THE RAILWAY IN JAMAICA
CHAPTER XVII
THE RAILWAY IN JAMAICA
In Jamaica there is a railway which carries passengers of the first and second class in carriages that would not necessarily disgrace even the London, Chatham, and Dover line in England. The upholstery of the carriages is of heavy stuffed leather; the fitments are of polished yellow wood; and the result infinitely more suitable for an Arctic clime than for merry sweltering Jamaica. There are, as I have stated, two classes; to these I must add the soda-water compartment, which is a sort of betwixt and between of both classes. A place where the men (sometimes the ladies also) foregather to sit on empty soda water boxes and consume mineral waters and eat fruit. This is the saloon of the railway—the drawing-room of travelling Jamaica. Here the guard sits always, and with him the coloured lady who sells the mineral water at a truly reasonable rate. The carriages are reserved for the uninitiated, or the respectable, of both classes. The soda-water room is always full of scandal talk; a half hour’s ride in this compartment of any train will teach any tourist the inner history of Jamaican society in a manner quite incapable of repetition or reproduction. The lady who sells the ginger beer is conversant with the character, the salary, the peculiarities and home life, of every person living in the island. She is the natural historian of the country. In three sentences she can destroy the reputation of a mansion; half an hour suffices for the moral destruction of a town. One day, even half a day, among the empty ginger-beer boxes kills every desire, no matter how ambitious one may have been, to enter the ranks of the upper ten of the society in the Queen of the Antilles. The reason for all this is the heat and discomfort of railway travelling in the tropics. The dust and sweat of travel jaundice a man’s outlook on life; and in the railway train a white face looks dull yellow. So it is with the cleanest reputation. And fortunately the soda-water gossip is forgotten even before one’s hair has ceased to smell of cinders.
The journey inland over the steel rails should only be undertaken at great provocation. It is not a desirable thing to do, although it is the quickest, the cheapest, and the most usual way of covering long distances. For perhaps eight hours you sit vis-à-vis with a person whom you have not met before, and whom you wish never to meet again,—for eight hours or twenty minutes, just according to the distance you desire to travel. You pass the time of day with the stranger, read all the printed matter available, and then solemnly gaze through the grimy window, and heavy cloud of dust, at the fields and rivers and fair plantations
