“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?”