Zone Policeman 88 Part 4

"Three persons live here, sir."

"I stand grammatically corrected. When did you move here?"

"We remove here in April."

"Again I apologize for my mere American grammar. Now, Henry, what is your room-mate's name?"

"Well, we calls him Ethel, but I don't know his right t.i.tle.

Peradventure he will not work this evening [afternoon] and you can ask him from himself."

"Do his parents live on the Zone?"

"Oh, yes, sah, he has one father and one mother."

An answer: "Why HIMSELF [emphatic subject p.r.o.noun among Barbadians]

didn't know if he'd get a job."

To a six-foot black giant working as night-hostler of steam-shovels:

"Well, Josiah, I suppose you're a Jamaican?"

"Oh, yes, boss, ah work in Kingston ten years as a bar-maid."

"Married?"

"No, boss, ah's not 'xactly married. Ah's livin' with a person."

A colored family:

Sarah Green, very black, has a child named Edward White, and is now living with Henry Brown, a light yellow negro.

West Indian wit:

A shop-sign in Empire: "Don't ask for credit. He is gone on vacation since January 1, 1912."

Laughter and carefree countenances are legion in the West Indian ranks, children seem never to be punished, and to all appearances man and wife live commonly in peace and harmony. Dr. O---- tells the following story, however:

In his rounds he came upon a negro beating his wife and had him placed under arrest. The negro: "Why, boss, can't a man chastize his wife when she desarves and needs it?"

Dr. O----: "Not on the Ca.n.a.l Zone. It's against the law."

Negro (in great astonishment): "Is dat so, boss. Den ah'll never do it again, boss--on de Ca.n.a.l Zone."

One morning in the heart of Empire a noise not unlike that of a rocky waterfall began to grow upon my ear. Louder and louder it swelled as I worked slowly forward. At last I discovered its source. In a lower room of a tenement an old white-haired Jamaican had fitted up a private school, to which the elite among the darker brethren sent their children, rather than patronize the common public schools Uncle Sam provides free to all Zone residents. The old man sat before some twenty wide-eyed children, one of whom stood slouch-shouldered, book in hand, in the center of the room, and at regular intervals of not more than twenty seconds he shouted high above all other noises of the neighborhood:

"Yo calls dat Eng-lees.h.!.+ How eber yo gon' l'arn talk proper lika dat, yo tell me?"

Far back in the interior of an Empire block I came upon an old, old negro woman, parchment-skinned and doddering, living alone in a stoop-shouldered shanty of boxes and tin cans. "Ah don' know how ol' ah is, mahster," was one of her replies, "but ah born six years befo' de cholera diskivered."

"When did you come to Panama?"

"Ah don' know, but it a long time ago."

"Before the Americans, perhaps?"

"Oh, long befo'! De French ain't only jes' begin to dig. Ah's ashamed to say how long ah been here" (just why was not evident, unless she fancied she should long ago have made her fortune and left). "Is you a American? Well, de Americans sure have done one thing. Dey mak' dis country civilize. Why, chil', befo' dey come we have all de time here revolutions. Ah couldn't count to how many revolutions we had, an'

ebery time dey steal all what we have. Dey even steal mah clothes. Ah sure glad fo' one de Americans come."

It was during my Empire enumerating that I was startled one morning to burst suddenly from the tawdry, junk-jumbled rooms of negroes into a bare-floored, freshly scrubbed room containing some very clean cots, a small table and a hammock, and a general air of frankness and simplicity, with no attempt to disguise the commonplace. At the table sat a Spaniard in worn but newly washed working-clothes, book in hand.

I sat down and, falling unconsciously into the "th" p.r.o.nunciation of the Castilian, began blithely to reel off the questions that had grown so automatic.

"Name?"-;-Federico Malero. "Check Number?"--"Can you read?" "A little."

The barest suggestion of amus.e.m.e.nt in his voice caused me to look up quickly. "My library," he said, with the ghost of a weird smile, nodding his head slightly toward an unpainted shelf made of pieces of dynamite boxes, "Mine and my room-mates." The shelf was filled with four--REAL Barcelona paper editions of Hegel, Fichte, Spencer, Huxley, and a half-dozen others accustomed to sit in the same company, all dog-eared with much reading.

"Some ambitious foreman," I mused, and went on with my queries:

"Occupation?"

"Pico y pala," he answered.

"Pick and shovel!" I exclaimed--"and read those?"

"No importa," he answered, again with that elusive shadow of a smile, "It doesn't matter," and as I rose to leave, "Buenos dias, senor," and he turned again to his reading.

I plunged into the jumble of negroes next door, putting my questions and setting down the answers without even hearing them, my thoughts still back in the clean, bare room behind, wondering whether I should not have been wiser after all to have ignored the sharp-drawn lines and the prejudices of my fellow-countrymen and joined the pick and shovel Zone world. There might have been pay dirt there. A few months before, I remembered, a Spanish laborer killed in a dynamite explosion in the "cut" had turned out to be one of Spain's most celebrated lawyers. I recalled that EL UNICO, the anarchist Spanish weekly published in Miraflores contains some crystal-clear thinking set forth in a sharp-cut manner that shows a real inside knowledge of the "job" and the ca.n.a.l workers, however little one may agree with its philosophy and methods.

Then it was due to the law of contrasts, I suppose, that the thought of "Tom," my room-mate, suddenly flashed upon me; and I discovered myself chuckling at the picture, "Tom, the Rough-neck," to whom all such as Federico Malero with his pick and shovel were mere "silver men," on whom "Tom" looked down from his high perch on his steam-shovel as far less worthy of notice than the rock he was clawing out of the hillside.

How many a silent chuckle and how many a covert sneer must the Maleros on the Zone indulge in at the pompous airs of some American ostensibly far above them.

CHAPTER III

Meanwhile my fellow enumerators were reporting troubles "in the bush."

I heard particularly those of two of the Marines, "Mac" and Renson, merry, good-natured, earnest-by-spurts, even modest fellows quite different from what I had hitherto pictured as an enlisted man.

"Mac" was a half and half of Scotch and Italian. Naturally he was constantly effervescing, both verbally and temperamentally, his snapping black eyes were never still, life played across his excitable, sunny boyish face like cloud shadows on a mountain landscape, whoever would speak to him at any length must catch him in a vice-like grip and hold his attention by main force. He spoke with a funny little almost-foreign accent, was touching on forty, and was the youngest man at that age in the length and breadth of the Ca.n.a.l Zone.

At first sight you would take "Mac" for a mere roustabout, like most who go a'soldiering. But before long you'd begin to wonder where he got his rich and fluent vocabulary and his warehouse of information. Then you'd run across the fact that he had once finished a course in a middle-western university--and forgotten it. The schools had left little of their blighting mark upon him, yet "pump" "Mac" on any subject from rapid-fire guns to grand opera and you'd get at least a reasonable answer. Though you wouldn't guess the knowledge was there unless you did pump for it, for "Mac" was not of the type of those who overwork the first person p.r.o.noun, not because of foolish diffidence but merely because it rarely occurred to him as a subject of conversation. Seventeen years in the marine corps--you were sure he was "jollying" when he first said it--had taken "Mac" to most places where wars.h.i.+ps go, from Pekin and "the Islands" to Cape Town and Buenos Ayres, and given him not merely an acquaintance with the world but--what is far more of an acquisition--the gift of getting acquainted in almost any stratum of the world in the briefest possible s.p.a.ce of time.

"Mac" spoke not only his English and Italian but a fluent "Islands"

Spanish; he knew enough French to talk even to Martiniques, and he could moreover make two distinct sets of noises that were understood by Chinese and j.a.panese respectively. He was a man just reckless enough in all things to be generous and alive, yet never foolishly wasteful either of himself or his meager substance. "Mac" first rose to fame in the census department by appearing one afternoon at Empire police station dragging a "bush" native by the scruff of the neck with one hand, and carrying in the other the machete with which the bushman had tried to prove he was a Colombian and not subject to questioning by the agents of other powers.

Renson--well, Renson was in some ways "Mac's" exact ant.i.thesis and in some his twin brother. He was one of those youths who believe in spending prodigally and in all possible haste what little nature has given them. Wherefore, though he was younger than "Mac" appeared to be, he already looked older than "Mac" was. In Zone parlance "he had already laid a good share of the road to h.e.l.l behind him." Yet such a cheery, likable chap was Renson, so large-hearted and una.s.suming--that was just why you felt an itching to seize him by the collar of his olive-drab s.h.i.+rt and shake him till his teeth rattled for tossing himself so wantonly to the infernal bow-wows.

Renson's "bush" troubles were legion. Not only were there the seducing brown "Spigoty" women out in the wilderness to help him on his descending trail, but when and wherever fire-water of whatever nationality or degree of voltage showed its neck--and it is to be found even in "the bush"--there was Renson sure to give battle--and fall.