“I know I ’ave enemies,” said Susan bitterly; “I know I am hated in this low neighbourhood. But I don’t see what them should hate me for, for I never interfere wid any of them.”
“Them hate y’u because you are better than them, and because y’u don’t mix with them,” sagaciously answered Catherine, her second sister.
“That they will never get me to do,” snapped Susan. “I wouldn’t mix with a lot of people who are not my companions, even if them was covered from top to toe with gold. It is bad enough that I have to live near them, but further than that I am not going. It is ‘good morning’ and ‘good evening’ with me, an’ that is all.”
“Then them will always hate you,”, said Catherine, “and if them can injure y’u them will try to do it.”
Catherine referred to most of the people living in the immediate vicinity, between Susan and whom a fierce feud had existed for some months. It was born of envy and nurtured by malice, and Susan knew that well. She dressed better than most of the girls in the lane, she lived in a “front house,” while most of them had to be content with ordinary yard-rooms. She frequently went for rides on the electric cars, whereas they could only afford such pleasure on Sundays and on public holidays. She carried herself with an air of social superiority which was gall and wormwood to the envious; and often on walking through the lane she had noticed the contemptuous looks of those whom, with greater contempt, she called the common folks and treated with but half-concealed disdain. On the whole, she had rather enjoyed the hostility of these people, for it was in its way a tribute to her own importance. But now a discomforting development had taken place in the manner in which the dislike of the neighbourhood habitually showed itself.
This evening Susan sat by one of the windows of the little house in which she lived, and which opened on the lane. It contained two tiny rooms: the inner apartment was her bedroom, her two sisters sleeping with her; the outer one was a sitting-room by day and a bedroom at night, when it was occupied by her father and mother. The house had originally been painted white and green, but the dust of Kingston had discoloured the painting somewhat; hence its appearance was now shabby and faded, though not as much so as that of the other buildings on either side of it. Opposite was an ancient fence dilapidated and almost black; behind this fence were two long ranges of rooms, in which people of the servant classes lived. The comparison between these and Susan’s residence was all in favour of the latter; and as this house overlooked the lane, and was detached from the buildings in the yard to which it belonged, its rental value was fairly high and its occupants were supposed to be of a superior social position.
The gutters on both sides of the lane ran with dirty soap-water, and banana skins, orange peel and bits of brown paper were scattered over the roughly macadamized ground. Lean dogs reclined in the centre of the patch, or prowled about seeking scraps of food which they never seemed to find. In the daytime, scantily-clad children played in the gutters; a few slatternly women, black and brown, drawled out a conversation with one another as they lounged upon the doorsteps; all during the long hours of the sunlight the sound of singing was heard as some industrious housewives washed the clothes of their families and chanted hymns as they worked; and now and then a cab or cart passed down the lane, disturbing for a little while the peaceful tenor of its way.
There were no sidewalks, or rather, there were only the vestiges of sidewalks to be seen. For the space which had been left for these by the original founders of the city had more or less been appropriated by householders who thought that they themselves could make excellent use of such valuable territory. Here a house was partly built on what was once a portion of the sidewalk; there a doorstep marked the encroachment that had taken place on public property; between these an empty space showed that the owner of the intermediate yard had not as yet been adventurous enough to extend his fence beyond its proper limits. Most of the houses that opened on the lane were of one storey, and built of wood, with foundations of red brick. An air of slow decay hung over nearly all of them, though now and then you saw a newly painted building which looked a little out of place in such surroundings.
Susan saw that hers was by no means the shabbiest of these houses, and Susan knew that she was the finest-looking young woman in that section of the lane in which she lived. It was her physical attractions that had helped her to comparative prosperity. In the euphemistic language of the country, she was “engaged” to a young man who was very liberal with his money; he came to see her two or three times a week; and though of late he had not seemed quite so ardent as before, Susan had not troubled to inquire the reason of his shortened visits. He had never hitherto failed on a Friday night to bring for her her weekly allowance, and that she regarded as a sufficiently substantial proof of his continued affection.
But now she felt that she must take some thought of the future. Thrice during the current week she had been openly laughed at by Mother Smith, a peculiarly objectionable old woman who lived about a hundred yards farther up the lane. Mother Smith had passed her house, and, looking up at the window, had uttered with a malignant air of triumph, “If you can’t catch Quaco, you can catch his shirt.” Meaningless as the words might have appeared to the uninitiated, Susan had immediately divined their sinister significance. She knew that Mother Smith had a daughter of about her own age, whose challenging attractiveness had always irritated her. Because Maria, though black, was comely, Susan had made a point of ignoring Maria’s existence; she had never thought of Maria as a possible rival, however, so confident was she of her ascendancy over her lover, and so certain was she that Maria could never be awarded the prize for style and beauty if Susan Proudleigh happened to be near. Still, there could be no mistaking the triumphant insolence of Mother Smith’s glance or the meaning of her significant words.
Tom’s growing coldness now found an explanation. The base plot hatched against her stood revealed in all its hideous details. What was she to do? She did not want to quarrel with Tom outright, and so perhaps frighten him away for ever. That perhaps was precisely what her enemies were hoping she would do. After thinking over the matter and finding herself unable to decide what course of action to adopt, she had put the problem before her family; and her aunt, Miss Proudleigh, happening to come in just then, she also had been invited to give her opinion and suggest a plan.
Susan soon began to realize that she could not expect much wisdom from their united counsel. They all knew that she was not liked by the neighbours; unfortunately, Mother Smith’s design was a factor in the situation which seemed to confuse them utterly. They had gone over the ground again and again. Catherine had said the last word, and it was the reverse of helpful. For a little while they sat in silence, then Susan mechanically repeated Catherine’s words, “If them can injure me, them will try to do it.”
“They does dislike you, Susan,” agreed her aunt, by way of continuing the conversation, “an’ if them can hurt you, them will do it. But, after all, the Lord is on your side.” This remark proved to Susan that at such a crisis as this her family was worse than hopeless. She turned impatiently from the window and faced Miss Proudleigh.
“I don’t say the Lord is not on my side,” she exclaimed; “but Mother Smith is against me, an’ the devil is on her side, an’ if I am not careful Mother Smith will beat me.”
As no one answered, she went on, “Mother Smith wouldn’t talk like she is talking if she didn’t know what she was talking about. She want Tom for Maria, her big-mouth daughter. She an’ Maria tryin’ to take Tom from me—I know it. But, Lord! I will go to prison before them do it!” She had risen while speaking, and her clenched hands and gleaming eyes showed clearly that she was not one over whom an easy victory could be obtained.
She was of middle height, slimly built, and of dark brown complexion. Her lips were thin and pouting, her chin rather salient; her nose stood out defiantly, suggesting a somewhat pugnacious disposition. Her hair, curly but fairly long, was twisted into several plaits and formed a sort of turban on her head; her eyes, large, black, and vivacious, were the features of which she was proudest, for she knew the uses to which they could be put. As her disposition was naturally lively, these eyes of hers usually seemed to be laughing. But just now they were burning and flashing with anger; and those who knew Susan well did not care to cross her when one of these moods came on.
Her father saw her wrath and trembled; then immediately cast about in his mind for some word of consolation that might appease his daughter. He was a tall, thin man, light brown in complexion, and possessed of that inability to arrive at positive decisions which is sometimes described as a judicial frame of mind. He was mildly fond of strong liquors; yet even when under their influence he managed to maintain a degree of mental uncertitude, a sort of intellectual sitting on the fence, which caused his friends to believe that his mental capacity was distinctly above the average. By these friends he was called Schoolmaster, and he wore the title with dignity. By way of living up to it he usually took three minutes to say what another person would have said in one. That is to say, he delighted in almost endless circumlocution.
It was even related of Mr. Proudleigh that, one night, no lamp having yet been lit, he surreptitiously seized hold of a bottle he found on a table and took a large sip from it, thinking the liquor it contained was rum. It happened to be kerosene oil; but such was his self-control that, instead of breaking into strong language as most other men would have done, he muttered that the mistake was very regrettable, and was merely sad and depressed during the remainder of the evening. Such a man, it is clear, was not likely to allow his feelings to triumph over his judgment, though upon occasion, and when it suited his interests, he was ready to agree with the stronger party in any argument. Though he now felt somewhat alarmed by Susan’s suspicions, and knew it was a matter of the first importance that Tom, her lover, and especially Tom’s wages, should be retained as an asset in the family, he could not quite agree that Susan had very good cause for serious apprehension as yet. Up to now he had said very little; he was convinced that he had not sufficient evidence before him on which to pronounce a judgment. He thought, too, that his hopeful way of looking at the situation might help her at this moment; so, his mild, lined face wearing a profoundly deliberative expression, he gave his opinion.
“I don’t think you quite right, Susan,” he observed; “but, mind, I don’t say y’u is wrong. Mother Smit is a woman I don’t like at all. But de Scripture told us, judge not lest we be not judged, an’ perhaps Mother Smit don’t mean you at all when she talk about Quaco.”
On hearing this, Susan’s mother, a silent, elderly black woman with a belligerent past, screwed up her mouth by way of expressing her disapproval of her husband’s point of view. Mrs. Proudleigh was a firm believer in the unmitigated wickedness of her sex, but judged it best to say nothing just then. Susan, however, annoyed by the perverseness of her father, burst out with:
“Then see here, sah, if she don’t mean me an’ my young man, who can she mean? Don’t Mother Smith always say I am forward? Don’t she pass the house this morning an’ throw her words on me? Don’t Maria call out ‘Look at her’ when I was passing her yard yesterday? Tut, me good sah, don’t talk stupidness to me! If you don’t have nothing sensible to say, you better keep you’ mouth quiet. I am going to Tom’s house to-night, to-night. And Tom will ’ave to tell me at once what him have to do with Maria.”
“I will go with you,” said Catherine promptly. She was a sturdy young woman of nineteen years of age, and not herself without a sneaking regard for Tom. Hence, on personal as well as on financial grounds, she objected to Tom’s being taken possession of by Maria and Maria’s mother.
The old man, rather fearing that Susan’s wrath might presently be turned against himself, discreetly refrained from making any further remark; but his sister, an angular lady of fifty, with a great reputation for intelligence and militant Christianity, seeing that Susan’s mind was fully made up as to Maria’s guilt, and being herself in the habit of passing severe comment on the conduct of the absent, determined to support her niece.
“But some female are really bad!” she observed, as if in a soliloquy. “Some female are really bad. Now here is poor Susan not interfering wid anybody. She got her intended. He take his own foot an’ he walk down the lane, an’ he fall in love with her. It is true she don’t marry him yet, but she is engaged. She is engage, and therefore it is an unprincipled sin for any other female to trouble her intended an’ take him away from her. If Maria want a young man, why don’t she go an’ look for one? Why she an’ her mother want to trouble Susan’s one poor lamb, when there is ninety and nine others to pick an’ choose from? Really some female is wicked!”
A speech like this, coming from a woman whose lack of physical charms was more than made up for by strength of moral character, was naturally hailed with great approval by Susan, Catherine, and their mother. The old man himself, never willing to be permanently in a minority, now went so far as to admit that the whole affair was “very provocating,” and added that if he was a younger man he would do several things of a distinctly heroic and dangerous character.
But all this, though in its way very encouraging, was not exactly illuminating. It only brought Susan back to the point from which she had started. “What am I to do?” she asked for the last time, reduced to despair, and sinking back into her seat despondently.
“If I was you,” said Catherine at last deliberately, “I would catch hold of Maria, and beat her till she bawl.”
This advice appealed to Susan; it corresponded with the wish of her own heart. But she doubted the efficacy of physical force in dealing with a difficult and delicate situation. No: a beating would not do; besides, in the event of an encounter, it might be Maria who would do the beating! Susan saw plainly that no word of a helpful nature would be forthcoming from any of the anxious group, who usually appealed to her for advice and assistance. So when Miss Proudleigh was again about to give some further opinions on the general wickedness of females, she got up abruptly, saying that she was going round to Tom’s house to see him. Catherine rose to accompany her, and after putting on their hats the two girls left the room.
It was about eight o’clock; and, save for a few lights gleaming faintly here and there in the yards and the little houses, the lane was in darkness. It was quiet, too; only three or four persons were to be seen moving about, and the innumerable dogs would not begin to bark until nearly everybody had gone to bed. A stranger standing at one of the numerous crossings that intersected the lane, and looking up or down the narrow way, might imagine he was peering into some gloomy tunnel were it not for the brilliancy of the stars overhead. The cross-streets were very much brighter and livelier, and that one towards which Susan and her sister directed their steps was particularly bright.
A Chinaman’s shop at the lane corner opened upon this street. To the right of this, and also opening on the street, was another shop presided over by an elderly woman. It was small, but contained a comparatively large quantity of things which found ready sale in the neighbourhood; such as pints of porter, little heaps of ripe bananas, loaves of bread, coarse straw hats, charcoal, pieces of sugar-cane, tin whistles, reels of thread and peppermint cakes. On the opposite side of the crossing were other shops, and on either hand, east and west, as far as the eye could reach, were still more shops standing between fairly large two-storeyed dwelling-houses of brick and wood. On the piazzas women squatted selling native sweetmeats and fruit. To the west, in the middle distance, two or three taverns blazed with light; away to the east was a great crowd of people singing, and in the midst of this crowd jets of flame streamed upwards from the unprotected wicks of huge oil-lamps. These lamps gave off thick columns of black smoke which slowly drifted over the heads of the sable, white-clothed revivalists who passionately preached on the always approaching end of the world, and called upon their hearers to repent them of their sins.
People were continually passing up and down. They passed singly or in groups, the latter discussing loudly their private affairs, careless as to who might hear: even love-making couples ignored the proximity of other human beings, and laughed and chatted as though there was no one within a mile of them. Many of these pedestrians were barefooted, but most of them wore shoes or slippers of some sort. A few were in rags, but the majority were fairly well dressed, for this was a populous thoroughfare, and the people took some pride in their appearance. A number of children hung about, playing with one another or gazing idly at the passing show; a fine grey dust lay thick upon the ground; gas-lamps placed at wide distances apart burned dimly, so that large spaces of the street were in shadow. Cabs conveying passengers home or on visits drove by frequently, and every now and then the electric cars flew by, stirring up a cloud of dust which almost blinded one, and which for a moment shrouded the street with a moving, impalpable veil. There was life here, there was movement, and while the revivalists prayed and preached in the distance, the candy sellers near by plaintively invited the young to come and purchase their wares, the proprietors of little ice-cream carts declaimed vociferously that they sold the best cream ever manufactured, and the vendors of pea-nuts screamed out that baked pea-nuts were strengthening, enlivening, and comforting. This was the life of the street.
At the right-hand corner of the lane, where the Chinaman’s shop stood, was a gas-lamp, and the gossiping groups about the spot indicated that it was a favourite rendezvous of the people of the vicinity. Susan never condescended to linger for a moment there; that would have been beneath her dignity. But Maria, her rival, sometimes paused at the corner when going for a walk, to talk for a while with a possible admirer or with a friend if she should happen to meet one. To-night Maria was standing under the gas-lamp conversing gaily with two girls. Evidently she was in a happy frame of mind.
“Yes,” she was saying, in answer to a question put to her by one of the girls, “I am goin’ to tell her so. She is proud an’ she is forward; but she will soon sing a different tune. I wonder what she would say now if she did know dat her lover write me two letters last week, an’ say that him love me! I don’t answer him yet, but him say him coming to see me to-morrow night. You watch! If I want to teck Tom from her, I have only to lift me little finger. An’ I am not too sure I won’t do it.”
She laughed as she spoke of her prospective victory over Susan; but her friends, though they hated Susan, were not particularly delighted with the news they heard. They were agreed that Susan ought to be humbled, but that was no reason why Maria should be exalted. It was, therefore, not altogether in a cheerful tone of voice that the elder one asked Maria:
“Y’u think Tom going to come to you?”
“Him almost come to me already,” replied Maria, with pride. “Look what him send for me last night!”
She thrust her hand into her pocket as she spoke. As she was taking out Tom’s present, Susan and her sister emerged into the light.
Both Susan and Maria caught sight of each other at the same moment. And each realized in a flash that the other knew the true position of affairs. The glare of hate from Susan’s eyes was answered by a contemptuous stare and a peal of derisive laughter from Maria. Susan’s sister and Maria’s friends at once understood that a desperate struggle had begun between the two.
Maria’s ringing jeer was more than any ordinary woman could tolerate. Susan tried to answer it with a laugh as contemptuous, but failed, her wrath choking her. Then she put all pretence aside, and swiftly moving up to Maria she thrust her face into the face of the other girl. “See here, ma’am,” she hissed, “I want to ask you one thing: is it me you laughing at?”
“But stop!” exclaimed Maria, backing away a little, and defiantly placing her arms akimbo. “Stop! You ever see my trial! Then I can’t laugh without your permission, eh?” Saying which she laughed again as contemptuously as before, and swung round with a flounce so as to bring one of her elbows into unpleasant proximity to Susan’s waist.
“I don’t say you can’t laugh, an’ I don’t care if y’u choose to laugh till you drop,” cried Susan bitterly; “but I want to tell you that y’u can’t laugh at me!”
“So you’re better than everybody else?” sneered Maria. “Y’u think you are so pretty, eh? Well! there is a miss for you! She can’t even behave herself in de public street, though she always walk an’ shake her head as if she was a princess, an’ though she call herself ‘young lady.’ But perhaps she think she lose something good, an’ can’t recover from the loss as yet!” And again that maddening peal of laughter rang out.
Susan did not answer Maria directly. She eyed that young woman swiftly, and noticed that her dress was old and her shoes poor and dusty. This gave her the advantage she needed in dealing with a girl who was all contempt while she herself was all temper. She turned to her sister and to Maria’s friends, and pointed to Maria with scorn.
“Look at her!” she cried. “Look how she stand! Her face is like a cocoa-nut trash, and she don’t even have a decent frock to put on!”
Maria might have passed over the reference to her face; she knew it was only spiteful abuse. But the allusion to the scantiness of her wardrobe was absolutely unforgivable. If not exactly true, it yet approached perilously near the truth, and so it cut her to the quick. No sooner were the words uttered than Maria’s forefinger was wagging in Susan’s face, and:
“Say that again, an’ I box you!” she screamed.
“Box me?” hissed Susan. “Box me? My good woman, this would be the last day of you’ life. Take you’ hand out of me face at once—take it out, I say—take it out!”—and without waiting to see whether Maria would remove the offending member, she seized it and pushed Maria violently away.
In a moment the two were locked in one another’s arms. There was a sound of heavy blows, two simultaneous shrieks of “Murder!” and a hasty movement of about forty persons towards the scene of the combat.
Catherine now thought it time to interfere. She threw herself upon the combatants, making a desperate but vain attempt to separate them. Maria’s friends protested loudly that Susan was ill-treating Maria, though, as the latter was at least as strong as Susan, it was difficult to see where the ill-treatment came in. A dignified-looking man standing on the piazza loudly remonstrated with the crowd for allowing “those two females to fight,” but made not the slightest effort himself to put a stop to the struggle. The little boys and girls in the vicinity cheered loudly. The one thing lacking was a policeman. Noticing this, the dignified-looking man audibly expressed his opinion on the inefficiency of the force.
“Let me go, I say, let me go!” gasped Susan, her head being somewhere under Maria’s right arm.
“You wants to kill me!” stammered Maria, whose sides Susan was squeezing with all the strength she possessed—“murder, murder!”
But neither one would let the other go. Neither one was much hurt as yet. The struggle continued about a minute longer, when some one in the crowd shouted, “Policeman coming!”
Then indeed both Susan and Maria came to their senses. They separated, and vainly tried to put on an appearance of composure. It was time, for yonder, moving leisurely through the crowd, now composed of over a hundred persons, was the policeman who had been spied by one of the spectators. The girls made no effort to run, for that would surely have provoked the policeman to an unusual display of energy, and, justly angered at having been compelled to exert himself, he might have arrested them both on the charge of obstructing him in the execution of his duty. They waited where they stood, their eyes still flashing, their bosoms heaving, and their bodies trembling with rage.
But angry as she was, Susan had already begun to feel ashamed of fighting in the street. She had always had a horror of street scenes; people of her class did not participate in them; before this event she would not have thought it possible that she could ever be mixed up in such an affair as this. Oh, the humiliation of being handled by a constable! She heartily wished she were a thousand miles from the spot.
In the meantime the policeman, having arrived at the outskirts of the crowd, began busily to work his way through to the centre. True to its traditions, the crowd was hostile to him and friendly to the culprits; so some of the women managed to put themselves in his way, then angrily asked him what he was pushing them for.
“What is all dis?” was his first question as he came up to the spot where Susan and Maria stood. “What is de meaning of this?” He looked fixedly at the gas-lamp as if believing that that object could give him the most lucid explanation of the circumstances.
Nobody answered.
“What is all dis, I say?” he again demanded in a more peremptory tone of voice.
“These two gals was fighting, sah,” explained a small boy, in the hope of seeing somebody arrested.
“Mind your own business, buoy!” was all the reward the policeman gave him for his pains, and then the arm of the law, feeling that something was expected of him, proceeded to deliver a speech.
“The truth of de matter is dis,” he observed, looking round with an air of grave authority: “You common folkses are too ignorant. You are ignorant to extreme. You ever see white ladies fight in de street? Answer me that!”
No one venturing to answer, he continued:
“White people don’t fight in de street, because them is ladies and gentleman. But I can’t understand the people of my own colour; they have no respect for themself!”
He spoke more in sorrow than in anger; almost as though he were bitterly lamenting the deficiencies of the working classes. But Susan, though in trouble, would not even then allow herself to be classed with the policeman and others in the category of “common folkses.” “I am not common,” she answered defiantly; “I am not your set!”
“Silence, miss!” thundered the policeman, scandalized. “I am the law! Do you know dat?”
“I never see a black law yet,” cheekily replied Susan, who thought that, if she had to be arrested, there would be at least some satisfaction in humiliating the policeman.
“If y’u say another impertinence word I will arrest you!” was the policeman’s threat. “Now de whole of you walk right off! Right off, I say, or I teck you all to jail!” He included the crowd with one comprehensive sweep of his arm, perceiving that his edifying attempt to awaken in his audience a sense of respectability had not been favourably received.
There was no disputing his authority, especially as he had begun to get angry. Susan knew, too, that she had mortally offended him by claiming to belong to a better class than his: which remark had also lost her the sympathy of the greater part of the crowd. So she was the first to take advantage of his command, and Maria followed her example by disappearing as quickly as she could. In another minute or two the normal activity of the street had been resumed, and the policeman had again started upon his beat, hoping that he would no more be disturbed that night. But both Susan and Maria knew that the fight would have a sequel. For war had now openly been declared between them.
“I will have to bring ’er up!”
It was Susan who spoke. She had returned to the house, where the news of the fight had preceded her. The whole family had been on the point of issuing forth to her rescue when she appeared, and now they were again assembled in full conclave to discuss at length this new aspect of the situation.
“?‘Vengeance is mine,’?” quoted her aunt; “but there is a time for all things. An’ if y’u don’t teach a gurl like Maria a lesson, she will go far wid you.”
“She is a very rude young ooman!” exclaimed Mr. Proudleigh with indignation, following up his sister’s remark; he felt that he must lend his daughter his moral support. “Ef I was a younger man,” he went on, “I would . . . I would . . . well, I don’t know what I wouldn’t do! But Mother Smit is a dangerous female to interfere wid, and de cramps is troubling me in me foot so badly dat I wouldn’t like ’er to put ’er hand ’pon me at all.”
“Ef she ever touch you,” his wife broke in, “old as I is, she an’ me would have to go to prison.”
“You was always a courigous gal, Mattie,” said the old man approvingly; “but I don’t want to see y’u get into any quarrel; an’ to tell you de trute, I don’t t’ink I could help you at all. Susan is goin’ to bring up Maria, an’ that is a satisfaction. I are going to de court-house wid ’er to encourage her.”
“But suppose Susan lose the case?” Catherine suggested. She had been a witness of the encounter, and though she fully intended to forget every fact that would make against Susan in the court-house, she was sagacious enough to realize that Maria’s friends would not do likewise.
“Lose me case?” asked Susan incredulously. “That can’t be done! She provoked me first, an’ the judge must take note of that. Besides, I am goin’ to put a good lawyer on her: not a fool-fool man that can’t talk, but a man who will question her properly an’ make her tell de truth.”
“Dat is right,” said Mr. Proudleigh with proud anticipation of coming victory. “Sue, I advise you to get de Attorney-General.”
“I never hear about him,” Miss Proudleigh remarked; “an’ it won’t do for Susan to get a lawyer we don’t know. But who to get?”
As Mr. Proudleigh knew nothing about the leader of the local bar except his name, he decided not to urge the claims of that high official upon his daughter. One after another, the names of the several lawyers of whom the family had heard were mentioned, and their various merits were discussed. As this was to be the most important case ever tried—or at least so the family thought—it was of the utmost importance that the brightest legal luminary should be obtained: the difficulty was to select one from the many whose reputation for ability commended them all as fit and proper persons to prosecute Maria Bellicant for assault and abusive language. At last Miss Proudleigh suggested a lawyer whose cleverness in handling witnesses determined to perjure themselves had often appealed to her admiration. Having once mentioned his name with approval, the worthy lady thought it was incumbent upon her to argue away all that might be said against him and all that might be urged in favour of other solicitors; and at length Susan decided that she would go to see Lawyer Jones in the morning. Miss Proudleigh was so delighted with the prospect of having Mr. Jones proceed against Maria, that during the rest of the time she remained at the house she could talk of nothing but that lawyer’s merits. But on leaving she reminded Susan of the value of prayer as a consolation for all the troubles of life, and suggested that supplications made properly and in a reverent spirit might lead to Maria’s being afflicted with manifold ills throughout the rest of her days.
After Miss Proudleigh had left, the family sat up until twelve o’clock discussing the fight and the coming case. And in many of the yards and houses of the lane the fight also formed the topic of discussion. In the yard where Maria lived some thirty persons assembled to express their sympathy with her and to give fervent utterance to the hope that she had beaten Susan properly. They were comforted on learning from Maria that she had. Mother Smith herself performed a sort of war dance about the premises, showing in pantomime what she would do as soon as she should lay hands upon Susan and Susan’s people, down to the third and fourth generation. Everybody agreed that Maria had been most shamefully ill-treated, and one of the girls who had been with Maria at the street corner went so far as to “think” she had seen Susan draw a pair of scissors out of her pocket, presumably to stab Maria. Indeed, in some of the tenement yards it was actually reported that blood had been drawn, one eye-witness even undertaking to describe the wounds. Altogether, it was a very exciting night in that section of the lane in which the girls lived, and almost every one was glad that Susan had at last met her match.
The excitement was kept alive the next day by the news that Susan had brought up Maria. Maria had been expecting this, for she had rightly calculated that no girl in Susan’s financial position would forgo the luxury of a case in court after such a fight. Maria was poor, but she felt that the only proper thing to do in the circumstances was to “cross the warrant”; so she went and crossed it that same day, and Mother Smith began to sell some of her scanty stock of furniture to raise enough money to employ a lawyer.
Susan acted very rapidly when her mind was made up. After leaving the court-house she had sent a note to Tom telling him to come round to see her that night; and Tom, who had already heard about the fight, came as requested.
He was a short, stoutish young fellow of about twenty-six years of age, and somewhat lighter in complexion than Susan. His watery eyes, weak mouth, and tip-tilted nose showed a man of little strength of character; you would rightly have described him as a nondescript sort of person. He took great pride in his appearance, always used cheap scents on Sundays, and carried on his amours as surreptitiously as possible. He had a horror of domestic quarrels, and though it was true that he had been attracted by Maria’s appearance, fear of Susan’s temper had kept him fairly faithful to his vows of eternal constancy. He had flirted just a little with Maria. He had made her one or two presents. He had written her a couple of letters; he was rather (perhaps dangerously) fond of writing letters. But Susan overawed him, and in the midst of these amorous exercises he had devoutly hoped that she would never suspect him of even speaking to Maria. Judge of his consternation, therefore, when, after greeting him coldly and saying that she had sent for him because he did not seem to care now about coming to see her as often as before, she launched out upon a sea of reproaches, and overwhelmed him with perfectly just accusations. Naturally, he denied all intercourse with Maria, though remembering with a sinking heart that his own handwriting might be produced against him. But Susan evidently knew nothing about those letters: perhaps he could induce Maria to return them to him. He began to take heart—too soon. For Susan did not believe a word he said, though she pretended to do so in order to gain the end she had in view. She heard him out to the end, and after he had expressed his indignation at the conduct of Maria, and agreed with Susan that that young woman deserved severest punishment, she quietly said:
“I bring Maria up to-day.”
Tom was thunderstruck.
“You mean,” he stammered, “that you going into a court-house with that girl?”
“Yes,” she answered; “I make up me mind.”
“An’ then,” he protested heatedly, “my name will be called, an’ I will be mixed up in it! What you talkin’ about, Sue?”
“You’ name won’t be called,” she answered inflexibly. “What you fretting about? If you know, as you say, that you have nothing to do with Maria, you needn’t trouble you’self. It is me bringing her up, not you. Who is to call you’ name?”
Tom looked into her face, and realized that there was no turning her from her purpose. The two were alone in the day-sitting-room; but even if the rest of the family were there, he reflected ruefully, that would hardly assist him.
“I don’t like it,” he muttered dismally.
“Don’t fret about anything,” she cheerfully advised him as he bade her good-night. “You’ name won’t come into the case.”
But Tom left her with a sinking heart.
The eventful day of the case dawned at last, and found Susan and her family in a state of intense excitement. The case was to be tried in the Police Court, a building which had once been a barracks for the Imperial soldiers when troops were stationed in the city of Kingston. The courtyard of this building opened on one hand upon the city’s central park, a large plot of land planted out in umbrageous evergreens and flowering shrubs; on the other hand, it opened upon one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. Thus on the one side was an oasis of peace and beauty, while in the adjoining street to the west all was squalor and confusion. This street itself was filled with little shops and crowded with clamouring, gesticulating people. A market was there, and the echoes of shrieks of laughter and sudden volleys of abuse sometimes came to the magistrates and lawyers as they transacted their business in the court; but they accepted these minor interruptions as part of the settled order of things, and never complained about them. Carts rattling over the brick pavement, electric cars passing at frequent intervals and incessantly sounding their gongs to warn the careless people out of their way, diminutive venders shouting out the nature and superior quality of their wares—all this, with the inevitable clouds of dust which swept over and enveloped everything, made up the life and activity of the street. And dominating the whole scene stood the weather-worn, ugly, two-storeyed building which to so many thousands of the people was the awe-inspiring symbol of a vague and tremendous power called Law.
Both Susan and Maria knew the place well. They arrived there with their attendant retinues at a little before ten o’clock, the hour at which the court began to sit. Policemen were to be seen about the large courtyard, clad in white jackets and blue serge trousers and white helmets. They were the visible and self-conscious representatives of might, majesty, dominion, and power. Habitual criminals made remarks about them as they passed up and down amongst the scores of people who loitered in the courtyard; but they paid no attention to these, for freedom of ambiguous speech is the privilege of all habitual criminals.
Soon after their arrival, Susan and Maria entered the court-room with their friends to wait until their case should be called. They had been there more than once before as spectators, but now, as the principal actors in such a tremendous drama, they gazed about them with new and strange sensations.
The room was furnished in the plainest manner possible. At the southern end of it was a platform, on which stood a desk and a chair: these were for the magistrate. To the magistrate’s right was the witness box, and just below his desk was a table, with a number of chairs around it. Here the court serjeant, one or two police inspectors, and the lawyers sat. Behind these, and facing the magistrate, was the dock; behind this dock were ranged a few wooden benches without backs, and apparently designed for the purpose of inflicting the maximum amount of physical discomfort on those who might choose to sit on them. These were for the use of the spectators.
A case over, a trifling thing relating to a young lady with fifteen previous convictions for abusive language, the case of Susan Proudleigh v. Maria Bellicant was called. Maria, as the accused, took up her stand behind her lawyer, who rose and informed the magistrate that he appeared for her.
“Susan Proudleigh!” called the court serjeant, and Susan rose. But the policeman at the door, who acted as the crier of the court, would not be defrauded of his privilege of shouting out her name; so immediately his voice was heard screaming, “Su—u—u—san Pounder! Su—u—u—san Pounder! Su—u—u—san Pounder!” And another policeman outside took up the cry with, “Su—u—u—san Plummer! Su—u—u—san Plummer! Su—u—san Plummer!” and was about to return the verdict of “No answer,” when he learnt that the lady was inside.
Susan was motioned towards the witness box after Maria had vehemently pleaded not guilty to the charge of assault and battery. She felt nervous as she gazed around the crowded room, but she was comforted by the reflection that she looked very well in her white lawn frock trimmed with blue ribbons, with hat to match.
She took the book in her hand as directed, and swore that she would tell nothing but the truth. Then she stated her case.
“My Honour, I was walking me way quite quiet an’ peaceful down Blake Lane on Thursday night last week; I was goin’ for a walk, my Honour, an’ thinking about——”
“Never mind what you were thinking about,” said the magistrate; “go on.”
“Yes, my Honour. I was thinkin’ about me poor old father at home, when all of a sudden I see Maria Bellicant at the corner. I was goin’ to tell ’er good evening, because as I know I never do her nothing, I had no bad feelings against ’er, and——”
“Oh, never mind all that!” interrupted the magistrate impatiently; “we don’t want to hear about your feelings. Tell us the facts.”
This was distinctly disconcerting. Susan, who had been trying to manipulate her th’s properly so as to make a good impression upon His Honour, now began to think he was prejudiced against her. However, she went bravely on.
“I go up to Maria, my Honour, an’ I was going to say, ‘Good evening, Maria,’ when she look at me an’ laugh. An’ she say, ‘Look at this wort’less gal!’ I say to her, ‘But, Maria, why you call me wort’less?’ an’ I go up nearer up to ’er in a friendly spirit; an’ she take ’er elbow an’ push me, an’ I hold ’er hand, an’ she collar me an’ begin to beat me, an’ I bawl for murder.”
She paused, for this was her version of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Her lawyer asked her a few questions, the answers to which all tended to corroborate her story. She felt quite satisfied, believing that she had already won the case; but Maria’s lawyer rose very quietly, and intimated that he desired to ask her a few questions.
“Your name is Susan Proudleigh?” he asked, the tone of his voice suggesting that he thought the name might be an alias.
“Yes.”
“You live at No. 101 Blake Lane?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your intended’s name is Thomas Wooley?”
“What has that to do with the case?” asked the magistrate.
“A great deal, your Honour,” answered the lawyer. “Now, Susan,” he went on, “remember you are on your oath! Your sweetheart’s name is Thomas Wooley, isn’t it?”
Susan looked at him dumbly. But his “Answer me!” was too peremptory to be disobeyed.
“Yes,” she answered, and her heart sank, for she remembered what she had said to Tom about his name not being called.
“And he is tired of you, isn’t he?” her questioner continued mercilessly, rejoicing in her confusion.
“What you mean?”
“Answer my question, miss!” was again the command.
“No; him never tell me so.”
“Ah, now, don’t you know that Thomas is in love with Maria?”
“I don’t know dat at all; in fact, you ’ave no business——”
“Don’t you dare argue with me! Now when you met Maria Bellicant that night, and when you told her that she had stolen the clothes she had on——”
“I never tell ’er so!” Susan burst forth. “I tell ’er she didn’t ’ave a decent dress to wear!”
“Oh! so you provoked her, did you?”
Susan perceived that she had blundered, but the lawyer did not give her a chance to recover herself.
“Why did you provoke her? Answer me at once!” he insisted, and she was about to blunder further, when her lawyer rose and asked the magistrate if his client was to be intimidated and bullied in that fashion? He suggested that Susan had offered no provocation whatever, and, although the magistrate promptly stopped him, Susan caught the cue. She had to admit, however, that she had struck Maria after she herself had been struck, and Maria’s lawyer was satisfied that Susan’s principal witness would admit far more than that.
This witness was a young man, one Hezekiah Theophilus Wilberforce. Catherine had taken ill almost at the last moment, fear of the court-house having much to do with her sudden illness; so Susan had had to fall back upon the assistance of Hezekiah. Had she been sophisticated she might have tried to obtain the services of a professional witness. A few of these are always to be found in every West Indian town of any importance, and they perform the useful function of swearing to things they never saw. You relate the circumstances to them, and they find that they were in the vicinity of the occurrence (whatever it was) on the day or night in question; and, if they were not seen by any of the other witnesses, that may be attributed to the fact that the excitement was intense.
These men are well known to the magistrates and lawyers, and sometimes they are called upon to explain their astonishing ubiquity. But a man is by British law considered honest until he is proven to be a scoundrel, so these witnesses continue to flourish like green bay trees. Susan, however, knew nothing of the high mysteries of the law and the customs of the court. So Hezekiah had been selected by her, chiefly on the strength of his own recommendation, as a person most likely to give a graphic and satisfactory account of the ill-treatment she had suffered at the hands of Maria Bellicant.
Hezekiah had always had an ambition to figure as something in a court of justice. Not being able to prosecute anybody himself, he longed for the time when he should “kiss de book,” and then proceed to tell a story which should assist in sending a fellow-creature to prison. On his name being called, he came into the court all smiles, and holding high his shining head, as one who realized the importance of being a witness. He repeated the story that Susan had told, varying it only by a detailed description of the treatment to which she had been subjected. Asked by the magistrate why he had not attempted to separate the girls, he replied with a grin that “horse don’t have business in cow’s fight,” a reason which, he thought, amply explained his apparent cowardice. That said, he was about to step down from the box, not anticipating that anything further would be required of him, when Maria’s lawyer abruptly asked him where he was going to?
He paused, confused by the sharp and even threatening tone of the lawyer, who knew his type well.
“Hezekiah, what do you do for a living?” was the first question put to him.
The question was quite unexpected, and it was simply impossible for Hezekiah to answer it straightforwardly. For the truth was that he did nothing for a living. While he stared open-mouthed at the lawyer, wondering what to say, the latter called His Honour’s attention to the fact that the witness could not answer a simple question about his own means of livelihood, and then suggested that Hezekiah must either be a thief or a loafer.
The magistrate was peremptory. “What do you do for a living?” he asked.
“Me mother help me, sah, an’ me uncle,” stammered poor Hezekiah, reduced to the sad extremity of telling the truth.
“Now, sir!” thundered the lawyer, “do you mean to tell me that a big man like you is living on a poor old woman? And have you nothing better to do than come to the court-house and tell lies?”
“I don’t tell no lie, sah!” grumbled Hezekiah.
“Don’t be impertinent, sir! Now remember you are on your oath: didn’t the Chinaman at the lane corner once threaten to put you in charge for stealing a pack of Rosebud cigarettes off his counter?”
The question came like a thunder-clap. Hezekiah’s love for these cigarettes was well-known to all his friends, but he had fondly hoped that that little episode, which might have had so unpleasant a termination, had been forgotten by the Chinaman himself. How did the lawyer know of it? In his bewilderment it did not dawn on him that his whole life-history, in so far as Maria knew it, had been told with point and circumstance to Maria’s lawyer.
Fear now took possession of him—abject fear. A few more questions like the last, and his reputation in the lane would be ruined for ever. He moved about in his circle as a man of some importance, for he played the guitar, swore with remarkable fluency, and claimed superiority on the ground that he neither worked nor wanted. This examination was not at all what he had bargained for. As he explained afterwards, the lawyer took a mean advantage of him. But the fierce interrogatory had had its effect; for when the lawyer asked him, “Now, didn’t you see Susan Proudleigh assault Maria Bellicant first?” he meekly answered, “Yes.”
After that the truth, or as much of it as Hezekiah could remember, came out. All that Susan’s lawyer could do was to prove that Maria had been as quick to quarrel as Susan. Long before the witnesses were finished with, it had become clear to the magistrate that he had here a simple case of jealousy to deal with, and, as he had acquired something of a reputation as a maker of compromises (which satisfied nobody) he thought he would interpose at this point and so still further add to his fame as a peacemaker.
Looking sternly at Susan, he told her that she could go on with the case if she liked; but that though it was clear that he would have to fine Maria for provoking her to a breach of the peace, by putting her hand in her (the prosecutor’s) face, which act amounted to a technical assault, he saw clearly that when Maria Bellicant’s case came on he would also have to fine the present prosecutor. Both had used insulting words; both were to blame. So he would advise them to make up their differences out of court, especially as they appeared to be two decent young women.
Being a man of decided views on morality, he was particularly hard on Tom.
“That young man, Tom Wooley,” he said, “has really been the cause of this quarrel. I wish he was here so that I could deal with him. But I hope that some one will tell him what I say. He seems to be a very loose character, and I fear that there are only too many such in Kingston. I have no doubt that he is deceiving a number of other women, and his acts may lead to some of them going to prison one day.” The speaker glanced at the reporters to see if they were taking down his little speech. Satisfied that they were, he went on to urge upon the girls the necessity of leading a respectable and self-sacrificing life. This they most faithfully promised to do, all the while thinking him an old crank who interfered too freely with other people’s business. Much pleased with the apparent result of his efforts to rescue Susan and Maria from the broad and easy way, and proud that he had effected another compromise, he ordered the serjeant to call the next case, and the young women and their several friends left the court.
Maria was delighted, for Susan had to all intents and purposes lost her case. Hezekiah was dazed, his mind being awhirl with new and uncomplimentary thoughts about His Britannic Majesty’s courts. They were to him places where mean advantages were taken of truthful witnesses, and in his heart of hearts he knew also that he had fallen from grace for ever, in so far as Susan was concerned. As for Susan, she was furious. She had not succeeded in getting Maria punished. She had been lectured by an “ole fool” as she called the learned magistrate. Worst of all, Tom’s name had been repeatedly mentioned during the trial. It had been an entirely miserable affair, and, for her, a humiliating defeat.
The thing about the trial that seemed to Miss Proudleigh the unkindest cut of all was the utter failure of Lawyer Jones to rise to the occasion and pulverize his legal opponent with arguments. She had accompanied Susan to the court-house with proud expectancy. Lawyer Jones had been recommended by her, and she felt that she had certain proprietary rights in him; that she was, in a way, responsible for his good behaviour as a lawyer. And now he had failed, failed miserably; he had disgraced her; she regarded him as guilty of a base deception. On the way home she urged this point of view upon Susan, and her brother agreed that the lawyer had indeed acted most strangely.
“The whole of them cheat me!” said Susan bitterly. “There is no justice in dis country at all. From the judge down, them is all a set of thief!”
“Solomon say that it is better to chop a baby in two dan go to law,” observed Mr. Proudleigh, “an’ I see to-day dat him is quite right. Now if you did half murder Maria, them would only fine you, an’ you would have de satisfaction to know that you give it to her properly. Instead of dat, you bring ’er up in a respectable style, an’ put a lawyer on ’er, an’ pay him two pounds to persecute her, an’ all de justice you get is dat the judge tell y’u to make up de quarrel or him will fine you too!”
“Leave them all to God!” said Miss Proudleigh piously.
“Leave them to de devil, you mean!” Susan rapped out. “The judge abuse me about me intended, an’ the lawyer take me money and don’t do nothing for it; an’ now you tell me to leave them to God! The truth of de matter is that all these judge an’ all these lawyers is simply humbugging poor people in this country. Them want nothing better than for we to leave them to God, so long as them can get de money. But while we walk to church to pray, them drive in motor-car!”
Wrath had made Susan a rebel, and contemptuous of the things she had always regarded with respect; but Miss Proudleigh had her Christian reputation to think of, and she could not join her niece in her violent protest. As for her father, though he was inclined to think Susan was right, he did not care to express his opinion of the judge too freely in the open street.
When they got home, Susan stationed herself by the window, her favourite point of vantage, and there she sat for hours nursing her anger. Now and then, as she looked around her, the pride of possession filled her soul. The room contained two American rocking-chairs, and five cane-seated chairs of a yellowish hue. There was a long wooden bench without a back placed against one of the walls, and two dealboard tables, both covered with gaudy worsted spreads. On one of them was a kerosene lamp, a couple of hymn books, and a few earthenware ornaments. The other was crowded with thick tumblers, some of fantastic shapes, and a heap of cheap crockery ware. On the walls hung coloured prints of the King and the Royal Family, and pictures of ladies dressed in exiguous garments, and smoking cigarettes with an air of enjoyment. All these things belonged to her. They had been given to her by Tom. And in the inner room she had an iron bed on which was a straw mattress, and two more chairs, and a big trunk containing her clothes, and a basin-stand, on which she kept her “china” basin and ewer. She had, besides, a large looking-glass on a little table in the room. And all these household gods were comparatively new.
She took pride in her furniture. Only married people of her class usually had as much, and certainly Maria had not. “After all,” she more than once muttered to herself, “I ’ave a comfortable house to come to, an’ perhaps Maria don’t ’ave a penny to-day.”
Yet she was not long comforted by this reflection. Maria had practically triumphed, and her success at the court-house might embolden her to attempt to capture Tom outright. Susan did not care much for Tom; in fact, she rather despised him. But times were hard in Kingston, and lovers were not easy to obtain; so if Maria should succeed. . . . “But that can’t be done,” she concluded; for what was Maria when compared with her?
Susan was not given to following out a train of thought for any length of time; she usually jumped from one subject to another as it came up in her mind. But the experience of that morning, and its unknown but dreaded consequences, caused her now to dwell lengthily upon the days before she became acquainted with Tom. Her past had not been a pleasant one. Her father was a carpenter, and when in good health he had earned a fair amount of money by working at his trade. But some sixteen years before he had been prostrated by a severe attack of rheumatism, and when he recovered he found that he had almost lost the use of his lower limbs. Then her brother went away to Nicaragua, and only wrote occasionally, sometimes sending a few dollars to his parents. After her father’s illness her mother had turned washerwoman, and what the old woman earned helped to keep the family from starvation. Her father did a few light jobs, when he could get them, but these did not bring in much. Susan herself, on leaving the Government elementary school when a little over fourteen years of age, had tried to find a situation; but there was hardly anything she could do at that age.
In those days she lived in a yard-room with the rest of the family. She could remember herself as often standing at the gate of the yard, her feet thrust into a pair of slippers, and looking with envy at those girls who could afford to wear shoes and go to all the Sunday-school picnics and treats. There were days when she went to bed without dinner, a fate by no means unknown to hundreds of other persons in her position. On other days she was glad if her dinner consisted of a piece of dry bread. The rent of the room her family occupied was always the great problem that faced them continually; for if it was not paid their few belongings might be levied upon, and the old people would have to go to the almshouse. Semi-starvation was better than that, so they not infrequently starved.
When she was nearly eighteen, what she called “a luck” befell her. She was in the habit of attending, every Wednesday evening, a little church near where she lived. There had been revival meetings in that church a short time before she had taken to going to the services, and nearly everybody in its immediate neighbourhood had been converted. Amongst these converts was a young fellow of nineteen, a clerk by occupation; and seeing Susan in the church once or twice, he was moved to attempt the saving of her soul. He only succeeded in losing his heart.
For some months he gave her five shillings a week out of the fifteen he earned; then he unfortunately lost his situation, and Susan’s father awoke to a sense of outraged morality. It was edifying to hear Mr. Proudleigh lecture that young man on the moral obliquity of endeavouring to “draw a youthful feminine away from religion.” There was no arguing with him, for very little argument is left in any youth who has lost his situation; so the young man quietly drifted out of Susan’s life.
For some time longer the family was compelled to exist on the mother’s earnings and on what Mr. Proudleigh’s son in Nicaragua occasionally sent home. It was then that Susan tried her hardest to obtain work of some kind. But it required influence to secure a position as a barmaid; the small shops had as many assistants as they required, and in any case usually employed young women fairer than she was; as for crochet-making, that had become so common that very few persons now cared to trim their clothes with crochet. She might have got a situation as nurse in one of the wealthier families of Kingston, but to domestic work she had a strong aversion. It was not, in her opinion, genteel. She did not want to be what she called “a common servant.” So she waited in idleness day after day, a prey to discontent, and wondering if her luck would ever turn.
It did turn when she was twenty years of age. She was standing at the gate of her yard one Sunday afternoon, very plainly dressed, but with her hair neatly combed and plaited. Tom was walking down the lane, with no object in particular, and seeing her all alone he thought he might as well try to make her acquaintance and have a little chat with her. As he was well dressed, from his polished yellow boots up to his new straw hat, Susan did not object to his inquiry after her health; and being thus encouraged he made further advances.
That afternoon he talked of trifling things for about a quarter of an hour. The following evening he again walked down the lane, and Susan was once more at the gate. On the subsequent night, when Tom met her by appointment, she asked him why he did not come inside, and on his accepting her invitation he was welcomed by her family with every mark of cordiality and respect. In fact, they all went out of the room and left him with Susan, so that the young couple’s conversation might not be interrupted in any way.
A week after that, she removed into the house which she now occupied. Thus she had realized, at a bound, one of the great ambitions of her life.
But now Maria was trying to come between her and Tom. And this case—now that she had lost it, she was rather sorry she had taken it to court. Tom’s name had been repeatedly called, and he had warned her against that. And her money, the money he had originally given her, had gone for nothing. If that had been all she would not have cared much, but she felt sure she had not yet heard the last of the fight and the trial. She wished she could believe that she had.
It was in an uneasy frame of mind that she ate her dinner by the window that evening, putting her plate on a chair in front of her. She was still eating when her aunt returned to the house for the purpose of further discussing the details of the case; and it was only then that Susan’s father and the others came into the sitting-room, which they had avoided all during the day, perceiving that Susan was too sorely sick at heart to appreciate conversation.
Miss Proudleigh, who, more than all of them together, was versed in the newspaper reports of the courts, had conceived a brilliant idea, and wished to lose no time before letting Susan know of it.
“I thinks, Susan,” she said, after she had sat down, “that the case was not try fair. An’ I thinks you ought to appeal.”
“Appeal?” asked her brother. “What is dat?”
Now Miss Proudleigh did not know exactly. So she answered vaguely, “Something to make de case try right.”
“That won’t help,” said Susan decisively. “De judge tell me I better drop the case, an’ I agree. It is all done away wid now. What is bothering me is the way de judge talk about Tom. It’s going to be all over Kingston to-morrow, for I saw the newspaper man writing it down. What a piece of bad luck fall upon a poor gurl to-day! An’ I didn’t do a single soul anyt’ing.”
“But don’t it finish now?” asked the old man hopefully.
“I don’t know about dat,” Susan replied. “Tom’s name call, an’ him going to vex.”
This was indeed what everybody feared; but Miss Proudleigh had a never-failing source of comfort in her principles as a religious woman.
“Susan,” she said, “you must have faith. When did you’ intended see you de first time? Wasn’t it on a Sunday evening? Now if it was on a Monday or a Saturday or any other day of de week, you would say it was a sort of accident. But when an important events take place on a Sunday, all of a sudden, it is you’ business to acknowledge that the Lord have made special interposition in your behalf. You mustn’t be ungrateful, Sue. The Lord is not mocked. Blessed is de man that trusteth in Him. An’ though the text says ‘man’ it mean woman too. Everything is goin’ to go right. Tom won’t vex too much.”
“That is what I thinks meself,” agreed Susan’s father, who was only too glad to catch at any ray of hope. “Susan is de child of many pr’yers. From the day she born to dis day, I been prayin’ for her. Not a thing can happen to her! De night before she became acquaint wid Mister Tom, I dream dat a mango tree grow up in me room, an’ I know that same time that somet’ing was going to happen. Now last night I dream dat a cow maltreat Mother Smit, an’ at first I thoughted that Susan was goin’ to win de case. But I see now dat it mean that Mister Tom is not goin’ to ’ave nothing more to do wid Maria.”
“Well, sah,” answered Susan petulantly, “all I have to say is, that you’ prayers didn’t ’elp me much this morning!”
This, Susan’s latest expression of infidelity, simply startled her audience. Their Providence was one that struck with blindness or instant death any of His creatures who dared to question His wisdom or goodness, and who bestowed no blessings upon those who worked on the Sabbath Day. To other sins He was lenient. He always allowed ample time to the sinners to repent of them. One could also think hard things of Him, for what was not spoken aloud might escape the hearing even of the higher Powers. But so openly to doubt the efficacy of prayer, as Susan had done, was to tempt Providence; and she herself felt a little frightened after the words had escaped her.
Miss Proudleigh, who herself had much of Susan’s temper, and who could never forget that she stood high in the estimation of her “leader” in the Wesleyan chapel of which she was an honoured and vocal member, would not allow this last speech of Susan’s to pass without reproof.
“If you goin’ to talk like that, Susan,” she said severely, “I will ’ave to leave the premises. I can’t sit down an’ hear you laugh at pr’yer. I don’t want to be include in the general judgment; for when the Lord’s time come to laugh, Him going to laugh for true.”
Her indignation having been expressed, faith immediately rose to higher heights, and she went on.
“As fo’ Maria, she will be punished, an’ you an’ me will live to see Mother Smith beggin’ bread. ‘He will smite the oppressor, an’ the wicked He will utterly destroy.’ I am goin’ to pray for Maria an’ her mother. I am goin’ to pray that them won’t have bread to eat; an’ when a woman like me kneel down an’ pray, her pr’yers must be heard!”
“I gwine to pray too,” cried the old man, with enthusiasm. “Four knees is better than two. I are going to church next Sunday night to offer up me supplication against all Susan’s enemy. Sue,” he concluded, turning to his daughter, “you don’t happen to have a small coins about y’u to lend your ole fader? I feel weak in me chest, an’ a little rum an’ anisou would help de feeling.”
This request for a loan, coming after his expressed determination to pray against her enemies, could not well be refused by Susan; and she was about to hand him threepence, when the front door opened quickly and Tom stepped into the room.
As he entered, the old man rose and gave him a military salute. But on this occasion Tom simply brushed past him without saying anything, and went at once to Susan. Such brusqueness was unusual, and Mr. Proudleigh, still in the military attitude, stared at Tom with wonder in his eyes.
The young man was angry. They all saw that. At any other time they would have left him alone with Susan, but now curiosity got the better of respect, and they remained to hear what he had to say.
“Susan,” he began, without even bidding her good evening, “didn’t I tell y’u not to take the case to court?”
“You goin’ to quarrel wid me about it now?” was her answer. “It’s not my fault dat I lose it! It’s Hezekiah wid his foolishness. An’ instead of sympathizing with me, you walk into the house, like a nager man, an’ don’t speak to nobody! See here, Tom, if it’s because I lose the money you give me, I will work an’ pay you back.”
“Never mind, Susan, never mind,” interposed her aunt, anxious to play the blessed part of peacemaker. “Mr. Tom don’t say anything of an aggravating nature. Two young people mustn’t quarrel. You is to live in peace, an’——”
“I don’t want to hear anything from you,” snapped Susan. “Tom ’ave no right to come into de house like this.”
Thus she tried to put Tom in the wrong, feeling that if she frightened him by a display of temper he would not say very much about his name being called in the court-house, a circumstance which she herself regretted greatly.
But the old man, alarmed at Tom’s attitude, and fearing lest Susan should drive him away at a time when Maria, and probably others, were spreading their nets for him, thought that now was the opportunity for proving to Tom that in every important domestic crisis he would have the head of the family on his side.
“Susan,” he commenced, with some fear in his heart as to how she would receive his admonition, “I don’t exprove of you’ conduct. Mister Tom is a young man, an’ a young man is supposed to get aggravated. Ef I did know that him tell you positive not to take de case to court, I would have tell you the same meself. The fact of de matter is, I did tell you so. For when you look upon one thing, an’ also upon another——”
But Susan would listen to no more. She sprang from her chair. “See here!” she asked, looking rapidly at each of them in turn, “you all want to abuse me to-night? What I do any of you? Eh? What you interfering with me for?”
But Tom was now in a desperate mood, and Susan’s rage did not seem to frighten him.
He glared back at her. “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want me name call in the court-house?” he demanded. “Y’u had no business to fight with Maria. If you didn’t speak to her, she couldn’t have troubled you. But you infernal women——”
“Don’t call me infernal, Taam! Don’t y’u call me infernal! It’s not because you paying me rent that you must use me an’ take an advantage of me as if I was a common street gurl. Don’t y’u do it, Tom!”
“Well, whether you like it or not, I say it already,” replied Tom bitterly. “As to the rent, y’u will have to pay it yourself next month!”
“Oh yes?” retorted Susan. “So you gwine to Maria, eh? Well, I tell you straight that I will pull every plait out of she head! An’ as for you, me good man, I don’t know what foot you goin’ to take to walk go to Maria’s house!
“Lor-r-rd!” she screamed. “Look what this man come an’ tell me to me face! Him say him going to this woman, Maria, an’ is leaving me!” and she burst into angry tears.
“I didn’t say that at all,” Tom muttered sullenly. “I said I am not going to pay any rent next month. Somebody go to-day an’ tell Mr. Jacobs all that de judge say about me, and Mr. Jacobs pay me two weeks’ wages and tell me him don’t want me any more.”
It was only too true. Tom had many friends who envied him his job, and it was one of these who had hastened to his employer with a full account of Susan’s case. In his narration this friend had managed to convey the impression that Susan and Maria were not the only two ladies who enjoyed the good things of life at Tom’s expense; and as Mr. Jacobs thought that it was not Tom, but he himself, who might later on suffer through Tom’s excessive gallantry, he concluded that the wisest thing to do was to get rid of his philandering employee at once. Thus had the blow fallen with dramatic swiftness. Susan realized what it meant. She ceased sobbing. This was no time for angry tears. Even her aunt felt that a religious text would not relieve the gravity of the situation. The old man gazed in blank amazement at Tom. Susan’s mother and sister were dumbfounded.
“Then what y’u going to do, Tom?” It was Susan who asked the question; she knew she was the cause of the crisis, but did not wish to face the blame. “P’rhaps,” she went on, without waiting for an answer, “you will get another job? Mr. Jacobs can’t say y’u rob him, an’ him must give you a character paper.”
Tom shook his head despondently. “When a man lose his job in Kingston,” he said, “it is the hardest thing for him to get another one.”
He had sat down, no longer angry, but a prey to despair. His natural weakness was beginning to reassert itself.
“But you can’t live widout working?” said Susan. “You mean to say that y’u don’t know anybody who will hire you? Don’t you have education?”
“Yes, Mister Tom,” her father remarked encouragingly, dipping into the conversation; “a ejucated gen’leman like you is not common. Trust to God!”
But Tom was not to be comforted. “I been with Mr. Jacobs six years,” he said, “an’ everybody is goin’ to say that it is funny him discharge me all of a sudden.”
“Then what you goin’ to do?” Susan asked again.
“I’m going to Colon.”
“Colon?” repeated Susan, with mingled hope and fear in her heart.
“Yes; Colon.”
“Well, Colon is a very good place,” said the old man reflectively. He was entertaining hopes of being taken to Colon himself. “I thinks Miss Susan will like it.”
“I can’t take her. I don’t have sufficient money.”
“Then what you goin’ to do wid me?” asked Susan, seeing her worst fears about to be realized. “Leave me here?”
“I will send for y’u, Sue,” Tom answered, “if I get a job. But I don’t know what is goin’ to happen. . . . It’s all your fault.”
This was so true that the rebuke was accepted in silence. But Susan did not wish to be left behind, for Maria and her mother to triumph over her downfall.
“Tom,” she pleaded, “take me with you! I can work, an’ there is plenty o’ work in Colon.”
“We all can work,” said her father anxiously, though why he should have included himself was something of a mystery. “I have always wanted to go oversea like me son. The fambily could makes you very happy, Mister Tom.” He paused, for he saw that nobody was paying any attention to him.
Tom, in fact, was explaining to Susan how impossible it was for him to take her to Colon with him, and was mingling his explanations with weak reproaches. Susan listened dumbly. She was thinking how few of her friends and acquaintances would sympathize with her; how the front house would have to be given up, and perhaps some of her furniture sold. Nor was that all. For if Tom did not send for her, as he promised, the old life might have to be resumed; and that would be more intolerable now than before. She would miss all that she had become accustomed to. She might have to face actual want—she who had for one full year enjoyed what she considered luxury. . . .
“When you goin’?” she asked at length, after Tom had said his say.
“Saturday.”
This was Wednesday night: three days more and he would be gone.
She cried, this time in real distress. Tom was touched, or he thought, erroneously, that she was crying because he was going to a foreign land where he would be far away from her.
“Don’t fret, Sue,” he said, trying to soothe her. “Colon is a place where a lot o’ money is making now. If I strike a job, you will be all right. In the meantime y’u must do you’ best.”
What that best was, and how it was to be done, was not apparent to Susan. But the old man faithfully promised Tom that Susan would do her best.
“An’ when you is arrive, Mister Tom, write to de ole man,” Mr. Proudleigh added, rising, for Tom had risen to go.
“God bless you, me son,” said his wife, as Tom shook hands with her; “you has been kind to Miss Susan.”
“Put your trust in de Lord,” said Miss Proudleigh, “an’ He shall renew thy strength.”
Susan’s sisters said nothing; Susan herself put on her hat to walk with him a portion of the way home, partly for the purpose of discussing certain financial matters, partly to make sure that he did not call at Maria’s yard.
They went out together, and then Catherine remarked:
“If Susan didn’t take de case to court, this wouldn’t happen.”
“What we gwine to do now?” asked Mr. Proudleigh dolefully.
No one answered the question.
“I don’t do too badly this week,” said Susan, as, sitting at the threshold of a little room, which was one of a range in a yard, she slowly counted a number of small silver and copper coins which she held in her lap.
“How much you make?” asked Catherine, who sat on a little box near to the door, watching Susan’s addition with interested eyes.
“I make eight shillin’s and sixpence, an’ two shillin’s is owing out to me, all of which is profit. If I did ’ave anybody to go an’ dun for it last night, I would ’ave ten shillin’s an’ sixpence this morning. Next week I going to sell more, for I am goin’ to put more things in the shop.”
“Business is good,” said Catherine, “but it will soon get better; so even if Tom don’t send for you, Sue, you will be all right.”
“Yes, I am independent now,” returned Susan, with a touch of pride in her voice; “but I sick of this life. Every day it’s de same thing. I ’ave to work too hard, an’ sometimes I don’t make as much in a day as I use to spend on car ride when Tom was here. I feel so tired, I can’t even go to church dis morning. An’ yet I have some good frock. I going to save up money meself an’ go to Colon, even if Tom don’t send for me.”
“That is a very good resolution, Sue,” said her father, speaking from inside of the room. “Colon is a better place dan Kingston. I hear dat you can earn money there like water, an’ that’s de place I want to go to. Ef you’ brother could only send me a few dollars, I would give it to you, an’ then you could go an’ send for the whole of we.”
“Yes, sah,” replied his daughter. “I would send for you, an’ mammee, an’ Eliza. Kate could go wid me. P’rhaps Kate would get an intended in Colon.”
“I wish so,” said Catherine wistfully; “de young men in Kingston don’t have nothing.”
“It wasn’t so when I was a young man,” observed Mr. Proudleigh, harking back to the past. “In dose days a man could make plenty money, an’ he treat de females like a king. Me first sweetheart rob me over ten pounds, an’ yet I didn’t miss it. But now a man don’t ’ave ten shillin’s to give a gal, much less ten pounds for anybody to rob.”
“You right,” agreed Susan. “Dis is not the place for me. Colon or Port Limon is the country to go to, an’ if me business prosper I going to save an’ go there.”
She nodded her head determinedly, then tied the money in the corner of a handkerchief, put it in her pocket, and went towards the back of the yard.
Her father came out and sat on the spot she had vacated. He did not like to question Susan too closely, but of Catherine, who was of a milder disposition, he had no fear.
“Kate,” he said, “you t’ink Susan will really save money to go away?”
“So she say, papee,” Catherine answered. “An’ she doing very well. She make ten an’ six this week, an’ she goin’ to make more.”
“That is good,” said the old man. “Ef you go wid her you mustn’t forget you’ ole father, Kate. I don’t want all me children to be away from me when I dead. An’ if you don’t send fo’ me when you go away, I don’t see how I can ever go.”
As Kate saw no immediate prospect of leaving Jamaica herself, she did not pursue the conversation. And both she and her father continued sitting there for some time in silence, gazing at nihility, and thus keeping the Sabbath day holy.
They were still living in a lane, but not the lane in which they had lately lived for fully a year. This one was called Luke Lane, and their yard was situated near the northern end of it, close to North Street. It was some eight weeks since Tom had left, and much had happened in the interval. The first four weeks had been a trying time for Susan, for, even before Tom sailed for Colon, Maria and her mother had heard of his dismissal. They spread the news rapidly and all Susan’s enemies rejoiced without any attempt at concealment. They assembled at the gates of their yards when she passed up and down the lane, and laughed loudly. They made remarks which she knew were intended for her hearing. Maria, remembering Susan’s fatal allusion to her dress, attired herself every Sunday in her most gaudy garments and went to see some people who lived opposite to Susan, so that the latter’s cup of humiliation should be full. She knew that Susan’s establishment could not be maintained long after Tom’s departure, unless some extraordinary piece of good fortune should befall her. This Maria confidently hoped would not happen: she had missed taking Tom away from Susan; but still there was great satisfaction in knowing that if she had lost what she might have had, Susan had lost what she actually had possessed.
Susan endured all these insults with considerable fortitude, and went about her business quietly, keeping her own counsel as to what she intended to do. About a month after Tom had left for Colon, she and her family, aided by a cart, removed what remained of her furniture (for she had sold some), and went to live elsewhere.
They removed late at night, and silently; for Susan’s pride revolted at the very thought of being seen taking last leave of the beloved front house. Removing late at night had its inconveniences, for it was certain to be said that she had left without paying the month’s rent, and without the knowledge of the landlord. Night removals in the West Indies (and they are very frequent) are always attended with this suspicion, a suspicion based upon extensive experience. But in this instance the landlord knew all about Susan’s intention, for she had given him the proper notice, and at the end of the month had gone to him and paid him two-thirds of the rent that was due. As she had been a good tenant, he made a virtue of necessity and generously allowed her to owe him the balance. Yet all this did not prevent it from being circulated in certain quarters of the lane that Susan, true to the principles of many who live in yard-rooms and little front houses, had availed herself of the darkness to cover her rent-escaping tracks.
She heard from Tom before her removal. In his letter he mentioned that the chances were that he should obtain a good situation if he did not fall ill of fever. Like a sensible girl she concluded that his chances of being ill were probably as great as his prospects of getting a job; so she told her aunt, “I better look for meself.” Her way of looking for herself was not original; but it proved successful. Tom had given her two pounds before leaving. She had also saved a few shillings. And this money had come in useful for the setting up of a small business.
She had rented a little shop and had stocked it with the things she knew would sell. The shop was built against the fence, and opened both in the yard and on the lane. It was constructed of odd bits of board and roofed with three sheets of corrugated iron. It could scarcely accommodate two persons. Customers were not allowed inside. They stood in the lane and made their purchases over a counter which was merely a square bit of board cut out of that side of the shop which faced the lane. This counter formed a shutter at night; you fixed it into the opening and secured it by means of an ingenious system of bars and bolts. As thieves might break in and steal, Susan usually removed some of her goods to a safer place at night; the room in which she and her family lived being the only place available to her.
She sold bread and “grater cake” (a cake made of desiccated cocoa-nut stewed with sugar). The prices of this sweetmeat ranged from a farthing to three farthings each, and she did a considerable trade in it. For the children held that a halfpenny spent on a small loaf of bread and a small grater cake yielded abundant satisfaction, and even grown-up people frequently made their lunch off the same articles.
She sold cocoa-nut oil, sugar-cane, mangoes, bananas, and flour-cakes. These last were made of flour and sugar and plenty of baking-soda, were very cheap and filling, and were openly despised by everybody and secretly eaten by all.
She sold Rosebud cigarettes, for that, she wisely calculated, would be a good bait for the boys and men, and she wanted the biggest custom possible.
She sold firewood, and yams and plantains, and gingerbeer. Ice also; and she proclaimed that fact by means of a red flag, hung out diagonally on a pole, and having sewn upon it three ill-shaped letters in white calico which spelt out the word, ICE. She was, in short, a full-fledged higgler, and as she sat in her shop surrounded by boxes and baskets, and little heaps of bread-stuffs, she assumed the important facial expression common to all higglers, though in her case neither ugliness nor slatternliness had set its seal upon her; which alone differentiated her sharply from most of the other women who followed her trade.
There were many of these in the lane. They were rivals, but among them Susan easily stood first. For the stock of none of them was ever worth more than seven or eight shillings, and sometimes not worth even half of that amount. She, on the other hand, had boldly invested thirty shillings in purchases at the start, and the venture had been justified by success.
Her looks helped her. The young men who passed by her shop patronized her and attempted to make love to her; but they were obviously poor, so while she was polite to them she kept them at a distance. Her family was also of great assistance. Her mother made the “grater cakes” and boiled the cocoa-nut oil; her sisters went in the mornings far beyond the northern boundaries of the city to meet the countrywomen coming down to market, so as to buy fruit cheap from them. By this means Susan saved money, an important consideration, for a shilling a day was the very most that she could spend on food for all the family. As for the old man, he rendered no material assistance; but he personally felt that his moral influence upon the situation was immeasurable. With the tattered remains of an old soft felt hat upon his head—he never went without it, for he imagined that it added to his dignity—a pipe in his mouth, and his feet thrust into slippers, he hovered about what he called “de little shaps,” feeling himself the natural protector of his daughter, and the inspiring genius of the family.
He was proud of Susan. The problem of living had presented itself to him with distressing intensity on the night that Tom had announced his intention of going to Colon. He then had seen nothing before himself and his wife but the union Poorhouse, an institution which he thought of with a shudder. He knew he could do nothing to help himself, though he never would have acknowledged that to anyone; so, even though the girls might shift for themselves, he could see no ray of hope for himself and the old woman. Susan, however, had solved the problem by unexpectedly developing commercial instincts; and he reflected that most of her ability must have been inherited from him, since he had never credited his wife with much intelligence.
As he sat this Sunday morning at the threshold of the single room they now lived in, he felt placidly contented. The shop had become a certain source of revenue, and no Maria could interfere with it. He was quite satisfied not to take much thought of the morrow; and the change that had recently taken place in Susan’s circumstances was accepted by him with a temperamental equanimity which could only be disturbed by fear of the almshouse or of immediate starvation.
He looked about the yard, seeing nothing. Such scenes he had been familiar with all the days of his life. It was an ordinary Kingston tenement yard; the low range of rooms, each room being separated from the other by but a thin partition of board; the broken-down kitchen; the water-pipe continually dripping, so that a part of the yard was never dry; babies sitting in little boxes stuffed with rags to prevent the little creatures from hurting themselves; bigger babies creeping about; wash-tubs everywhere; it was what he had always seen in every similar place. The prevailing squalor did not affect the old man and his wife, and even Catherine and his youngest daughter had reconciled themselves to it. But Susan rebelled; she felt that she ought not to be reduced to living in a yard-room.
This Sunday morning, however, she was better pleased than usual, for she saw that if her custom continued to increase she would soon be in a position to save money. Up to now she had been living on every penny of her profits, for the rent of the shop and the room together was sixteen shillings a month. But good luck was plainly attending her, and already she was speculating upon what she would do in the future.
Presently she returned to where her father and Catherine were still sitting. Catherine made room for her on the box, and Mr. Proudleigh, never happy if compelled to remain silent for long, asked her when next she expected to hear from Tom.
“How can I tell, sah?” was her very reasonable reply. “Him only write me once since he gone to Colon; an’ I wants to believe he must be in the hospital. From all dat I hear about Colon, Tom don’t likely to get on there. Him too soft! Kingston is all right enough; but in Colon—so I hear—if you look on a man too hard, him wants to shoot you; an’ if you don’t look on him hard, him wants to take an advantage of y’u. That is not the sort o’ place for Tom.”
“Then how you expects to go down to him?” asked her father. “Ef him is such a young man of unreligable nature, I don’t see how you can teck up you’self an’ put you’self under his protection an’ care.”
Susan laughed scornfully. “I was ever under his protection an’ care in Jamaica?” she asked.
“No,” said Catherine; “but here everything is quiet. Down in Colon a young gurl must ’ave a young man to look after ’er; otherwise there may be boderation. I wouldn’t like to go down by meself that way.”
“I would go,” said Susan decisively. “After all, whatever y’u meet in this world it is you’ luck. If you to dead in Colon, you will dead there. If you to come back to Jamaica, y’u will come back.”
This fatalistic note, struck with such confidence, awoke a responsive echo in the hearts of her hearers.
“You is right,” said the old man. “A man shouldn’t bother him head about what goin’ to happen to-morrow, for him can’t prevent what is gwine to happen. Therefore, sufficient to de day is the evil thereof. You saving money to go?”
“Don’t I tell y’u so a little while ago, sah?” asked Susan, though she knew that the old man would repeat the question every day.
“I don’t mean nothing by askin’ you,” he explained; “only, ef I was you, I wouldn’t put me money into any bank. I hear that bank is a thing that broke every now an’ then; though,” he continued sagaciously, “I don’t see how such a strong place can broke.”
“When a bank broke,” explained Catherine, “it mean that de clerk rob you’ money.”
“Oh! I see! But, even then, I don’t t’ink Sue should put her money in a bank, for if them rob her few shillin’s, what she gwine to do?”
“The Government bank is safe,” said Sue, conscious of superior knowledge. “Nobody can rob it, an’ them give you interest on you’ money.”
“Then you gwine to put yours in de Government bank?”
“Yes, sah; to-morrow morning I goin’ to lodge three shillin’s: it is me first commencement. It’s to help me to go away.—Who that?”
Some one had knocked at the gate, and the person thus addressed loudly answered:
“Me!”
“Who me?” asked Catherine.
“Letitia Samuels: can you hinform me ef Miss Susan Proudleigh resides here?”
Both Susan and Catherine rose simultaneously and rushed towards the gate. They opened it, and a young lady of about twenty, glossily black, fat, not bad looking, and extremely stylish, walked into the yard. She was dressed in a white lawn frock trimmed with any quantity of lace; wore high-heeled shoes and carried a pink parasol. Her hat was a marvel; her cheeks were covered with white powder. She kissed both the girls loudly, said she was feeling “fine,” shook hands with Mr. Proudleigh, and then was taken into the room.
There she met the old woman, who spoke to her, then went outside, with the true West Indian instinct of hospitality, to prepare some refreshment for her.
The room, originally small, was divided into two apartments by a cloth partition, one side of it being reserved for the old people, the other being occupied by Susan and her sisters. Letitia sat in the one chair that she saw, while Catherine and Susan perched themselves on the bed.
Letitia was an old friend. She had known Susan at the elementary school, and Susan had admired and envied her because of her constant possession of small coin. Letitia’s father was a plumber in a good position, and he looked after his daughter well. She was a Roman Catholic, and loudly sang hymns in honour of the saints; Susan, on the other hand, was a staunch Protestant, and strongly objected to “the worship of idols.” But differences of doctrine did not disturb their personal relations, and even Mr. Proudleigh’s efforts to convert the erring Catholic to a truer faith did not sow the seeds of discord. For though his theology (from a Protestant point of view) was perfectly sound, he never ventured on moral admonitions. This was satisfactory, for Letitia still enjoyed the favour of the priests and nuns and other important personages of the Church, and gratefully rejoiced in the present security of a suspected virtue.
She was very excited.
“I didn’t know you move, Sue; I went roun’ to Blake Lane, an’ them tell me y’u move. It was you’ aunt told me yesterday where y’u live.”
“Yes, me dear,” was Susan’s remark. “My intended gone away, so I have to look for meself. Just see where I living now!”
“Cho! never mind! Y’u soon get another intended. Now guess what I come to tell y’u about?”
“What?”
“A picnic. A big picnic! Father Moulder making it at Cumberland Pen to-morrow, an’ it’s only one an’ sixpence for trainage and hentrance to the pen. You ’ave to provide you’ own refreshment; but that can’t cost more dan one an’ six. I want you come. Y’u will come?”
Susan’s answer was interrupted by the entrance of her mother, who brought in a mug of chocolate and a plate containing a big slice of bread.
Letitia spread out her handkerchief in her lap, and rested the plate on it, then took the mug from the old woman. Eating and drinking, she continued the conversation.
“Y’u must come, me child! It’s goin’ to be grand. All the young men in Kingston is goin’. There is to be six piece of music, an’ dancing all day.”
Catherine’s face lighted up, then fell as she remembered that she had no money.
Susan shook her head slowly, the wish to go struggling with her desire to save.
“It will cost me three shillin’s,” she said, “an’ I don’t see how I can manage it.” She paused as a vision of the dancing on the sward rose before her mind’s eye.
“I engage a bag of coal for Thursday, an’ I must have to take it. An’ I ’ave to save money. . . .”
“Cho!” pleaded Letitia. “Come, man! It’s only once!”
The old man, still sitting at the threshold, had overheard the conversation. By way of showing disinterested generosity, he called out:
“Don’t fret you’self about t’ree shillin’s, Sue. Go an’ enjies you’self. Don’t kill you’self, me daughter. You lookin’ thin.”
“Then how is Sue to go to Colon?” asked Catherine, who, seeing no prospect of going to the picnic herself, was not inclined to be enthusiastic about it.
The old man remembered that he also wanted to go to Colon, and immediately regretted his precipitancy. But his words had had their effect. The struggle in Susan’s soul was over. In a moment she passed from a calculating to an excited frame of mind.
“All right!” she cried, jumping from the bed; “I will go.” Excitedly, “I will wear me blue dress, an’ me new straw hat! Lord! I goin’ to dance every dance! I goin’ to enjoy meself! What a thing!”
She was dancing already, and all thought of saving was thrown to the winds.
“Come for me in the morning, Letitia, early,” were her last words to her friend, when she bade her good-bye at the gate.
That afternoon Susan made special preparations for the great event of the morrow. Hairdressing being a very important part of her toilet, she literally sat at Catherine’s feet, who, armed with a strong comb and a pot of scented castor oil, bent over her sister’s head and spent fully three-quarters of an hour in combing out the hair, oiling it, plaiting it, and twisting the plaits into the shape dictated by the latest fashion. That done, Susan tied up her hair very carefully in a towel, so that it should not become disarranged. Then she took out her blue dress and hung it up over the head of her bed. She polished her shoes, carefully looked over her hat, and fished out a fan from the bottom of her trunk. When all this work was over, she untied her head, dressed hurriedly and went to church, her sister going with her. Both her parents strongly approved of church-going; and though the old man himself never went out on Sunday, he would not allow the day to pass without reading aloud the first Psalm, laying special stress on the opening words which proclaim a blessing on those who walk not in the way of the ungodly.
Susan and her sisters enjoyed the service. They usually did. The large church, nearly filled with people dressed in their multi-coloured best, the deep-toned organ, the hearty singing in which they joined, the bright light from the electric lamps—all this was a weekly source of pleasure to girls who had nice dresses to wear on the Sabbath day. The sermon might consist of denunciations of the popular way of living. They listened to it with interest and agreed that the parson was, from his point of view, perfectly right. But he, so to speak, was looking at life theoretically, while they were compelled to regard it from the practical standpoint of daily bread. If he expounded doctrine, they appeared engrossed in his words, and followed his meaning with a fair degree of understanding. What they liked best were the hymns; and when the service was over, and they mingled with the contented home-going crowds, they felt that they were, after all, not very far from the Kingdom.
Susan went to bed immediately after going home, not omitting to bind up her head once more. She wished to be up early in the morning. Her father talked to her for a while from his part of the room, a cloth partition placing no obstacles in the way of conversation; but though he was very anxious to hear about the sermon, so that he might give his opinion on the parson’s theology, she soon shut him up by saying she wished to go to sleep. Then silence reigned unbroken, but for the barking of the dogs in the lane; for by nine o’clock practically all the inmates of the yard had retired, after a day spent for the most part in lolling about and avoiding any unnecessary work.
At half-past four in the morning Susan was awake. She hurried out of the hot, stifling room to wash her face under the water-pipe, then went in again to dress. She was ready by five o’clock. Her dress fitted her nicely; and though blue was perhaps not the colour that best suited her complexion, it was more striking than white would have been, and she wanted to attract attention. She wore a pink sash, and her hat was trimmed with pink roses and ribbons. Her high-heeled shoes were gorgeous with buckles. When fully arrayed, and after she had gulped down her cup of coffee, she turned herself round and round to be admired. Catherine and Eliza surveyed her critically.
“You is all right, Sue,” said the first, and her younger sister agreed. Her mother smiled, then went about her business. Her father was vocal in his praise.
“Ef I was a young man,” he said approvingly, “I would fall in love wid you. Dat frock suit you’ figure. Everybody gwine to dance wid you, an’ you mustn’t fo’got to bring somet’ing nice fo’ me.”
Susan, satisfied with this appreciation, promised to bring home for him a part of whatever she might get; and Letitia coming in just then, both girls went out to catch the electric car that should take them to the railway station.
It was not yet six o’clock, so the air was still comparatively cool. It was a public holiday, consequently they met numbers of other pleasure-seekers like themselves, all gaily dressed. They caught the car, and it took them by a circuitous route to the station, going first towards the north of the city for nearly a mile, then south again, then east to where the railway station stands. On the way they passed handsome villas; those were the houses, they thought, where the rich people lived, people so much above their own station in life that they never dreamt of envying them. The white and the higher classes of fair coloured people belonged to one world. They belonged to another. But envy and hatred did not embitter the relations of one class with another, though their interests in life were superficially as different as was the yard-room or little front house from the spacious-looking residence with its garden of tropical shrubs and flowers blooming in front of it.
They alighted at the railway station, and found it crowded. Every colour of the rainbow was represented in the dresses of the women and the neckties of the men; and a stranger not accustomed to a West Indian crowd might well have thought that there could have been no greater confusion at the Tower of Babel. Everybody talked and nobody listened. Everybody gesticulated. Laughing, pushing, screaming, scrambling through the iron gates, the good-humoured picnickers made towards the platform, and then began to fight their way into the train. In vain the guards shouted. In vain they tried to direct the passengers. Discipline and order were thrown to the winds on this holiday morning, when the chief thought of every one was to obtain all the fun and excitement that the day could afford.
In the struggle for a good seat Susan was nearly separated from her friend. But by a vigorous use of their elbows they managed to keep together; and when at last, breathless but triumphant, they were seated, they began to look about them to see if any of their friends were near. Susan saw many persons whom she knew. Amongst these was Hezekiah, and him she stared out of countenance. She nodded to the others, and commenced with lively anticipation to discuss the prospects of the picnic with Letitia, when the train, with a sudden jerk, pulled out of the station.
Slowly at first, then quickly, and crowded to its utmost capacity, it ran out of the city and into the open, sunlit country. The transition was abrupt. Within a minute Kingston had been left behind, and broad fields and forests soon appeared on either side, all steeped in the early morning light and still green and fresh with the dews of the night. The hot and dusty city lay baking in the sun behind the pleasure-seekers; the country, with its wonderful beauty of deep blue skies, giant trees, and variegated green; with its dark-gleaming rivulets, placid streams and leaping waterfalls, unrolled itself before them. Peeping out of the windows, they could see the cattle and horses browsing in the pastures, the distant skyline broken by a long chain of dream-like verdure-clothed mountains, the long, delicate tendrils of parasitic plants waving gently in the breeze, and clumps of water-hyacinths glowing in the ponds or in some quiet backwater of a stream. All, all was beautiful. A majestic peace pervaded the spacious countryside, and the great yellow sun of the tropics lighted it up with splendour. There was something alluring, enticing about it all; something enervating too in its luscious appealing beauty. But Susan and Letitia gave no thought to it all, nor did many of the people in the train. Their minds were centred upon one subject—this picnic to which they were speeding and which was to afford them a whole day’s intensest pleasure.
“Cumberland Pen!” The guard shouted the name of the station, the train slowed down and stopped, the doors of the carriages were thrown open, and then the scramble and hubbub began once more. Parcels were grabbed at and secured, and then—a phenomenon which one observes in every country and on every occasion among passengers on a train—every one pushed forward to alight as quickly as possible, and as though a second longer spent upon the train would lead to the most unpleasant results.
The siding was soon crowded, and already a straggling stream of human beings was pouring towards the Cumberland Pen gate, where stood two men who collected the tickets and indulged in arguments with those who pretended to be scandalized at the amount they were called upon to pay as entrance fee. It was quick work at this gate in spite of the chaffing and arguing; then other trains came in from Kingston, and soon more than a thousand persons were assembled on a grassy sward, spacious and fairly smooth, and shaded here and there by leafy trees that grew singly or in cool inviting clumps. But shade trees were not in demand just now, except as convenient places for the storing of parcels and baskets filled with refreshments, which some of the more prudent or more fastidious picnickers had brought with them. These impedimenta put away for the present, the pleasure-lovers broke into groups, and a loud cry for music arose.
Then rose the piercing squeal of the clarionettes, the squeak of fiddles, the blare of cornets and the bang of a big drum. There was noise enough, and the dancers called it music. The young men took off their jackets and waved them wildly in the air to show their appreciation of the band. Girls with arms akimbo swayed their bodies to and fro, keeping time with the tune. Thus encouraged, the musicians redoubled their efforts and the discord was infernal; but partners were rapidly selected, places taken, and in a few minutes there were nearly five hundred couples dancing on the sward and under the now burning, blistering rays of the forenoon sun.
Susan was in her element. Quadrilles followed lancers, polkas followed quadrilles, and mentoes, a sublimated West African, phallic dance, followed the polkas and were the most popular with a certain section of the people. The girls danced these, swaying on their hips. Some of the women, however, and amongst these was Susan, did not care to dance these mentoes, on the ground that they were not quite proper. So while mentoes were being danced, Susan sat at the foot of a tree fanning herself, and trying to mop up with her wet handkerchief the flood of perspiration that streamed from her face.
Gazing intently at the dancers during one of these intervals, she did not notice that a man had approached her, till she heard herself addressed.
“Young lady,” said the stranger, “you not dancing?”
“No,” she answered shortly, without looking round to see who the speaker might be.
“Why?”
“I don’t dance mento.”
“But why you don’t?”
The persistency of her questioner annoyed her; it was common enough for girls to be accosted by strangers at a picnic; but she did not want to make any more acquaintances that day, for the simple reason that she was tired. The stranger, however, was not to be denied. He deliberately sat down near her, and resumed the conversation.
“Well,” said he, “allow me to introduce meself. My name is Samuel Josiah Jones from Spanish Town. I been watchin’ you all the time you been sitting here; an’ when I see a beautiful young female not enjoying herself, I think I ought to do the consequential.”
Susan had not the faintest idea of what the consequential might be, but the word pleased her. Besides, Samuel Josiah Jones had called her beautiful, and such a compliment predisposed her to be kind. As she did not exactly know what to reply, she looked at him with an inquiring air; but that did not in the least disconcert Mr. Jones, who blandly went on.
“My name,” he repeated, “is Samuel Josiah Jones.” (He plainly expected the repetition of his name to have a talismanic effect.) “Spanish Town is my paternity. Where you come from?”
“Kingston,” said Susan briefly; then she added, “What is that to you?”
“Oh, don’t be vex,” said Jones appealingly. “Don’t expostulate with me. I don’t ask you for nothing. But you didn’t introduce you’self properly, so I interrogated you. You angry?”
Susan saying nothing in reply, Jones’s voice became more confidential.
“I wouldn’t tell you a lie. I have had a few good drinks to-day. But me head is strong, an’ when I see a young lady like you, I would rather die than disgrace meself.
“If a young man can’t behave himself in the company of ladies,” he continued, still speaking confidentially, “he ought not to frequent their company. Don’t you think I am right?”
Susan was obliged to nod her agreement.
Pleased with this, his voice took on a triumphant ring.
“Quite so,” he resumed. “As I tell these boys here, sobriety is the great thing; sobriety an’ temperance. Take a drink when y’u want one; but don’t disgrace you’self—like me.”
“But you not disgracin’ you’self,” said Susan, flattered by the respect he professed for her, but a little puzzled by his last sentence.
“No,” said Jones, “that is what I say. I don’t disgrace meself. I set a good example. I don’t want no man to say that Samuel Josiah Jones disgrace himself in public.”
Mr. Jones leaned back against the tree, obviously proud of the example he was setting, and quite as obviously pleased with the world and himself. Susan looked at him curiously. He was a young man of her own complexion; that is to say, dark brown. His features were good, his face frank and lively, and when he spoke two big gold teeth gleamed brightly, showing that Mr. Jones did not belong to the common classes. He was tall, and flashily dressed, his necktie reminding one of a Scotch plaid of the most pronounced pattern. A gorgeous fob hung out of the trousers pocket in which he kept his watch. It was plain to Susan that he was a young man of some importance, and by the words he used she judged him to be a man of considerable education. She was pleased too he had recognized that she was a young lady, for some “fast and forward young men” of her acquaintance had not always been ready to do that. She was rather glad now that he had persisted in talking to her. His preference for her company was a distinct compliment.
She saw that his sobriety had been tempered with a fair quantity of strong drink. He had himself said so. But temperance folk were held in strong contempt by her, and she had always heard her aunt quote with great approval Paul’s advice to Timothy, that he should take a little wine for his stomach’s sake. Miss Proudleigh faithfully followed this advice herself: every night before going to bed she drank, not a little wine, but a little rum and water; and Susan’s parents would have done the same had they been able to afford it. So she thought more highly of Mr. Jones for being able to enjoy himself in the free and independent manner which his appearance denoted. She was about to continue the conversation when Letitia came up.
The latter stared at Jones, not exactly surprised, for on such a day a girl might pick up half a dozen new acquaintances. Susan introduced her, and Jones, rising with great dignity, assured her that his name was Samuel Josiah Jones, and asked her to take a seat.
“I not sitting down,” said Letitia, shaking her head. “I came to henquire if Sue are going to ’ave her lunch.” (Letitia was very careful of her diction in company.)
“Lunch?” said Jones; “lunch? Of course! The inner man must be replenished. We will have lunch immediate. Miss Susan, arise!”
Miss Susan arose, as bidden, and seeing that Letitia showed no objection to accepting Mr. Jones’s hospitality, she followed the young man to the spot where refreshments were being sold.
Under a tree, and protected by a barricade of dealboard tables and low wooden benches, were a number of women and a man, retailers of refreshments, and all busy attending to the crowd of customers that surrounded them. Quick-tempered and aggressive, the women bustled about with their sleeves drawn up above their elbows, and the upper part of their skirts tucked up into bundles around their waists. Within the enclosure, huge pots steamed and bubbled on improvised fireplaces; and barrels and boxes containing aerated waters, and beer and whisky and Jamaica rum, stood invitingly open.
The smell of stewed beef mingled with that of stewed salt-fish, and the heavy odour of cocoa-nut oil rose from two five-gallon cans in which rice and red peas were boiling. The women ladled the food into coarse earthenware and enamelled plates as it was ordered, and the man served the liquors.
Jones and the girls sat down to a lunch of stewed fish and rice-and-peas. He ordered whisky for himself, and asked his companions what they would have. After some hesitation, they decided on beer, this being a luxury they did not often enjoy. He called for two glasses of “the best beer,” and the girls gulped the stuff down, declaring with grimaces that it tasted bitter.
Letitia noticed that Jones paid a good deal of attention to Susan. “I wonder if him speaking ’er up?” was her thought, but presently she ceased to think, the beer having set her head a-swimming. Susan felt dizzy too, and had to cling to Jones for support when they rose from the table.
He offered an arm to each of the girls, and gallantly escorted them back to the tree. They sat there for a little while, Jones talking, Susan and Letitia hearing nothing.
The pipes still screamed, and the fiddles squeaked, and the dancers continued dancing. A good many persons had strolled down to the river that ran through the pen, to bathe. Here and there some sat on stones or logs of wood, resting; contented-looking cows cropped the grass within a stone’s throw of the picnickers, no longer frightened by the unusual noise; children climbed the trees to hunt for mangoes; big green lizards pursued their prey among the stones and leaves; and down on men and beasts and trees came the fiery rays of the now vertical sun, scorching, blistering, burning, but powerless to exhaust the energy of the musicians or to put an end to the dance.
“This sun,” remarked Jones, “is the hottest sun I feel for a long time. It make me sweat like a bull. But I come to dance, an’ I must dance. What you say?”
His words were addressed to Susan, who faintly murmured in reply, “Too hot.”
Two or three minutes passed in silence, and then the beer, acting in conjunction with the heat and the exertion of the morning, completed its work. Reclining against the tree, Susan slept. Letitia, who was not so easily affected by strong drinks as her friend, laughed at first; then, finding it dull sitting there, asked Jones what he intended to do.
“Remain here,” he said. “A gentleman must behave gentlemanly. Can’t leave this female alone when she is not in her senses.”
“All right,” said Letitia; “I goin’ to dance. I will come back later. Tell Susan so when she ’wake.”.
Jones nodded, then stretched his legs out more comfortably, covered his face with his handkerchief, and disposed himself to reflect on his own superior manners, while Letitia walked away.
He dozed, and for an hour both of them lay there, recumbent in the sun.
Jones woke first. Although desiring to be gentlemanly, his first impulse was to go and join the dancers; for a chance meeting at a picnic did not, he felt, compel him to remain constantly in attendance upon one young woman. Instead of doing so, however, he bent over and shook Susan slightly. She opened her eyes, yawned loudly, stretched her arms above her head, yawned again, then remarked, “I seems to ’ave been sleepin’, Mr. Jones.”
“Yes,” he said. “You been sleepin’ all the time. An’ I been watching you, in case any of these common young men wanted to take any liberty with you. I wouldn’t move a foot while you reposed.”
“Thank you,” said Susan; “but I mustn’t keep y’u back from dancin’.”
“Don’t mention,” said Jones; “it would be preposterous to leave you in a somnolescent state. Will you take some more beer?”
She shook her head firmly. “It make me giddy,” she confessed.
“All right, then, you stay here till I come. I am goin’ for a rum; I soon be back.”
He went off to the refreshment stand, and Susan followed him with her eyes. He was showing her a lot of attention: did he mean anything? She quickly persuaded herself that he did; otherwise why should he have remained with her all the time? It might be her good fortune to get another intended in place of Tom. She thought of the yard-room and the shop with disgust. This fellow was evidently well off, decent looking, generous. . . . She smiled when he returned, and readily rose when he suggested that they should take a little walk and then have a dance.
“Y’u like Spanish Town, Mr. Jones?” she asked him as they moved away.
“So, so,” he replied; “but I been living in Kingston these last ten years—up in Allman Town.”
“Funny I never see y’u,” said Susan, though there seemed nothing really funny in her not having before met one particular person in a city of over sixty thousand souls.
“That is so,” Jones agreed; “it is a peculiar incident. And here we have become acquainted just when I am goin’ away.”
“Goin’ away?” Susan asked, surprised. “Where?”
“Panama. They wants mechanics down there. An’ Mr. Hewet, an American man that was down here three months ago hiring labourers, send for me. They wants a man like me to help them dig the canal,” he proceeded grandiloquently. “Fifteen dollars a week, an’ quarters. Here I can’t earn much more than thirty shillin’s, an’ I have so many people to boss me that sometimes I don’t know what to do.
“This is a worthless country,” he continued. “No prospects at all. It is much better foreign. I don’t think I will bother come back to Jamaica.”
So he wasn’t “speaking her up” after all! The disappointment she felt was keener than she would have thought possible. Her hastily constructed castle in the air came toppling down, and only the shop and the yard-room remained in their sordid reality.
Tom had gone to Panama. Jones was going. She knew that every week scores and hundreds of other people went, and that the dream of almost everybody she had met was to go to Colon or Port Limon, or “anywhere,” as one man told the steamship clerk to whom he applied for a decker’s ticket. “Anywhere.” Anywhere outside of Jamaica. That was the wish of thousands of persons in all classes and ranks of society, and she had caught the general infection.
She too wanted to go away. She had heard of the riches of Panama and Costa Rica, and had often talked about those places with her friends. Life there, they believed, was free as air; money almost to be had for the asking. True, returning emigrants told of fearful fevers, and unsympathetic policemen, and months of continuous rain, and the dark impenetrable jungle; but the bright fantastic picture painted by imagination cast no shadow in spite of all these dreadful tales. The emigrants who returned to Jamaica almost invariably went back. The fascination of the semi-civilized Central American countries, once felt, was too often irresistible. Hundreds of forgotten graves in Central America contained the bones of men and women who had gone thither with high hopes of enriching themselves; but still the exodus continued. The restless longing for change, for new scenes, for a new life, acted as a spur to discontent.
Susan had become silent and depressed. Jones noticed this and asked her:
“You tired?”
“No,” she said, “I was thinkin’!”
“What was you thinkin’ about?”
She hesitated, then said quite frankly:
“I would like to go to Colon.”
Jones pushed back his jippi jappa hat and stared at her. So she was dissatisfied with Jamaica also! Half-jestingly he asked her:
“You want to go with me?”
She, on her part, surprised by the question, looked at him with eager eyes. Her heart beat quickly, her face lit up with excitement.
“But y’u don’t mean it?” she asked.
Now he really did not know whether he meant it or not. He was a very impulsive man, who did most things on the spur of the moment. He was also a very gallant man, and wasted much of his substance on “females.” He had no permanent connexion with any one of them just then, however; and on Susan asking him whether he really wanted to take her with him or not, it occurred to him that it might be a very fine thing indeed to land in Colon with so attractive a companion.
The idea was worth playing with. “A man,” he answered Susan, “say a lot of things he don’t mean. But y’u don’t answer me question yet. You would like to come with me?”
She made up her mind to a straightforward reply. “I wouldn’t mind, if——”
“If what?”
“If y’u would treat me good.”
“Oh,” he remonstrated. “Do you think a gentlemanly man like me would treat y’u bad? I never do such a thing in me life!”
“I don’t think y’u would,” Susan graciously replied. “You don’t look like those sort of young men at all.”
This compliment pleased Jones immensely. “You are intrinsically correct,” he assured her. “Not a female have a word to say against Samuel Josiah Jones. An’ you will find when you get to Colon what sort of man I am.”
“Then you goin’ to take me?” Susan asked quickly.
“Of course! Don’t y’u want to go?”
Her heart gave one great bound. Here was the opportunity come to her at last!
“All right,” she exclaimed. “I will come. When you goin’?”
“Three weeks’ time. I give notice at the Railway already, but I have to fix up me business. Where y’u live in Kingston?”
“Luke Lane. Y’u must come wid me to-night, let me introduce you to me parents. The place don’t too nice, but you mustn’t mind dat.”
“Certainly not. You are nice, an’ that is enough.”
He felt that something more was required of him—something that a lover in one of the novels he had read would have thought appropriate to the occasion. At the moment only one thing in the way of what he called poetry came to his memory; but still it was poetry, and therefore suitable. He repeated it, standing still and looking fondly in Susan’s face:
“Fleecy looks and black complexion
?Do not alter Nature’s claim,
?Skin may differ, but affection
?Dwells in white and black the same.”
He expected applause. As Susan did not know what the verse was intended for, she simply answered, “Yes.”
“Let us go and tell Letitia,” she added, catching hold of his arm and dragging him with her in her excitement. Nothing loth, he followed, and soon they found Letitia, to whom the good tidings were told. Hezekiah heard it too. He was standing near by when Susan was speaking to her friend, and Susan spoke loudly on purpose that he might hear.
“I goin’ in three weeks’ time. I not comin’ back to Jamaica at all! Sam going to get three pounds a week! What a good luck, eh, Letitia? What a luck!”
Hezekiah heard it all, and saw Jones in the flesh, smiling with the consciousness of irresistible masculine attractions and great potential wealth. Hezekiah could not doubt, and so that night he did exactly what Susan had calculated on his doing. Not only Maria and her mother, but everybody else that he met in Blake Lane was told that Susan had got another intended with plenty of money, and was going to Colon.
“Dis world don’t level,” was Maria’s bitter comment on Susan’s undeserved good fortune.
Fortune is not fair.
“We must take a ’bus,” said Jones, when he and Susan alighted from the train at Kingston. “Don’t bother with the car. It’s late already.”
He hailed a cab, and both of them, after bidding Letitia good-bye, got into the cab and drove off, but not before the cabman had exchanged some sharp words with the policeman who was regulating the traffic. Jones wanted to take sides with the cabman, partly through a natural inclination for argument, partly from a desire to impress Susan with his utter contempt for the guardian of the law. But she urged the cabman to drive on, fearing any serious quarrel at the very beginning of her new career; and the cabman obeyed after some grumbling, though he was clearly in the wrong.
She was glad to be back in Kingston, glad to be riding once more through the ill-lighted streets, to be amongst the slow-moving, chattering people, to feel the dust of the city in her face. She thrilled with excitement at the thought of her parents’ surprise; the whole yard would wonder who it was that had brought her home so splendidly from the picnic. Then she remembered the room and felt ashamed.
“The place shabby,” she again warned Jones. “Me an’ me family are poor; but we are decent. Me father ’ave cramps in his feet; that is why we ’ave to live in a little room.”
She said nothing about Tom and the house in Blake Lane; Jones again declared that the place she lived in did not matter to him.
“I can’t stay long,” he said, when the cab stopped at Susan’s gate. “I will have to go home for me dinner.”
He entered the yard jauntily, and Susan took him up to the room, sitting near the door and at the threshold of which were her father and mother and sisters, and her aunt who had dropped in to see them, as she so frequently did.
They were expecting Susan, but when they heard the cab stop at the gate they had not imagined it was she who had come home in it. Seeing her now with a tall young man whose face they could not distinctly make out in the darkness, they all rose, each one looking at him intently.
“This is Mr. Jones,” said Susan; “I met him at the picnic.”
“My best respects, sir,” said Mr. Proudleigh, taking off the remains of the hat he wore—“my distant respects.”
“Same to you, sir,” said Jones, feeling a trifle awkward.
“Won’t you step inside?” asked Miss Proudleigh. “The place is small, but de heart is warm. Susan, show the gentleman inside.”
She stepped inside herself as she spoke, being curious to know who the gentleman was and what he had come for. That he had some sort of design upon Susan she had no doubt whatever; for no man could take a young woman home without a very definite interpretation being given to this ostensibly innocent act. Susan led Jones into the room. Mr. Proudleigh transferred into the apartment two chairs from his part of the room, and on these he and his sister sat; Jones took the one remaining chair, and Susan sat on the bed. Catherine and Eliza stood by the doorway, curious, while their mother disappeared, as usual, being a woman who rarely indulged in conversation or obtruded her presence upon anyone.
“Very noice picnic, Mr. Jones?” inquired Mr. Proudleigh. “Plenty of music and enjiements? Hope you enjie you’self?”
“Magnanimously,” said Jones; “I met you’ daughter an’ we had a nice conversation. You have a beautiful daughter, Mr. Proudleigh.”
“Cho!” said Susan deprecatingly, but nevertheless pleased.
“Oh yes, sir,” agreed Mr. Proudleigh; “she take after me. She have my features and my disposition. I always say she is me own daurter.”
“Hi! papee,” cried Eliza, a trifle indignant; “don’t we are you’ own daughter too?”
“Of course,” assented her father; “but Sue is de most oldest; an’ she take the world upon her shoulder.”
The world was really himself and the rest of the family, and a good deal of the deference he showed to Susan was inspired by the fear that she might some day throw the burden off.
“Yes,” said Jones, wishing to come to the point at once; “I seldom see a female like Miss Susan. She is perfectly emphatic.”
“Quite true, sir,” said Miss Proudleigh; “but we must remember that beauty is only skin deep, and except a young lady have the fear of de Lord in her heart, she can’t prosper. What society you belongs to, Mr. Jones?”
“Society? Me?” said Jones; “I never belong to any society since I use to go to Sunday school when I was a boy.
“Church is a very good thing,” he continued, “but a young man is wild.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Proudleigh, “I didn’t jine society meself till I was long time over forty. Then I felts that I was a ripe man, an’ could do me duty. I don’t like to see a young man goin’ too much to church. That is like de Scribes an’ Pharisee; it is hypocritical.”
“Well,” his sister was beginning, but here Susan’s impatience got the better of her manners.
“Why don’t you tell them what you ’ave to tell them?” she asked Jones.
Every one’s ears were pricked up. What was it that he could have to say? Miss Proudleigh forgot entirely the remark she had been about to make. Catherine glanced quickly from Jones to Susan, and back again.
“I am goin’ to take away your daughter altogether from you,” said Jones to the old man, and struck an attitude.
So that was it! Everybody had heard the “altogether,” and Mr. Proudleigh and his sister immediately came to the conclusion that Jones wished to marry Susan. It was a most unexpected announcement, but Mr. Proudleigh loved dramatic climaxes, and, fearing lest his sister should forestall him, he quickly rose from his chair and grabbed Jones by the hand.
“I esteem y’u, sir!” he exclaimed. “It is true I never meet you before; but Miss Susan is a big ooman an’ must judge for herself. Besides, I can look ’pon you an’ tell dat you are a honourable gen’leman. Miss Susan will makes a good wife, better dan all——”
He stopped, seeing that Jones was shaking his head decisively.
“I didn’t say I was going to married—yet,” Jones explained; then he looked at Susan as if expecting her to complete the explanation.
“It’s all right,” she said; “papee understand.”
Mr. Proudleigh sat down again. He was sorry he had not grasped the purport of Jones’s words from the start, for it was rather embarrassing to have mentioned marriage when marriage was not immediately intended.
But Miss Proudleigh rose to the occasion. “Ef Susan are satisfied,” she said, “there is nobody to interfere. A respectable young man may not feel like marrying now, an’ yet that does not signify that he is to remain widout a partner in life. After all, who make the marriage service? Don’t it is man? Read the Bible, an’ y’u won’t find a word of it there. Isaac an’ Rebecca didn’t married in a church; an’ yet look how lovin’ them live together. I am a Christian woman, an’ I know what is right from wrong. But I don’t agree wid all those stiff-neck people who say that everybody ought to married right off. That is not a practical view.”
Mr. Proudleigh saw the golden bridge which his sister had built for him, and he went flying over it.
“That is my own opinions,” he remarked with emphasis. “When Mister Jones mention dis matter, I did thought it was funny that . . . I mean that I thought dat a young man would want to know the sort o’ female him goin’ to get married to. Before I married, I was along wid Susan’s mother for ten years. I had the twins that dead, an’ me son who is now oversea—a good buoy that. Then I married, an’ Susan was born. An’ p’rhaps I wouldn’t married at all ef the parson of de church I use to attend sometimes didn’t talk to me an’ tell me I ought to jine society an’ don’t live no more in sin. I don’t regret I are married, but I wouldn’t tell any young man to married right off if him don’t wants to.”
“That is what I say meself,” put in Catherine from the door. “If a gurl get a young man, she would be foolish to drive him away because him don’t want to married at once. After all, if him is free, she is free too.”
Now Catherine had no young man in view, so far as Miss Proudleigh was aware. And though many excellent arguments might be found to show that Susan and Jones were doing almost the right and proper thing in the circumstances existing, Miss Proudleigh felt that a stricter code of morality ought to be enforced in so far as Catherine and Eliza were concerned, at any rate until the time should come when moral theory might wisely be dispensed with on the tacit understanding of a marriage in perspective.
She pursed up her mouth. “I doesn’t thinks,” she observed, “that a young gurl should talk in that way. Susan is different. But you an’ Eliza don’t know de world yet, an’ you should be modest. When I was young, me parents wouldn’t allow me to make such a remarks.”
Catherine bridled up, Eliza tittered, Susan laughed outright.
Catherine made a peculiar noise with her mouth which is locally known as “sucking your teeth,” and which expresses both contempt and defiance. Miss Proudleigh would have volubly resented this, had not her brother interrupted her by going to the door and calling his wife.
“Mattie,” he explained, when she answered the summons, “Mister Jones is takin’ Susan as an intended. Him is a decent young gen’leman, an’ I tell him we is pleased to welcome him.”
“Yes,” said his wife; “we very pleased, sah.” She looked at Jones as she spoke, not liking him as well as she had liked Tom, but yet feeling that Susan was woman enough to make her own choice.
“I am goin’ to make you’ daughter very comfortable, old lady,” said Jones, involuntarily glancing round the little room. “When we go to Colon we going to have fine times.”
He spoke loudly and gaily, for the effect of the liquor he had been drinking had by no means worn off, and he held himself to be something of a hero who had arrived just in time to rescue a good-looking girl from poverty and distress.
The old woman smiled, then asked: “You an’ Miss Susan goin’ to Colon, sah?”
“Yes; three weeks’ time. They offered me an occupation down there, an’ I am taking Susan with me.”
“Well! there is coincidence!” exclaimed Miss Proudleigh. “P’rhaps, Sue, you will meet T——”
“What you goin’ to say now, ma’am?” asked Susan, in a threatening tone.
Miss Proudleigh heard and understood in time. “I was sayin’ that p’rhaps you might meet you’ brother; but I just remember he gone to Nicaragua an’ not Panama,” she replied, with admirable presence of mind.
“Sue did want to go to Colon all this time,” said her mother; “an’ now she can go.” She glanced again at Jones, and left the room; then that gentleman rose to bid them good night, saying as he did so that they would see him on the following night.
Susan accompanied him to the gate, where they remained talking for a little while. When she returned she was clinking a few silver coins in her hand, and smiling gaily.
“Well!” she said, “you see me luck don’t desert me! I did think I would ’ave to work an’ save before I could go away; an’ before I save a shillin’ I get a friend to take me.”
“An’ you remember, Sue,” said her father, “that it was me who strongly advise y’u to go to de picnic. I had a sort of feeling that you should go. Something say to me, ‘Make her go.’ I am a man who follow me feeling all de time; an’ p’rhaps if I didn’t do it, you wouldn’t have gotted such a chance to go foreign.
“Well, nobody can say I don’t do me best fo’ me children,” he proceeded, in a self-satisfied tone. “An’ if them should forget me, the curse of God must fall on them. All night long I lay down and thinks about them. When you believe I are sleeping I am thinking about you.”
If snoring be a proof of wakefulness, then it must be admitted that Mr. Proudleigh spent all the long hours of the night in anxiously reflecting on his children’s future welfare. In fact, on the strength of such evidence, it might reasonably be contended that he never knew what it was to sleep. On the other hand, it was difficult to reconcile his claims to habitual insomnia with his habit of frequent dreaming; for every morning he had at least one dream to relate, and nearly every dream of his was fraught with prophetic meaning.
That he should now be anxious to bind his children, and especially Susan, to him by the bonds of gratitude was natural. And the reason was obvious. If Susan went to Panama and did not take the others with her, or agree to send something regularly for them, the prospects of himself and the old woman might again become serious, however it should fare with the two girls. In mentioning the vengeance of God upon ungrateful children, therefore, he felt he had struck a note that would vibrate to good effect, and inwardly congratulated himself on his diplomacy. Susan, however, did not need to be reminded of the necessity of doing something for her people before she left; she had already made up her mind as to that while driving home from the railway station. So by way of answer to her father’s remarks, she began to tell them of her plans.
“I can’t take Kate wid me again, as I was goin’ to do if I did go by meself,” she explained. “An’ I can’t promise to send for any of you, for Sam not going to like it. If Kate can manage to come to Colon by herself, after I get down there, dat will be all right, for I would like some of me own family near me. But I not sending for her. And I don’t see what you would do in Colon, sah,” she went on, turning to her father, “for you’re old, an’ you can’t work.”
“Me!” exclaimed Mr. Proudleigh indignantly; but Susan calmly continued with her statement, without taking any notice of his protest, or giving him the opportunity of showing how extremely useful just such a man as he would be in a country devoted to the strenuous task of building a great canal.
“I am going to leave the shop, an’ all of you can look after it, same as if I was in Jamaica. It getting on well, an’ if you don’t act foolish you will make a profit every week. An’ I will send something for y’u whenever I can. And see here! Remember that I don’t want nobody to talk about Tom when Sam come to see me. Aunt Deborah nearly do it a little while ago when Sam was here, an’ it is all that sort of stupidness I don’t like.”
“You needn’t express you’self in that way, Susan,” protested Miss Proudleigh severely. “I didn’t mean anyt’ing. It only occur to me that Jones might meet Tom, an’ Tom might make confusion.”
“Him make confusion!” retorted Susan scornfully. “What about? What him send for me since him gone away? I only hear from him once, an’ him say that if he don’t get sick him will send for me; an’ he didn’t even put a dollar in de letter. It’s two months now since him gone. If I didn’t look for meself I might have been dead by this time. Besides, after all, I am me own woman, an’ if I choose to get another intended, that’s my business!”
“But suppose Jones meet Tom in Colon?” said Catherine.
“Well, what about dat? Jones couldn’t think that he is me first lover. I am not his first sweetheart. I don’t want him to hear anyt’ing about Tom, for I don’t want any chat in Kingston before I leave; but if him meet Tom an’ I see any confusion goin’ to come, I will simply look for something to do, like I been doing here since Tom leave. Once I am in Colon I will be all right.”
But Miss Proudleigh, not pleased with Susan’s confidence and self-assertion, and perhaps resenting her niece’s continued good fortune, assumed a dismally prophetic air and uttered this doleful prediction:
“I don’t quite like this, Susan. This young man’s name is Jones, an’ the lawyer who lose you’ case against Maria is Jones. Now if you put two an’ two together, an’ reflect in a general way on the coincidence, y’u will see that there is trouble before you. Howsoever——”
“Howsoever,” flamed out Susan, “it would be a good thing if everybody mind them own business. It wasn’t me who select Lawyer Jones; an’ a lot of people in Kingston have the same name. Those who envy me can think an’ believe what them like.”
Then she asked for her dinner, which she had been too excited all this time to think of; and about an hour after eating it she went to bed.
But her excitement prevented her from sleeping; and with the excitement was mingled some anxiety lest Jones should change his mind in the morning and not come back to see her after all. That was not improbable, for a man sober might think much differently from the same man who, according to his own admission, had taken “a few good drinks” during the day. Yet she was inclined to believe that he had been in earnest. He had given her five shillings when bidding her good-bye at the gate, and no one who was not very much in earnest would have done so. On the whole, after thinking the matter over, she felt she was certain of him.
She began to think about her approaching migration. To her, Colon and Panama meant one and the same place, the lesser thus being made to include the greater. She could form no idea of what the town might be like, but of one thing she was certain: she would enjoy herself there immensely and all the time. She would have plenty of money to spend. She would have many fine dresses to wear. If Jones did not treat her nicely? Well, she was not the sort of young woman to submit to bad treatment. She would not stay with him. But she liked Samuel Josiah; he was attentive and generous. She speedily decided that they would get on excellently together. . . .
As for all those who disliked her, how she had triumphed over them! They would hear of her good luck, and gnash their teeth with envy. Maria? Mother Smith? They were entirely beneath her notice now.
She dwelt upon this thought with delight for some time, then gradually fell asleep.
Unlike Susan, Jones slept very soundly that night. It was not until the next morning that he thought over the proposal he had made to Susan, and he did not regret it. He was attracted by her, more so than he had been by any other woman he could remember. He did not know the reason, and would have been the last person in the world to have thought about reasons in such a connexion. He simply believed he was in love with her, and not in quite the same way that he had been in love some twenty times before.
He felt happier now about going to Colon. The truth is that Jones, in spite of all his talk, had been rather uneasy about leaving Jamaica and going to a land where he might meet with no one whom he knew intimately. Susan’s will was stronger than his. Hers was a more determined character. That was one cause of the attraction she had for him; impulsive, uncertain, volatile, and talkative as he was, it was not surprising that a girl who usually knew her own mind in matters that directly concerned her, and who could stick to her own point with remarkable tenacity, should exercise considerable influence over him almost from the moment of their first meeting. Then she was good-looking, lively, and of excellent figure. She was not common either, he was sure, for she had not welcomed his advances at the start as so many other girls would have done. Consequently he was satisfied with the arrangements of the previous day; and he lost no time that evening in going to see her. When he appeared, Susan’s last doubt vanished. She was now quite certain of him.
Soon Mr. Proudleigh began to speak of him as his son-in-law, and Susan’s sisters regarded him as their brother-in-law. Calling Jones brother-in-law appealed to the girls’ sense of propriety, while it suited their aunt’s religious views to consider Jones as almost married to Susan. The family’s standards of respectability demanded that some deference, if only in words, should be paid to the conventions of recognized propriety.
Jones went to see Susan every night, sometimes taking her out for long car rides. Usually they were left alone when at home, for, as Mr. Proudleigh put it, “A courting couple don’t like disturbation.” On these occasions the rest of the family distributed themselves amongst the other people who lived in the yard, or sat together in the yard on boxes talking about Susan’s good luck. Both Catherine and Eliza would then dearly express the hope that a similar stroke of good fortune might befall them, for they were heartily tired of their present way of life. But whenever they voiced their discontent Mr. Proudleigh would ask them to have patience, assuring them at the same time that he was praying for them as he had prayed for Susan, and was expecting a similar answer at any moment.
One night it rained, and then all of them were obliged to assemble indoors. It was then that Mr. Proudleigh took the opportunity of mentioning certain fears that he professed to feel in regard to Samuel’s and Susan’s future; though, if the truth must be told, he had begun to think that as Jones already had a good situation in Jamaica, he might as well remain in the island with Susan and endeavour to be happy, instead of going to a place where he (Mr. Proudleigh) might not be able to follow them. Not without some hope of dissuading Jones from leaving Jamaica, he remarked:
“You know, Mister Jones, I been hearing dat Panama is a dangerous place for a young man. A person tell me this morning dat the Americans don’t like Jamaica people at all; an’ that the first word you say to them, them shoot y’u.”
“That don’t frighten me,” said Jones. “No American man is going to shoot Samuel Josiah. I can do my work, an’ when the work is done, I go about me own business, an’ leave the Americans to themselves. Besides, I hear that all y’u have to do is to tell an American you are a British subject, an’ he wouldn’t put a finger on you.”
“So I hear meself,” said Susan. “If you belongs to another race, them will take an advantage of you. But so long as them know y’u are an English subject, them will respect y’u.”
“Is dat so?” asked the old man, rather disappointed at hearing that British citizenship was such a sure protection against the dangers of which he was warning Samuel; “but how is it that I hear them sometimes illstreat folkses that go away from here?”
“It can’t be Americans do it,” said Jones, quite positively.
Now Mr. Proudleigh, although not gifted with particular quickness of wit, could perceive that there was something lacking in Jones’s reply. “Not reburting you, Mister Jones,” he said, “but even ef it wasn’t de Americans who half-murder the Jamaica mens, it was somebody. An’ those people didn’t seem to mind dat Jamaica people was British subjects.”
This way of looking at the matter was certainly of some importance; Jones, however, was not one to allow himself to be easily beaten in an argument.
“The Jamaica people couldn’t have been Jamaica people at all,” he answered. “For a British subject can’t be touched.”
“I don’t see how dat can be,” said Mr. Proudleigh doubtfully, “for those Jamaica people did really born in Jamaica.”
“Then they were a set of fools,” replied Jones shortly. “Most Jamaica people is foolish; they have no cranium whatsoever. I bet you those men never told they were British subjects. Now, if it was me, I would have made everybody to understand that I was an Anglo-Saxon, an’ that if they touch a hair of me head, war would be declared. That’s the way to talk in a foreign country. I wouldn’t make a man bluff me out. No, sir!”
“Dat is all right, Mister Sam,” said the old man. “But p’rhaps them wouldn’t care what y’u call you’self till after them finish beat y’u. An’ then I don’t see how it would help y’u, even if them publicly expologize to you as you are a British subjec’.”
“But why y’u want to frighten Samuel, papee?” asked Susan, who now began to suspect that her father had some motive in arguing like this. “Don’t y’u think Sam can look after himself? An’ don’t a lot of other people gone to Colon an’ nothing ’appen to them? Why you talking like that?”
Mr. Proudleigh may never have heard of the proverb which asserts that discretion is the better part of valour, but he certainly lived up to both the spirit and the letter of it.
“Y’u misunderstand you’ poor ole father, Sue,” he answered, with the suggestion of a reproach in his voice. “I only wanted to hinform Mister Sam as to what I hear. I know him can look after himself. Him is as brave as a . . . a . . .” He cast about in his mind for a term of comparison that would transcend all such other commonplace terms as “lion” and “tiger,” and finally came out with—“as a hedgehog.” He had not the faintest conception what sort of animal a hedgehog might be; but that in itself induced him to think of it as possessing remarkable qualities of courage. His children, who had read at the elementary school of the hedgehog and its ways, laughed outright; but Jones was not at all offended.
“You are right, old massa,” he observed, “if y’u put your hand on a hedgehog, he stick you with his porcupines, an’ that’s like me. I am a word and a blow all the time. If any man interfere with me, he get the worst of it.”
“But nobody going to interfere wid you,” Sue insisted. “Y’u will mind your own business, an’ leave everybody else alone.”
Given Jones’s temperament, this was highly improbable. But he agreed with her.
“Besides,” he added, “it is quite true that they can’t do what they like with a British subject. That’s undiscussable.”
“I wonder why dat is so?” asked Mr. Proudleigh. “I always hear so, but I don’t understand de reason.”
“It is the King,” explained Catherine. “Them ’fraid of the King. If y’u do one British subject anything, an’ the King hear about it, him send ships to fight for you. Him ’ave sojers an’ ships, an’ nobody can beat them. And as Jamaica belongs to him, him protect us.”
Catherine’s display of political knowledge deeply impressed her father. “I see!” he remarked. “It’s like what Queen Victoria used to do. I hear dat when she come to the throne she get up one day an’ say, ‘I don’t want any more slave in Jamaica,’ an’ the moment she say so, them send an’ free every slave! That was a good ooman. An’ that is why she live so long that I was beginning to think she would never dead. An’ her children take after her, or them wouldn’t protect us when we go foreign.”
“It’s not only the King,” said Jones, anxious to show that he knew much about such matters. “It’s the Parliament as well. The Parliament look after British subjects wherever them go to.”
“Yes, eh?” said Mr. Proudleigh, still more deeply impressed; “what is de Parliament?”
Jones thought for an instant, then answered, “It’s something like our Legislative Council. A lot of dukes; an’ they all discuss an’ argue. I hear, too, men are elected to it; big men, like lords, and that sometimes them fight, but them don’t fight often. They are all white, for in England y’u never see a black man. But if a black man go there an’ just say he is a British subject, they do anything for him. They love him, y’u know, because he is born under the British flag.”
“That’s a place I would like to go to,” said Mr. Proudleigh. “I would like to see de King. Howsoever, ef he protect Jamaica people in Colon, you an’ Miss Susan will be all right there.”
Then the talk drifted to other subjects, and Mr. Proudleigh made no further attempts to persuade Jones to remain.
The days flew by quickly. During the last week that she was to remain in Kingston Susan busied herself in going round to her debtors and letting them know that Catherine would collect the moneys due to her, in going to see her friends to bid them good-bye, and in going for long car rides in the evenings with Jones. It was when she was returning from one of these rides one night that she stopped suddenly and looked back at a woman who was walking slowly at some distance behind her.
“What’s the matter?” asked Jones.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I thought I did know that person back of us; but I can’t see her face. I must be mistaken.” But that night after Jones had left she said to Catherine:
“Kate, y’u know who I could swear I thought I saw in the lane to-night?”
“Who?” asked Kate.
“Mother Smith. As I was coming down, I pass a person that look familiar. An’ something say to me, ‘Turn back.’ An’ when I look back, the person seem to be Mother Smith, but I wasn’t sure; an’ as Sam was wid me I couldn’t go up to her.”
“But what is Mother Smith doin’ here?” asked Catherine. “Maria was with ’er?”
“No. P’rhaps it wasn’t her, after all. If it was ’er, she must ’ave been walkin’ this way to see what sort o’ young man Sam is, for Hezekiah must ’ave told her an’ her big-mouth daughter that I going to Colon. I hope she see what she come to see! Thank God! She can’t interfere wid me any more—the old wretch!” Then she dismissed Mother Smith from her mind.
She was to sail on Saturday, so on Friday night quite a number of her friends came to see her. She had specially invited them; for though, the exigencies of space forbidding, she could not give a dance, she had heard that rich people had “at homes,” and she saw no good reason why she should not have one herself. She did not call it an “at home”; she merely told her friends it was to be “a joke”; but she meant it to be a very serious and fashionable joke, which was what she conceived an “at home” to be.
Letitia was there, and Cordelia Sampson, a reddish-brown young lady, very much freckled, and with a voice of astonishing shrillness. Cordelia sang in the choir of an Episcopalian mission church in one of the suburbs of the city, always spoke of herself as “a choir,” and was always alluded to as “a choir” by those who knew her. She was the terror of the mild-mannered clergyman who, for some utterly inexplicable reason, believed that she was endowed with a splendid voice, and that her resignation, so frequently threatened, would mean a great loss to the church. You sometimes had to persuade her to sing when she came to see you; but, once she began, the problem was how to persuade her to stop. She was clothed in pink this evening, and was aggressively prepared to be musical; in fact, she had brought a music folio with her, and she sat with it in her lap, so as to be ready for all emergencies. There were four other girls, two of them black, and the other two of the dark brown shade known as sambo. All of these were dressed in light white frocks which fitted them to perfection. No men had been invited, except Letitia’s brother; for Susan did not think highly of the few young men she knew.
The cloth partition in the room had been taken down, and the beds removed. Some chairs had been borrowed from the people in the yard, who, since they had heard of Susan’s good fortune, treated her with marked respect and never neglected to address her as Miss Susan. There was therefore room for the guests, who, if they did sit rather close to one another, and perspired profusely, did not seem to mind that much. As for refreshments, Susan had laid out eight shillings in cakes, aerated waters and syrups, being determined that no one should call her mean. She was expecting Samuel; but he, she told her friends, might not come until nine o’clock.
There was but one thing to talk about, of course.
“I may ’ave to sing at you’ wedding, Sue,” said Miss Sampson. “For if a young man can fall in love with a young lady at first sight, an’ take ’er away with ’im, it is likely he may marry ’er.”
“I believe so!” said Letitia. “The moment I saw Sue an’ Jones together, I know ’im love ’er. Y’u should see the way him look on ’er. Sort of funny, y’u know . . . in fact, you could see love all over his face.”
“Well,” said Susan complacently, “if it’s my luck to married, I will married. But I not putting me head on that. After all, a lot of people married an’ don’t better off than me to-day; so ef I don’t married I won’t fret.”
“Y’u right, me child,” said Letitia. “What’s de good of getting married if you ’ave to work ’ard? I know some married woman that toils like a slave from morning to night, an’ I don’t see what them get for it. That wouldn’t suit me!”
“Nor me,” observed one of the other girls. “What any woman going to kill herself for?”
“But I say, Sue,” she went on, inadvertently turning the conversation; “y’u ever hear anything about that gurl y’u brought up in de court-house? I never see y’u since dat time, an’ I wanted to ask you about ’er.”
“I never see her. I don’t ’ave no bad feelings for ’er now, for if she didn’t interfere wid me, I wouldn’t be goin’ away to-morrow. But I glad she didn’t get Tom, for that teach people like she not to interfere wid other gurls’ intendeds,” Susan replied.
“She an’ her mother must be cursing y’u,” said Cordelia with a shrill laugh. “You are all right, an’ they are all wrong! Y’u ought to sing ‘Sound the loud Timbrel o’er Egypt’s Dark Sea,’ Sue, because y’u really beat them out,” and she fingered her song folio suggestively.
“Ladies,” said Susan, taking the hint, “don’t you think Miss Sampson should favour us with a song?”
Her careful pronunciation and formal speech was, as it were, a call to order; it meant that the serious business of the evening was about to begin.
Miss Sampson simpered, opened her book, said, “You must ’elp me with the chorus,” and then uttered a terrifying scream.
In the choir she must have been a disturbing element. As a soloist she was indisputably remarkable. Yet that did not prevent the company from assisting her with the chorus to the best of the ability of their lungs; and when the song was ended they expressed themselves as enraptured.
It was after that that Susan’s sisters handed round glasses of kola and bits of cake in saucers, and while the guests were enjoying these refreshments Jones came in.
He was duly introduced, but would not sit down.
“Some friends of mine,” he explained, “want to give me a send-off; so while you girls enjoyin’ you’selves here, I will go an’ enjoy meself with a few males.”
This was disappointing to the girls, who had already begun to find the society of their own sex a little dull.
“We would like to enjoy you’ conversation, Mr. Jones,” Cordelia suggested. “I’ve just rendered a song, an’ now we would like you to say something.”
But Jones would not be prevailed upon to say something. He shook hands with them, told Susan at what hour he was coming for her the next day, and went out. Susan followed him to the gate, as usual, and her friends, finding the ceremonial of an “at home” much too stiff for enjoyment, began to discuss him and Susan and their own affairs in an intimate manner, and without paying any special and irksome attention to the pronunciation of their words or the grammatical sequence of their sentences. This sort of talk was congenial to Susan herself, and she heartily joined in it when she returned to the room. And when her friends were leaving her at a little past eleven o’clock, she agreed that she had had a very fine evening, and that the “joke,” although not by any means as lively as a joke with music and dancing, had nevertheless been a very good joke of its kind.
Yet, when all the guests had gone, her sisters noticed a puzzled look on Susan’s face.
“What is it?” asked Catherine.
Susan wrinkled her brows. “I am sure Mother Smith was outside this yard to-night,” she answered. “I saw her when I went to de gate wid Sam. What is dat woman coming about me for? What can she mean?”
In the meantime Jones had gone to meet his friends. On leaving Susan, he turned southwards, and as he emerged from the lane on to a crossing an old woman approached him, as if with the intention of speaking to him. Thinking she was a beggar, he took no notice of her, but hurriedly continued on his way. In about ten minutes he came to a saloon, over the principal entrance of which was a huge signboard with the encouraging invitation, “Welcome to All.”
He went up a short flight of steps, pushed the slat door, which swung back on its hinges behind him, and found himself in a large well-lighted room. He knew the place well. Facing the entrance was a long bar of dark polished wood, and behind it, against the wall, were a number of shelves arranged in the form of a pyramid. These shelves were stocked with bottles of all sorts and shapes, all of them containing liquors. In the centre of the pyramid was a huge mirror, the only one in the room. At one end of the bar was a great pitcher of iced water, and scattered about it were glasses and ice-bowls and long silver-plated ice-spoons.
Behind the bar stood two bright-looking dark girls, gaily dressed and busily attending to the orders of the customers. One or two of the latter were lounging against the bar, but the most of them were seated at little marble-topped tables scattered here and there about the room. The people who frequented this place were nearly all clerks, shopmen, and superior artisans. It was towards one of the tables, round which four or five men were seated, that Jones walked immediately on entering the saloon.
One of the men held a newspaper in his hand, and was talking loudly. “Hullo, Sam!” he shouted, when he caught sight of our friend, “I thought you weren’t comin’ again. Make room, boys, make room!”
They made room for Jones, who sat down.
“What’ll you have?” said the same speaker, who was known to his friend’s as the Professor. “Order something good, old boy: won’t see you after to-morrow, y’u know. What is your drink?”
Jones decided on gin and ginger beer; ordered a pack of cigarettes, then settled down to enjoy his beverage, his smoke, and a last friendly chat.
“So you going to leave us, eh?” said a dark, serious-looking man, who sat stirring a bit of ice in a glass with his finger. “Going away! I travel once meself to Colon when the French was diggin’ the Canal. I nearly die, an’ when I came back to Jamaica I swear I never would go away again. A man don’t have long to live, an’ it’s just as well to remain here till his time come.”
“Why you talking like that?” asked Jones. “You not sick? When I come back y’u will be alive and kicking, Septimus, an’ yet you talking to-night like a dying duck in a thunder-storm. You are too pessimistical, man.”
“You don’t know what y’u saying,” replied the serious Septimus seriously. “I know you are a man don’t read the newspaper, but you should hear what Professor been reading to-night!”
Curious, Jones turned to the Professor, who impressively read from a local journal the views of a European astronomer on Halley’s Comet, then visible in the morning sky. Jones had heard of the comet, like most other people in the island, and, like them, had not given it much thought. Now, however, he listened to what the newspaper had to say about it with a great deal of interest. It appeared that somebody in Europe believed that he had discovered certain green bands in the tail of the comet, which indicated a poisonous gas, and now that astronomer was warning the inhabitants of the earth of their possible extermination at an early date. The whole article was read out aloud by the Professor (for the third time), and nearly everybody in the room listened intently. When the reader stopped, the serious man again took up the burden of his lamentations.
“There you are!” he exclaimed dismally. “I have been expecting that thing for I don’t know how long. It is written in the Book of Revelations that before the last day there shall be signs and wonders. The Kingston earthquake was a sign. An’ this comet is a perfect wonder; for when I saw it the first time a few days ago it only had a head, an’ yesterday morning I only saw its tail! Oh! you can laugh as y’u like” (Jones had laughed) “but I tell you the situation is serious.”
The seriousness of the situation so overcame him that he called for another drink.
“Well,” said Jones, “I wouldn’t trouble about that. I don’t see the comet yet; an’ you say you only see the tail. But if you see the tail, you see the comet. An’ if you see the comet, the head must be somewhere.”
This reasoning appealed to the Professor, a light-complexioned man of about thirty, who had once been an elementary schoolmaster.
“I agree with you, Jones,” he said. “Besides, the Book of Revelations is unscientific. There is something about a three-footed horse in it, isn’t there?”
“A pale horse,” said Septimus reprovingly. “A three-footed horse is a Jamaica duppy story.”
“Even so,” said the Professor, “a horse cannot be pale.”
“What’s to hinder it?” asked the serious man. “If a man can be pale, a horse can be pale too. The pale horse in Revelations was a sign; an’ I tell you that everything y’u read in that book is coming true. I wouldn’t leave Jamaica now, me brother! All we can do in these last days is to watch and pray. I think I’ll take a little rum.”
He took it, then—“It’s rather hard,” he said, “that after a man spend his whole life looking after his family, a comet should come like this to destroy him. What have I done?”
Jones found the conversation distinctly depressing, though there was no denying that many persons in the room were listening to it with very serious faces. He was going away next day, and he began to fear that, at sea, he might be more directly exposed to danger from the comet than those on land.
“I like to talk about big scientific things, meself,” he said, “but I don’t see the good of talkin’ about the end of the world.”
“Well, perhaps you are right,” said the serious man. “It’s not everybody who can face these questions like me. You know, I was brought up very religious. Me gran’mother was a very strict woman; she used to make me say me prayers every morning, an’ she flog me whenever I didn’t want to go to Sunday school. That’s why I turn out so well.”
This claim to superiority nettled Jones. “I have been brought up religious meself,” he said, a little indignantly. “Suppose we have a game of billiards?”
“No, Sam,” Septimus replied gravely. “This is not a time for billiards. I think I shall go to church on Sunday. It is time to turn our thoughts to higher things. I nearly got killed two years ago, an’ since then I not taking any risk with my soul. Y’u going to join Church when you go to Panama?”
“No,” said Jones, “I don’t have nothing to do with churches; the fact is, I don’t understand them at all.”
A chorus of approval greeted these words. “Something should be done to reform the churches,” said the Professor. Then he added impressively, “Something is going wrong somewhere.”
“If the churches were better,” said Jones, “there would be less sin in the world. That’s what I always say.”
“That is so,” said Septimus; “the churches are to blame.” Then calling to the younger barmaid, he said, “Missis, you hear about this comet?”
“I am prepare,” the girl answered, “whenever the call shall come.”
“That’s a fine girl,” said Jones approvingly. “If I wasn’t taking one with me to Panama, I would take her.”
He spoke loudly enough for the barmaid to hear him, and she (though prepared for instant death) imagining that he was making fun at her, promptly faced him with an indignant rejoinder.
“See here, Mister Jones! you really wouldn’t be rude to me to-night. It’s not because y’u see me servin’ behind a bar that you must think y’u can laugh at me! I am a lady, though I am poor; an’ if me dead father should know I was workin’ here, him would dead again from grief!”
“I wasn’t making any fun!” protested Jones. “I was only admiring you. An’ I meant what I said!”
“Stop!” said his serious friend. “You really takin’ a female with you?”
“Yes,” said Jones gaily. “You didn’t hear?”
“No! y’u don’t mean to tell me you married an’ didn’t let me know? You will regret it, me friend! You don’t know what marriage mean yet! A man who have a wife an’ children have a feeling of responsibility he can’t get over, no matter how hard he try, an’ I tell you I have tried very hard. However, we all have to shoulder our burden, an’ do our duty, an’ so let our light shine.”
Here the elder barmaid happening to pass near by him, he (for he seemed to be on terms of surprising familiarity with her) tried to put his arm round her waist. She drew away giggling, and he nearly lost his balance. But his good humour was imperturbable in spite of his fears of the comet, and of the heavy responsibility of wife and children, which, as he alleged, weighed him utterly down.
Jones speedily reassured him and his other anxious friends.
“It’s only a female I taking with me,” he said. “She and I became acquainted recently.”
“What’s her name?” asked one of the men who had hitherto taken no part in the conversation.
“Miss Susan Proudleigh. Fine girl, man! Fall in love with me the same day she see me. I am going to cut a dash with her in Colon.”
“Proudleigh?” asked the Professor, lifting his eyebrows as if trying to remember something. “I think I know that name. . . . Yes, she had a case in court some time ago.”
“What’s that?” Jones asked sharply. “You make a mistake, me friend. She is not the sort of girl anybody can take to court-house. She is a perfect incomparable, man!”
“I didn’t say anybody take her to court-house, Sam; but she did have a case. I don’t remember it exactly, but I think she brought up a girl.”
“It can’t be so,” said Jones, “for I never hear anything about it. It must be somebody else.”
“Perhaps so,” said the Professor, who had no special object to gain by contending he was right, and who knew also that there might be other Susan Proudleighs in Kingston besides the one he remembered having read about.
“Yes, y’u can make a mistake about a name,” said Septimus, “but you can’t make any mistake about this comet. The newspaper say it have sanatogen in its tail, an’ sanatogen is not a thing to fool with.”
“Cyanogen,” corrected the Professor; “sanatogen is a tonic—something you drink.”
“Well, whatever y’u call it, it’s a dangerous thing. However, let us hope for the best. Jones, old man, if we even don’t meet again, let’s have a drink before we part.”
He led the way to the bar, and each of them ordered the liquor he most preferred. It was a farewell glass, and the sincerity with which Jones’s health was drunk showed that his friends really liked him. Under their hilarity there was emotion concealed. Which of them could know for certain that he would ever see Samuel Josiah again?
This last glass was the signal for the breaking up of the party.
Jones lived to the west of the city, and the Professor said he was going that way. So they bade the other fellows good-bye at the tavern door, and started homewards.
They had hardly gone fifteen yards when an elderly, respectable-looking woman boldly accosted them; she spoke to Jones, calling him by name: could she speak to him for a moment?
She was close enough for him to perceive that she could not be a beggar. He wondered what she could have to say to him. He stopped, and asked his invariable question:
“What’s the matter?”
“Y’u mustn’t vex because I stop you out here, my gentleman,” said the old woman: “but I came up to speak to you in Luke Lane to-night, an’ you walk on before I could stop y’u. I only want to tell y’u one thing. I hear y’u going away some time dis month wid Susan Proudleigh. That is your business. But let me tell you—for I don’t believe she tell you herself—dat she has a young man in Colon already, an’ is only making you a fool. You can ask her to-night about Tom Wooley! I don’t like to see a nice-lookin’ young gentleman like you deceive; so I tell you about the sarpent you is nourishin’ in you’ bosom.”
She ceased and said good night, having done the work she had been striving for several nights to accomplish. The oath that she had taken on the night when Susan had fought with Maria had been by no means forgotten, for Mother Smith was a revengeful woman, and, bitterly disliking Susan, would have gone far to injure her. To think that Susan had been more fortunate than Maria was gall and wormwood to her already bitter spirit. Only one chance of striking at Susan was open to her and she had seized it. She wanted Jones to know the truth about Susan; how he would act she could not guess, but she hoped for the worst.
“Tom Wooley,” said Samuel’s companion as the woman walked away—“why, that’s the name of the man mentioned in the case I was telling you about.”
Jones, who had been astonished at the old woman’s reason for stopping him, continued his walk.
“I don’t see through this whole business,” he said to his friend. “What she mean?”
Professor, who had read the case in the newspapers, had easily grasped the situation. He explained:
“The old woman’s daughter was the girl your intended brought up; so the old lady want to put a spoke in her wheel.”
“Yes, of course!” said Jones; “what a woman, eh? She nearly frightened me! Now what she think I can do, me dear sir?”
A question which showed that he intended to do nothing; which indeed was the decision he had arrived at. As he had never had any reason to suppose that he was Susan’s first lover, he could not profess to feel shocked at learning that a former flame of hers was now in Colon. Nor did he really feel aggrieved, for even though she had not told him of the case, there was clearly nothing to her discredit about it, since she had been the prosecutor. He would have liked to ask her about it, and said to himself that he would do so some day; but the truth is that he already knew Susan well enough to understand that she might lose her temper if questioned about anything she did not want to discuss. On the whole, he did not see that Susan’s past mattered to him, any more than his could matter to her. This conclusion was characteristic of Jones. Before he had reached his house he had begun to talk of another subject having no relation whatever to Mother Smith and her story.
Ghost.
On the afternoon of the following day a wharf at the eastern section of the city was thronged with people, chiefly black and brown. Scores of cabs were drawn up at both sides of the entrance to the wharf, and any number of porters were conveying trunks on their heads to the ship which lay anchored alongside of the pier. Steam was up; a donkey engine rattled and clattered as the sailors lowered some packages into the vessel’s hold; the captain stood on the bridge shouting out his commands with a fine sense of ultimate authority; the passengers streamed up the gangway, while their friends and relatives who had come to see them off stood on the pier and looked with envy and admiration at those who were about to brave the perils of the deep.
It was a scene characteristically West Indian. The long wooden pier crowded with a jabbering, multi-coloured throng, the mountains of coal from which fine particles of coal-dust came flying as the sea breeze swept over the wharf; the noise, the confusion, the total lack of all appearance of order—though order of a kind was certainly maintained—the dark faces, eager or tearful; the ragged porters who balanced on their heads packages weighing over a hundred pounds each as though they were feather pillows; the few white men moving perfectly at ease amongst the excited people; the brilliant sunlight, the great arch of dazzling sky, the gently-heaving green-tinted water, the crowds of boys, who, simply clad in a short pair of breeches, swam and dived like fishes in the sea, shaking their heads as they rose to the surface, and showing their strong white teeth as they laughed and shouted to the people on the ship—all this was typical of a British West Indian island on a day when a vessel leaves the port.
To Susan and Jones it was not strange, and the noise could not possibly confuse them. They pushed their way through the crowd, followed by Mr. Proudleigh, his wife, Miss Proudleigh, and Susan’s sisters; but at the gangway they were stopped by one of the Steamship Company’s officials, who firmly told them that only passengers were allowed to go on board. Here they separated. Susan kissed all her folk, Jones shook hands with them, and then the two climbed up the gangway, and Susan found herself at last on the deck of the steamer which was to take her to a strange and distant land.
For the first time doubts assailed her. For the first time she realized fully that she was leaving her home, perhaps for good; and as she looked from the deck down upon her people a lump gathered to her throat and she began to wonder if she were altogether wise. Yet she would not have given up her purpose for a moment. She was too deeply bitten by the prevailing desire to go somewhere.
She leaned against the vessel’s rail, now and then exchanging a word at the top of her voice with Catherine or her father. Jones was as gay as ever, and was loudly explaining to some of his friends on the pier that he would have travelled first-class had he not been taking a female with him. He was in the condition locally known as “merry” (this term indicating generally a half-way stage between soberness and intoxication), and seemed to entertain a cheerful expectation of being shot immediately after arrival in Colon; but Susan saw nothing exhilarating in such a prospect, and more than once suggested to him that he should stop talking nonsense.
She was to travel second-class; but for the present she remained standing amongst the deck-passengers. There were over a hundred of these, and the deck on which they were gathered was littered with boxes and trunks containing their clothes, and with the deck-chairs on which they would sit during the day and sleep at night. It seemed a strange scene to Susan’s wondering eyes. The beat of the engines stunned her, the smells nauseated her, she was conscious of a throbbing in her head. Suddenly it seemed to her as though the pier and the people on it were moving backwards. She heard a great shout of “Good-bye!” She saw a great waving of hands. They were going, going, and now she broke down and began to cry outright.
“Look after the shop good, Kate!” she called out to her sister; and “Good-bye, mammee—good-bye, papee! good-bye!”
Her mother waved in reply, two big tears stealing down her withered cheeks. Her father, though much comforted by the reflection that the shop had been left to the family as a source of revenue, yet felt sad. But he waved his hat and shouted, “Take care of you’self, Susan, an’ write to me!” and continued waving his hat long after there was any possibility of its being seen by her. Then, when the crowd on the pier had become an indistinct mass, Susan went to the second-class passengers’ deck and began to wonder once more what sort of life awaited her in Colon. . . .
Steadily Kingston dwindled into a collection of white houses nestling amidst a forest of trees and backed by a noble range of smoke-blue mountains. And as the ship steamed through the narrow channel that forms the entrance to the city’s harbour, the shrill voice of a woman rose in a quavering chant, and soon all the deckers were singing the words of some plaintive hymn.
It was their way of bidding farewell to Jamaica.
Thus singing, they left the land behind.
“Susan! get up! This is not a time to sleep.”
Susan, who had been sleeping but fitfully, awoke at once with a start. Jones was rapping loudly at her cabin door. Something in his voice startled her.
“What is it?” she asked, frightened.
“The comet! It’s the first time I see it.”
Susan dressed in a minute; she hurried out of the cabin and went to the well-deck with Jones.
It was about four o’clock in the morning, but there was as yet no sign of the coming day. A crescent moon was glowing above, but the light of it paled into insignificance before the radiant splendour of the morning star. There in the East hung Venus, like a great lamp illumining all heaven and earth, a diamond set against a magnificent background of millions and millions of stars. These indeed were strewn almost as thickly in the sky as sand in a desert; look where you would, you saw them, some faint, some bright, and some like silver dust scattered profusely about the lofty silent dome that overarched and covered the wide circle of the sea. The gleaming planet and scintillating sky were alone sufficient to impress those who beheld them that morning with a sense of wonder and of awe. Their serene and lofty beauty, immeasurable grandeur, and vast incalculable distance must have appealed even to the most indifferent care-blunted mind. But it was not upon these that hundreds of eyes were turned when Susan and her lover reached the starboard of the vessel, where a crowd of persons were already standing. All looked at but one object—a great band of light that streamed up from below the eastern horizon and swept across the sky to the south-west, where it dipped into the sea. Clear and distinct it shone, in spite of the radiance around it: a flaming portent, as it seemed, emerging suddenly out of the mysterious depths of space. Most of the travellers on the ship saw it for the first time that morning. They looked at it startled, and with palpitating hearts.
“The comet,” whispered Jones again, and—
“The sword of the Lord,” said calmly but distinctly an old man who stood amongst the deckers.
Almost every one talked in whispers. Something oppressed them—a vague, uncanny feeling. The women pressed their hands against their hearts.
They were alone on the sea. On land they would not have feared so much, for nearly all calamities, or imagined indications of calamity, the West Indian peasant can face with a calmness which springs from his deep-rooted fatalism. But here they were amidst surroundings strange to them; they were alone in a world which they regarded with apprehension—alone upon the sea with the sword of the Lord flaming in the heavens above them.
The sea ran swiftly, wave racing after wave, black and foam-crested. They dashed against the sides of the vessel, flinging high into the air a glistening shower of spray which fell back upon the bosom of the waters in sparks of liquid fire. The prow of the ship seemed to plunge into argent flame; in its wake writhed and twisted a long serpent of light. The phosphorescent gleams of the tropic sea flashed an answer to the brilliance of the tropic sky above, and fire seemed glancing and blazing everywhere.
The wind blew steadily from east to west, and the throbbing of the engines added to the roar of the leaping, hurrying waves. Now and again a murmuring sound was heard amongst the people on the deck—a sound as if they prayed.
Long and earnestly they gazed upon the comet; and then into Jones’s mind came the words of his friend Septimus, spoken so short a time before.
He bent down and whispered in Susan’s ear:
“You think it mean anything, Sue?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, almost inaudibly; “but it’s awful; an’ if it was to come close an’ we should all dead, where would we go to, Sam?”
As if in reply to her question, the old man amongst the deck passengers, who had called the comet “The Sword of the Lord,” again lifted up his voice, this time repeating some words from the Scriptures:
“Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither His ear heavy that He cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you, that He will not hear.”
Susan heard and trembled; a woman in the crowd of watchers groaned out, “Yes, Lord!”
“Have mercy!” sobbed another.
Some one began repeating the hymn, “Jesus, Lover of my Soul.”
“Christ, have mercy,” prayed the shivering people.
“Sue,” whispered Jones, “I heard on Friday night that the comet won’t touch the world until Wednesday; so when we get to Colon to-morrow morning we better married. This sort of life is not one to face death in. I am not a coward, Sue, but, after all, it will be better to die right.”
An immense weight seemed lifted off Susan’s heart as she heard these words. Her present mode of life was called “living in sin” by the ministers and religious folk of her country; and so persistently had this view of it been inculcated that, in common with thousands of others, she had come to regard unsanctified connexions as the one offence really worth considering. True, she had never gone further than giving her intellectual assent to this proposition; but then she had never seen a great comet blazing in the sky before. She now agreed with it with all her soul.
“You right, Sam,” she whispered; “let us make our peace wid God, in case anything happen.” And as she spoke the thought flashed through her mind that, if nothing did happen, she would be Mrs. Jones, a prospect of social advancement which, even at that tremendous moment, gave her a thrill of delight.
Some of the deckers were audibly praying now. The old man, who in Kingston had been a well-known street-preacher, kept on repeating tags of Scripture and words of warning; but gradually, in spite of his efforts to terrify the passengers into hysterics and thus establish his spiritual supremacy, they grew more calm, and soon began to talk at their ordinary pitch of voice.
For the sky was lightening. Slowly the morning star dimmed her brightness, the other stars paled and flickered out, the comet shone but indistinctly, and the moon grew white. Before it was five o’clock “The Sword of the Lord” had disappeared. And as the sky changed from black to grey, and from grey to pink and pearl and loveliest azure, as the phosphorescent brilliance of the water died away and the sun came surging up out of the sea, a great palpitating globe of golden fire, the passengers busied themselves with their toilet, and laughed and chatted as though they had not, but an hour before, been thinking of imminent death.
The transformation was complete. The sun had restored their courage, and had banished for the moment all fear from their minds. As for Susan, she fell sick during the day, her stomach no longer being able to endure the rocking and vibration of the ship. So she did not talk much about anything, and did not even trouble to mention the marriage which she and Jones were to celebrate the next day in Colon, as a sort of spiritual insurance against the eternal fire with which the greater part of mankind might be threatened on the 18th and after.