A frail little woman in the early thirties looked up from her lace-making as I paused in her doorway. In her lap was a small, round, hard cushion with scores of pins stuck in it, and a wooden bobbin at the end of each white thread. She clicked the bits of wood swiftly as she talked, like one who enjoyed conversation, but could not afford to lose time at it. Yes, she worked all day and usually well into the night—nodding at a wick in a little can of tallow. By doing that she could make a whole yard of lace, and get eighty cents for it. It took a spool and a third of thread—American thread, mira usted—at ten cents a spool. Fortunately, she was young and strong, though her eyes hurt sometimes, and people said this work was bad on the lungs. But she had her mother to support, who was too old to do much of anything—the toothless crone, grinning amiably, slouched forward out of the “next house,” which was really another room like the incredibly piece-meal shack in which I stood, though with a separate roof. The rent of the two was thirty cents; they were worth thirteen dollars—the lace-maker mentioned that enormous sum with a catch in her breath. Then she had a little girl. There had been four children, but three had died. Her husband was gone, too—Oh, yes, she had been really married. They had paid $3.75 for the ceremony. She had heard that the Protestants did it cheaper, but of course when one is born a Catholic.... Some women in the quarter were “only married by God,” but that was not their fault. She never had time to go to mass, but she had been to confession four times. There had been no charge for that. Her daughter—the frizzly-headed little tot of six or seven had come in munching a mashed boniato in a tiny earthen bowl, with a broken spoon—went to school every day. She hoped for a great future for her. She had gone to school herself, but she “wasn’t given to learn.” She couldn’t get the child the food the teacher said was good for her. Even rice was sixteen cents a pound, and those—pointing to three or four miserable roots in the burlap “hammock”—cost from one to four cents apiece now. And clothing! Would I just feel the miserable stuff her waist was made of—it was miserable indeed, though snowy white. Then she had to buy a board now and then for two or three cents to patch the house; the owner would never do it. Once she had tried working in a warehouse down by the wharf. The Spaniards said they paid a dollar a day for cleaning coffee—because the law would not let them pay less, or work women more than eight hours a day. Yet the cleaners must do two bags a day or they didn’t get the dollar, and no woman could do that if she worked ten, or even twelve, hours. Clever fellows, those peninsulares! The little basket of oranges in the doorway? Oh, she sold those to people in the gully, when any of them could buy. Some days she made nothing on them, at other times as much as four cents profit. But “that goes for my vice, for I smoke cigarettes,” she concluded, as if confessing to some great extravagance.
Down in the plaza that night a score of ragged men lolled about a cement bench discussing wages and the cost of food. Beans cost a fortune now; sugar was sixteen cents; coffee, their indispensable coffee, thirty-two. They did not mention bread; the Porto Rican of the masses seldom indulges in that luxury. And with the sugar centrals in the neighborhood paying scarcely a dollar a day, even when one could find work! “I tell you, we working-men are too tame,” concluded one of them; “we should fight, rob....” But he said it in a half-joking, harmless way that is characteristic of his class through all Porto Rico.
It is time, however, that we leave the towns and get out among the jíbaros, as the countrymen are called, from a Spanish word for a domesticated animal that has gone wild again.
The American Railroad of Porto Rico was originally French, as its manager is still. Though it is narrow-gauge, it has a comfort and aseo unknown even in Cuba, a cleanliness combined with all the smaller American conveniences, ice water, sanitary paper cups, blotter-roll towels—prohibition has at least done away with the yelping trainboy and made it possible to drink nature’s beverage without exciting comment. Its fares are higher than in the United States,—three cents a kilometer in first and 2¼ in the plain little second-class coaches with their hard wooden benches that make up most of the train. The single first-class car is rarely more than half filled, for all its comfortable swivel chairs. Automobiles and the lay of the land, that makes Ponce less than half as far over the mountain as by rail, accounts for this; though by night the sleeping-car at the rear is fully occupied by men, usually men only, who have adopted the American custom of saving their days for business. The sleeping compartments are arranged in ship’s-cabin size and run diagonally across the car, to leave room for a passageway within the narrow coach. These two-bunk cabins are furnished with individual toilet facilities, thermos bottles of ice water, and electric lights, and many Porto Ricans have actually learned that an open window does not necessarily mean a slumberer turned to a corpse by morning. The trainmen are polite and obliging in an unostentatious way that make our own seem ogres by comparison. In short, it is a diligent, honest little railroad suiting the size of the country and with no other serious fault than a tendency to stop again at another station almost before it has gotten well under way.
For nearly an hour the train circles San Juan bay, the gleaming, heaped-up capital, or its long line of lights, according to the hour, remaining almost within rifle-shot until the crowded suburbs of Bayamón spring up on each side. Then come broadening expanses of cane, with throngs of men and women working in the fields, interspersed with short stretches of arid sand, or meadows bright with pink morning-glories and dotted with splendid reddish cattle. Beyond comes a fruit district. Under Spanish rule scarcely enough fruit was grown in Porto Rico to supply the local demand. The Americans, struck with the excellency of the wild fruit, particularly of the citrus variety, began to develop this almost unknown industry. But among the pathetic sights of the island is to see acre after acre of grape-fruit, unsurpassed in size and quality, rotting on the trees or on the ground beneath them. While Americans are paying fabulous prices for their favorite breakfast fruit, many a grower in Porto Rico is hiring men to haul away the locally despised toronjas and bury them. Lack of transportation is the chief answer—that and a bit of market manipulation. Not long ago the discovery that the bottled juice of grapefruit and pineapple made a splendid beverage led a company to undertake what should be a booming enterprise, with the thirsty mainland as chief consumers. But the promoters quickly struck an unexpected snag. The available supply of bottles, strange to relate, was quickly exhausted, and to-day the company manager gazes pensively from his windows across prolific, yet unproductive, orchards.
The pale-green of cane-fields becomes monotonous; then at length the blue sea breaks again on the horizon. Beyond Arecibo the railroad runs close along the shore, with almost continuous villages of shaggy huts half hidden among the endless cocoanut-grove that girdles Porto Rico, the waves lapping at the roots of the outmost trees. These without exception are encircled by broad bands of tin. During an epidemic of bubonic plague the mongoose was introduced into the island, as into nearly all the West Indies, to exterminate the rats. The rodents developed new habits and took to climbing the slanting cocoanut trees, which afforded both food and a place of refuge. The bands of tin have served their purpose. To-day both rats and snakes are scarce in Porto Rico, but the inhabitants discovered too late that the chicken-loving mongoose may be an even greater pest than those it has replaced. Cocoanuts brought more than one Porto Rican a quick fortune during the war. Now that the gas-mask has degenerated into a mural decoration, however, immense heaps of the fibrous husks lie shriveling away where the armistice overtook them, and even the favorable state of the copra market seems incapable of shaking the growers out of their racial apathy.
Several pretty towns on knolls against a background of sea attract the eye as the train bends southward along the west coast. Below Quebradillas the railroad swings in a great horseshoe curve down into a little sea-level valley, plunges through two tunnels, and crawls along the extreme edge of a bold precipitous coast, past mammoth tumbled rocks, and all but wetting its rails in the dashing surf. A few tobacco patches spring up here, where the mountains crowd the cane-fields out of existence, women and children patiently hoeing, and men plowing the pale-red soil behind brow-yoked oxen. Crippled Mayagüez drags slowly by, new seas of cane appear, then the splendid plain of San Germán, with its vista of grazing cattle and its pepinos gordos, reddish calabashes clinging to their climbing vines like huge sausages. Beyond, there is little to see, except canefields and the Caribbean, until we rumble into Ponce, spread away up its foothills like a city laid out in the sun to dry. On the southeastern horizon lies an island the natives call Caja de Muertos—“deadman’s box,” and it looks indeed like a coffin, with the lighthouse on its highest point resembling a candle set there by some pious mourner. Local tradition has it that this is the original of Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.”
The train turns back from Ponce, but the railroad does not, and one may rumble on behind a smaller engine to Guayama. Some day the company hopes to get a franchise for the eastern end of the island and encircle it entirely. A private railroad covers a third of the remaining distance as it is. But the traveler bent on circumnavigating all Porto Rico must trust to guaguas, an automobile, or his own exertions through this region, and swinging in a great curve around the Luquillo range, with the cloud-capped summit of the island purple and hazy above him, eventually fetches up once more in sea-lashed San Juan. By this time, I warrant, he will long for other landscapes than spreading canefields.