blend of violent idealism and hard common sense which is so often found when the laws of God and man are expected to conform to one another. Joy was a devout churchwoman, but it just flashed through her mind as she listened to the stately homily pronounced by the vicar that something or other, she did n't quite know what, escaped. A few weeks after the wedding, while Nicolas and Maude were still enjoying their honeymoon (they had decided to spend it upon the golf course at St. Andrews'), Joy received a startling letter from Julia. An accident had happened to her which did n't seem very clear even after Julia had rather elaborately ex plained it. She had gone up, she wrote, to the roof to have a look at a choked drain-pipe, and, slipping on a dead leaf, had fallen forty feet to the ground. She ought, she supposed, to have been killed; but she was n't in the least dead, and, barring rather a badly broken leg, none the worse for her fall. But would Joy care to come and look after her household for her until she could get about again? She knew it was rather a tall order, but the servants were good and already devoted to Joy, and she could n't trust any one else. Still, Joy must not come if she would rather not, if for any reason she would rather not. Julia underlined this statement. She added: I know all about the wedding. Please don't tell me how beautiful a bride Maude looked. I thought you 'd have the sense to go home and stop it. When I found you had n't, I wrote to Nicolas, I dare say you won't thank me, and it appears to have been as useful as most attempts to put crooked things straight; but I can't bear to see a thing that can be helped forced into a stage where it can't. Don't worry about them, though; they'll probably come out all right in the end, and hardly know it if they don't. They have n't got any illusions to trip them up. It 's you I mind about. Not that I think you really cared, but it's dreadful to begin to care and to be left with that particular feeling on your hands. Try not to be left long. I dare say you think it matters dreadfully whom you marry, but I don't think it does nearly as much as one imagines, provided the man is straight. Don't be too romantic; take my word for it, it does n't pay. The twins are getting on splendidly. They roar like the bulls of Bashan, and spend all their time waxing fat and kicking. Yours ever, JULIA. P. S. It really does n't pay being too romantic. This was an odd letter to receive from Julia Pennant, who was the happiest woman in the world. It puzzled Joy so much that she gave it to her mother to read. Mrs. Featherstone was apparently even more struck by it than Joy had been. She read it through twice, and then asked rather irrelevantly: "What do you think of Owen Ransome, Joy?" Joy said at once that he was the most entertaining and sympathetic person she had ever met. He was full of kindness and tact. It was a pity he did n't lead a life that was more worth while; but he was extremely rich, and often went to London or even to Paris and Antwerp for meetings on international finance. Still, most of his life was taken up with amusements; however, even the amusements were perhaps part of the upkeep of a business career. Joy did n't know much about business, but whatever she knew about Owen Ransome was to his credit, and she liked to praise him. Mrs. Featherstone listened to her for some time in silence, then she said: "People lead the kind of lives they are, unless they are quite abominably weak, when they are led by other people. Good people lead lives that are worth while. If they do not, I do not think they can be good." very well" comes extremely easily. There seems to me no good reason why he should not be fond of his twins." Joy looked a little uncomfortable. She could not quite give her reasons for thinking Owen good, but she knew she thought him good. Sometimes she was a little less sure about Julia, Julia had so manifestly changed. It really did seem sometimes to Joy that Julia had become a little worldly. She hoped her mother would not ask her any very direct question about Julia; but Mrs. Featherstone seemed to connect the two subjects in some mysterious way, for she said after a pause: "I knew Julia Pennant very well, and I always liked her very much. I do not like that letter at all. Particularly I dislike her reference to Nicolas. Nicolas is married now. "But I know Owen is good," said There is nothing more that can be Joy, doubtfully. "You mean you know he is pleasant," corrected Mrs. Featherstone. "People can afford to be pleasant without any very high moral standard." conveniently said about him. Don't look so distressed, child. I do not blame you in any way. You have behaved very well, but I hesitate to give my consent to your returning to the house of any one who can write in such "He 's fond of his twins," said Joy, a hard and flippant spirit. protestingly. "They 're nice, healthy children," observed Mrs. Featherstone, "and he is a rich man to whom fatherhood "It is an unreserved letter, too, and I never knew Julia Pennant unreserved when she quite obviously should not be. Marriage has dete |
