I was struck with the nice feeling on the man's part, and cordially gave my permission, though I must say I was surprised at its being asked.
He came one night after I had gone to bed and next morning he was engaged in chopping wood for the cook. And then I found to my dismay that he and Frances and Edgar shared her room!
What was I to say? My leave had been asked. So I shut my eyes and said nothing, and the gentleman stayed a fortnight, and then sent in to know what present I was going to give him before he went away!
I suppose to the average stay-at-home middle-class English woman this state of things sounds shockingly immoral, but after all is it not that things are here done openly that in other places are done under the rose.
Up and down Jamaica have I been, and I can honestly say that the average Jamaican peasant woman looks happy. Nay, she looks more than happy, for happiness may be a passing condition, the majority of the Jamaican peasant women look entirely content. There is no unspoken longing in a peasant woman's face, she is quite satisfied.
“Missus,” said Leonie persuasively, “me kindly begging you leff me sleep home.” Now Leonie had sworn by all her gods that she would stay at her post all night, so enquiries were made and it was found “me cousin” was going to have a baby in six weeks, and as it was her first, very naturally she did not like being alone at night. But what about her husband? Oh, she hadn't a husband. Whatever made missus think that? The father? “Oh, he nice young man, he helping her a lot, but he too young, not worth marrying.”
“Missus, kindly begging—” insinuatingly.
Well, of course, Leonie spent her nights with the expectant young mother, and everybody was satisfied.
The real trouble is that these poor little children thus brought into the world are often not properly looked after. How can a young woman keep herself and her child on 7s. a week, and that is more than the majority of them get? And so often it ends in a pitiful little white coffin with a forlorn little wreath of fern upon it, carried on a man's shoulder to the graveyard. I have seen them often. There are no followers, though the Jamaican loves a funeral.
“Not worth while,” said Malvina when I asked why no one went to the poor little baby's funeral.