At best we caught only a small percentage at each table before the crowd had wolfed and melted away. An odd half dozen more, perhaps, we found stretched out in the shade under the mess-hall and neighboring quarters before the imperative screech of the labor-train whistle ended a scene that must be several times repeated, and now left us silent and alone, to wander wet and weary to the nearest white bachelor quarters, there to lie on our backs an hour or more till the polyglot jumble of words in the back of our heads had each climbed again to its proper shelf.
Speaking of white bachelor quarters, therein lay the enumerator's greatest problem. The Spaniard or the Jamaican is in nine cases out of ten fluently familiar with his companion's antecedents and pedigree. He can generally furnish all the information the census department calls for. But it is quite otherwise with the American bachelor. He may know his room-mate's exact degree of skill at poker, he probably knows his private opinion of "the Colonel," he is sure to know his degree of enmity to the prohibition movement; but he is not at all certain to know his name and rarely indeed has he the shadow of a notion when and in what particular corner of the States he began the game of existence. So loose are ties down on the Zone that a man's room-mate might go off into the jungle and die and the former not dream of inquiring for him for a week. Especially we world-wanderers, as are a large percentage of "Zoners," with virtually no fixed roots in any soil, floating wherever the job suggests or the spirit moves, have the facts of our past in our own heads only. No wanderer of experience would dream of asking his fellow where he came from. The answer would be too apt to be, "from the last place." So difficult did this matter become that I gave up rushing for the bus to Pedro Miguel each evening and the even more distressing necessity of catching that premature 6:30 train each morning in Empire and, packing a sheet and pillow and tooth-brush, moved down to Paraiso that I might spend the first half of the night in quest of these elusive bits of bachelor information.
Meanwhile the enrolling by day continued unabated. I had my first experience enumerating "gold" married quarters—white American families; just enough for experience and not enough to suffer severely. The enrolling of West Indians was pleasanter. The wives of locomotive engineers and steam-shovel cranemen were not infrequently supercilious ladies who resented being disturbed during their "social functions" and lacked the training in politeness of Jamaican "mammies." Living in Paradise now under a paternal all-providing government, they seemed to have forgotten the rolling-pin days of the past. It was here in Paraiso that I first encountered that strange, that wondrous strange custom of lying about one's age. Negro women never did. What more absurd, uncalled-for piece of dishonesty! Does Mrs. Smith fear that Mrs. Jones next door will succeed in pumping out of me that capital bit of information? Little does she know the long prison sentence at "hard labor" that stares me in the face for any such slip; to say nothing of my naturally incommunicative disposition. Or is she ashamed to let ME know the truth?—unaware that all such information goes in at my ears and down my pencil to the pink card before me like a message over the wires, leaving no more trace behind. Surely she must know that I care not a pencil-point whether she is eighteen or fifty-two, nor remember which one minute after her screen door has slammed behind me—unless she has caused me to glance up in wonder at her silvering temples of thirty-five when she simpers "twenty-two"—and to set her down as forty to be on the safe side. Oh now, please, ladies, do not understand me as accusing the American wives of Paraiso in general of this weakness. The large majority were quite pleasant, frank, and overflowing with cheery good sense. But the percentage who were not was far larger than I, who am also an American, was pleased to find it.
But doubly astonishing were the few cases of lying by proxy. A "clean-cut," college-graduated civil engineer of thirty-two whom one would have cited as an example of the best type of American, gave all data concerning himself in an unimpeachable manner. His wife was absent. When the question of her age arose he gave it, with the slightest catch in his voice, as twenty. Now that might be all very well. Men of thirty-two are occasionally so fortunate as to marry girls of twenty. But a moment later the gentleman in question finds himself announcing that his wife has been living on the Zone with him since 1907; and that she was born in New England! Thus is he tripped over his own clothes-line. For New England girls do not marry at fifteen; mother would not let them even if they would.
I, too, had gradually worked my way high up among the nondescript cabins on the upper rim of Paraiso that seem on the very verge of pitching headlong into the noisy, smoky canal far below with the jar of the next explosion, when one sunny mid-afternoon I caught sight of Renson dejectedly trudging down across what might be called the "Maiden" of Paraiso, back of the two-story lodge-hall. I took leave of my ebony hostess and descended. Renson's troubles were indeed disheartening. Back in the jungled fringe of the town he had fallen into a swarm of Martiniques, and Renson's French being nothing more than an unstudied mixture of English and Spanish, he had not gathered much information. Moreover negro women from the French isles are enough to frighten any virtuous young Marine.
"What's the sense o' me tryin' to chew the fat in French?" asked Renson, with tears in his voice. "I ain't in no condition to work at this census business any longer anyway. I ain't got to bed before three in the morning this week"—in his air was open suggestion that it was some one else's fault—"Some day I'll be gettin' in bad, too. This mornin' a fool nigger woman asked me if I didn't want her black pickaninny I was enumeratin', thinkin' it was a good joke. You know how these bush kids is runnin' around all over the country before a white man's brat could walk on its hind legs. 'Yes,' I says, 'if I was goin' alligator huntin' an' needed bait!' I come near catchin' the brat up by the feet an' beatin' its can off. I'm out o' luck any way, an'—"
The fact is Renson was aching to be "fired." More than thirty days had he been subject only to his own will, and it was high time he returned to the nursery discipline of camp. Moreover he was out of cigarettes. I slipped him one and smoothed him down as its fumes grew—for Renson was as tractable as a child, rightly treated—and set him to taking Jamaican tenements in the center of town, while I struck off into the jungled Martinique hills myself.
There were signs abroad that the census job was drawing to a close. My first pay-day had already come and gone and I had strolled up the gravel walk one noon-day to the Disembursing Office with my yellow pay certificate duly initialed by the examiner of accounts, and was handed my first four twenty-dollar gold pieces—for hotel and commissary books sadly reduce a good paycheck. Already one evening I had entered the census office to find "the boss" just peeling off his sweat-dripping undershirt and dotted with skin-pricking jungle life after a day mule-back on the thither side of the canal; an utterly fruitless day, for not only had he failed during eight hours of plunging through the wilderness to find a single hut not already decorated with the "enumerated" tag, but not even a banana could he lay hands on when the noon-hour overhauled him far from the ministrations of "Ben" and the breeze-swept veranda of Empire hotel.
It was, I believe, the afternoon following Renson's linguistic troubles that "the boss" came jogging into Paraiso on his sturdy mule. In his eagerness to "clean up" the territory we fell to corraling negroes everywhere, in the streets, at work, buying their supplies at the commissary, sleeping in the shade of wayside trees, anywhere and everywhere, until at last in his excitement "the boss" let his medium soft pencil slip by the column for color and dashed down the abbreviation for "mixed" after the question, "Married or Single?" Which may have been near enough the truth of the case, but suggested it was time to quit. So we marked Paraiso "finished except for recalls" and returned to Empire.
One by one our fellow-enumerators had dropped by the wayside, some by mutual agreement, some without any agreement whatever. Renson was now relieved from census duty, to his great joy, there remained but four of us,—"the boss" and "Mac" in the office, "Scotty" and I outside. A deep conference ensued and, as if I had not had good luck enough already, it was decided that we two should go through the "cut" itself. It was like offering us a salary to view all the Great Work in detail, for virtually all the excavation of any importance on the Zone lay within the confines of our district.