Produced by Col Choat
The Workingman's Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel
by 'John Miller' (William Lane) (1861-1917)
* * *
IN TWO PARTS.
PART I. THE WOMAN TEMPTED HIM.
PART II. HE KNEW HIMSELF NAKED.
First published 1892
* * *
PREFACE
The naming and writing of THE WORKINGMAN'S PARADISE were both done
hurriedly, although delay has since arisen in its publishing. The
scene is laid in Sydney because it was not thought desirable, for
various reasons, to aggravate by a local plot, the soreness existing
in Queensland.
While characters, incidents and speakings had necessarily to be adapted
to the thread of plot upon which they are strung, and are not put forward
as actual photographs or phonographs, yet many will recognise enough in
this book to understand how, throughout, shreds and patches of reality
have been pieced together. The first part is laid during the summer of
1888-89 and covers two days; the second at the commencement of the
Queensland bush strike excitement in 1891, covering a somewhat shorter
time. The intention of the plot, at first, was to adapt the old legend
of Paradise and the fall of man from innocence to the much-prated-of
"workingman's paradise"--Australia. Ned was to be Adam, Nellie to be Eve,
Geisner to be the eternal Rebel inciting world-wide agitation, the Stratton
home to be presented in contrast with the slum-life as a reason for
challenging the tyranny which makes Australia what it really is; and so on.
This plot got very considerably mixed and there was no opportunity to
properly re-arrange it. After reading the MSS. one friend wrote advising
an additional chapter making Ned, immediately upon his being sentenced for
"conspiracy" under George IV., 6, hear that Nellie has died of a broken
heart. My wife, on the contrary, wants Ned and Nellie to come to an
understanding and live happily ever after in the good old-fashioned style.
This being left in abeyance, readers can take their choice until the matter
is finally settled in another book.
Whatever the failings of this book are it may nevertheless serve the
double purpose for which t was written: (1) to assist the fund being
raised for Ned's mates now in prison in Queensland and (2) to explain
unionism a little to those outside it and Socialism a little to all
who care to read or hear, whether unionists or not. These friends of
ours in prison will need all we can do for them when they are released,
be that soon or late; and there are too few, even in the ranks of
unionism, who really understand Socialism.
To understand Socialism is to endeavour to lead a better life, to regret
the vileness of our present ways, to seek ill for none, to desire truth
and purity and honesty, to despise this selfish civilisation and to
comprehend what living might be. Understanding Socialism will not make
people at once what men and women should be but it will fill them with
hatred for the unfitting surroundings that damn us all and with passionate
love for the ideals that are lifting us upwards and with an earnest
endeavour to be themselves somewhat as they feel Humanity is struggling
to be.
All that any religion has been to the highest thoughts of any people
Socialism is, and more, to those who conceive it aright. Without blinding
us to our own weaknesses and wickednesses, without offering to us any
sophistry or cajoling us with any fallacy, it enthrones love above the
universe, gives us Hope for all who are downtrodden and restores to us
Faith in the eternal fitness of things. Socialism is indeed a
religion--demanding deeds as well as words. Not until professing
socialists understand this will the world at large see Socialism as it
really is.
If this book assists the Union Prisoners assistance Fund in any way or if
it brings to a single man or woman a clearer conception of the Religion of
Socialism it will have done its work. Should it fail to do either it will
not be because the Cause is bad, for the cause is great enough to rise
above the weakness of those who serve it.
J.M.
CONTENTS
PART I. THE WOMAN TEMPTED HIM.
CHAPTER I. Why Nellie Shows Ned Round.
CHAPTER II. Sweating In The Sydney Slums.
CHAPTER III. Shorn Like Sheep.
CHAPTER IV. Saturday Night In Paddy's Market.
CHAPTER V. Were They Conspirators?
CHAPTER VI. "We Have Seen The Dry Bones Become Men."
CHAPTER VII. A Medley of Conversation.
CHAPTER VIII. The Poet And The Pressman.
CHAPTER IX. "This Is Socialism!"
CHAPTER X. Where The Evil Really Lies.
CHAPTER XI. "It Only Needs Enough Faith."
CHAPTER XII. Love And Lust.
PART II. HE KNEW HIMSELF NAKED.
CHAPTER I. The Slaughter Of An Innocent.
CHAPTER II. On The Road To Queensland.
CHAPTER III. A Woman's Whim.
CHAPTER IV. The Why Of The Whim.
CHAPTER V. As The Moon Waned.
CHAPTER VI. Unemployed.
CHAPTER VII. "The World Wants Masters."
CHAPTER VIII. The Republican Kiss.
CHAPTER IX. Ned Goes To His Fate.
"On the Flinders.
"In a western billabong, with a stretch of plain around, a dirty waterhole
beside me, I sat and read the WORKER. Maxwellton Station was handy; and
sick with a fever on me I crawled off my horse to the shed on a
Sunday. They invited me to supper; I was too ill. One gave me medicine,
another the WORKER, the cook gave me milk and soup. If this is Unionism,
God bless it! This is the moleskin charity, not the squatter's dole. The
manager gave me quinine, and this is a Union station. I read 'Nellie's
Sister' (from THE WORKINGMAN'S PARADISE) in you last. A woman's tenderness
pervades it. Its fiction is truth. Although my feelings are blunted by a
bush life, I dropped a tear on that page of the WORKER."
--FROM A LETTER.
PART I.
THE WOMAN TEMPTED HIM.
* * * * *
Ah thy people, thy children, thy chosen, Marked cross from the womb and
perverse! They have found out the secret to cozen The gods that constrain
us and curse; They alone, they are wise, and none other; Give me place,
even me, in their train, O my sister, my spouse, and my mother, Our Lady
of Pain.--SWINBURNE.
THE WORKINGMAN'S PARADISE
CHAPTER I.
WHY NELLIE SHOWS NED ROUND.
Nellie was waiting for Ned, not in the best of humours.
"I suppose he'll get drunk to celebrate it," she was saying,
energetically drying the last cup with a corner of the damp cloth. "And I
suppose she feels as though it's something to be very glad and proud
about."
"Well, Nellie," answered the woman who had been rinsing the breakfast
things, ignoring the first supposition. "One doesn't want them to come,
but when they do come one can't help feeling glad."
"Glad!" said Nellie, scornfully.
"If Joe was in steady work, I wouldn't mind how often it was. It's when
he loses his job and work so hard to get--" Here the speaker subsided
in tears.
"It's no use worrying," comforted Nellie, kindly. "He'll get another job
soon, I hope. He generally has pretty fair luck, you know."
"Yes, Joe has had pretty fair luck, so far. But nobody knows how long
it'll last. There's my brother wasn't out of work for fifteen years, and
now he hasn't done a stroke for twenty-three weeks come Tuesday. He's
going out of his mind."
"He'll get used to it," answered Nellie, grimly.
"How you do talk, Nellie!" said the other. "To hear you sometimes one
would think you hadn't any heart."
"I haven't any patience."
"That's true, my young gamecock!" exclaimed a somewhat discordant voice.
Nellie looked round, brightening suddenly.
A large slatternly woman stood in the back doorway, a woman who might
possibly have been a pretty girl once but whose passing charms had long
been utterly sponged out. A perceptible growth of hair lent a somewhat
repulsive appearance to a face which at best had a great deal of the
virago in it. Yet there was, in spite of her furrowed skin and faded eyes
and drab dress, an air of good-heartedness about her, made somewhat
ferocious by the muscularity of the arms that fell akimbo upon her great
hips, and by the strong teeth, white as those of a dog, that flashed
suddenly from between her colourless lips when she laughed.
"That's true, my young gamecock!" she shouted, in a deep voice, strangely
cracked. "And so you're at your old tricks again, are you? Talking
sedition I'll be bound. I've half a mind to turn informer and have the
law on you. The dear lamb!" she added, to the other woman.
"Good morning, Mrs. Macanany," said Nellie, laughing. "We haven't got yet
so that we can't say what we like, here."
"I'm not so sure about that. Wait till you hear what I came to tell you,
hearing from little Jimmy that you were at home and going to have a
holiday with a young man from the country. We'll sherrivvery them if he
takes her away from us, Mrs. Phillips, the only one that does sore eyes
good to see in the whole blessed neighborhood! You needn't blush, my
dear, for I had a young man myself once, though you wouldn't imagine it
to look at me. And if I was a young man myself it's her"--pointing
Nellie out to Mrs. Phillips--that I'd go sweethearting with and not
with the empty headed chits that--"
"Look here, Mrs. Macanany!" interrupted Nellie. "You didn't come in to
make fun of me."
"Making fun! There, have your joke with the old woman! You didn't hear
that my Tom got the run yesterday, did you?"
"Did he? What a pity! I'm very sorry," said Nellie.
"Everybody'll be out of work and then what'll we all do?" said Mrs.
Philips, evidently cheered, nevertheless, by companionship in misfortune.
"What'll we all do! There'd never be anybody at all out of work if
everybody was like me and Nellie there," answered the amazon.
"What did he get the run for?" asked Nellie.
"What can we women do?" queried Mrs. Phillips, doleful still.
"Wait a minute till I can tell you! You don't give a body time to begin
before you worry them with questions about things you'd hear all about it
if you'd just hold your tongues a minute. You're like two blessed babies!
It was this way, Mrs. Phillips, as sure as I'm standing here. Tom got
trying to persuade the other men in the yard--poor sticks of men they
are!--to have a union. I've been goading him to it, may the Lord
forgive me, ever since Miss Nellie there came round one night and
persuaded my Tessie to join. 'Tom,' says I to him that very night, 'I'll
have to be lending you one of my old petticoats, the way the poor weak
girls are beginning to stand up for their rights, and you not even daring
to be a union man. I never thought I'd live to be ashamed of the father
of my children!' says I. And yesterday noon Tom came home with a face on
him as long as my arm, and told me that he'd been sacked for talking
union to the men.
"'It's a man you are again, Tom,' says I. 'We've lived short before and
we can live it again, please God, and it's myself would starve with you a
hundred times over rather than be ashamed of you,' says I. 'Who was it
that sacked you?' I asked him.
"'The foreman,' says Tom. 'He told me they didn't want any agitators
about.'
"'May he live to suffer for it,' says I. 'I'll go down and see the boss
himself.'
"So down I went, and as luck would have it the boy in the front office
wasn't educated enough to say I was an old image, I suppose, for would
you believe it I actually heard him say that there was a lady, if you
please, wanting to see Mister Paritt very particularly on personal
business, as I'd told him. So of course I was shown in directly, the very
minute, and the door was closed on me before the old villain, who's a
great man at church on Sundays, saw that he'd made a little mistake.
"'What do you want, my good woman?' says he, snappish like. 'Very sorry,'
says he, when I'd told him that I'd eleven children and that Tom had
worked for him for four years and worked well, too. 'Very sorry,' says
he, my good woman, 'but your husband should have thought of that before.
It's against my principles,' says he, 'to have any unionists about the
place. I'm told he's been making the other men discontented. I can't take
him back. You must blame him, not me,' says he.
"I could feel the temper in me, just as though he'd given me a couple of
stiff nobblers of real old whisky. 'So you won't take Tom back,' says I,
'not for the sake of his eleven children when it's their poor
heart-broken mother that asks you?'
"'No,' says he, short, getting up from his chair. 'I can't. You've
bothered me long enough,' says he.
"I So then I decided it was time to tell the old villain just what I
thought of his grinding men down to the last penny and insulting every
decent girl that ever worked for him. He got as black in the face as if
he was smoking already on the fiery furnace that's waiting for him below,
please God, and called the shrimp of an office boy to throw me out.
'Leave the place, you disgraceful creature, or I'll send for the police,'
says he. But I left when I got ready to leave and just what I said to
him, the dirty wretch, I'll tell to you, Mrs. Phillips, some time when
she"--nodding at Nellie--"isn't about. She's getting so like a
blessed saint that one feels as if one's in church when she's about,
bless her heart!"
"You're getting very particular all at once, Mrs. Macanany," observed
Nellie.
"It's a wonder he didn't send for a policeman," commented Mrs. Phillips.
"Send for a policeman! And pretty he'd look with the holy bible in his
hand repeating what I said to him, wouldn't he now?" enquired Mrs.
Macanany, once more placing her great arms on her hips and glaring with
her watery eyes at her audience.
"Did you hear that Mrs. Hobbs had a son this morning?" questioned Mrs.
Phillips, suddenly recollecting that she also might have an item of news.
"What! Mrs. Hobbs, so soon! How would I be hearing when I just came
through the back, and Tom only just gone out to wear his feet off,
looking for work? A boy again! The Lord preserve us all! It's the devil's
own luck the dear creature has, isn't it now? Why didn't you tell me
before, and me here gossiping when the dear woman will be expecting me
round to see her and the dear baby and wondering what I've got against
her for not coming? I must be off, now, and tidy myself a bit and go and
cheer the poor creature up for I know very well how one wants cheering at
such times. Was it a hard time she had with it? And who is it like the
little angel that came straight from heaven this blessed day? The dear
woman! I must be off, so I'll say good-day to you, Mrs. Phillips, and may
the sun shine on you and your sweetheart, Nellie, even if he does take
you away from us all, and may you have a houseful of babies with faces as
sweet as your own and never miss a neighbour to cheer you a bit when the
trouble's on you. The Lord be with us all!"
Nellie laughed as the rough-voiced, kind-hearted woman took herself off,
to cross the broken dividing wall to the row of houses that backed
closely on the open kitchen door. Then she shrugged her shoulders.
"It's always the way," she remarked, as she turned away to the other door
that led along a little, narrow passage to the street. "What's going to
become of the innocent little baby? Nobody thinks of that."
Mrs. Phillips did not answer. She was tidying up in a wearied way.
Besides, she was used to Nellie, and had a dim perception that what that
young woman said was right, only one had to work, especially on Saturdays
when the smallest children could be safely turned into the street to play
with the elder ones, the baby nursed by pressed nurses, who by dint of
scolding and coaxing and smacking and promising were persuaded to keep it
out of the house, even though they did not keep it altogether quiet. Mrs.
Phillips "tidied up" in a wearied way, without energy, working stolidly
all the time as if she were on a tread-mill. She had a weary look, the
expression of one who is tired always, who gets up tired and goes to bed
tired, and who never by any accident gets a good rest, who even when dead
is not permitted to lie quietly like other people but gets buried the
same day in a cheap coffin that hardly keeps the earth up and is doomed
to he soon dug up to make room for some other tired body in that
economical way instituted by the noble philanthropists who unite a keen
appreciation of the sacredness of burial with a still keener appreciation
of the value of grave-lots. She might have been a pretty girl once or she
might not. Nobody would ever have thought of physical attractiveness as
having anything to do with her. Mrs. Macanany was distinctly ugly. Mrs.
Phillips was neither ugly nor pretty nor anything else. She was a poor
thin draggled woman, who tried to be clean but who had long ago given up
in despair any attempt at looking natty and had now no ambition for
herself but to have something "decent" to go out in. Once it was her
ambition also to have a "I room." She had scraped and saved and pared in
dull times for this "room" and when once Joe had a long run of steady
work she had launched out into what those who know how workingmen's wives
should live would have denounced as the wildest extravagance. A gilt
framed mirror and a sofa, four spidery chairs and a round table, a
wonderful display of wax apples under a glass shade, a sideboard and a
pair of white lace curtains hanging from a pole, with various ornaments
and pictures of noticeable appearance, also linoleum for the floor, had
finally been gathered together and were treasured for a time as household
gods indeed. In those days there was hardly a commandment in the
decalogue that Mephistopheles might not have induced Mrs. Phillips to
commit by judicious praise of her "room." Her occasional "visitors" were
ushered into it with an air of pride that was alone enough to illuminate
the dingy, musty little place. Between herself and those of her
neighbours who had "rooms" there was a fierce rivalry, while those of
inferior grade--and they were in the majority--regarded her with an
envy not unmixed with dislike.
But those times were gone for poor Mrs. Phillips. We all know how they
go, excepting those who do not want to know. Work gradually became more
uncertain, wages fell and rents kept up. They had one room of the small
five-roomed house let already. They let another--"they" being her and
Joe. Finally, they had to let the room. The chairs, the round table and
the sofa wore bartered at a second-hand store for bedroom furniture. The
mirror and the sideboard were brought out into the kitchen, and on the
sideboard the wax fruit still stood like the lingering shrine of a
departed faith.
The "room" was now the lodging of two single men, as the good old
ship-phrase goes. Upstairs, in the room over the kitchen, the Phillips
family slept, six in all. There would have been seven, only the eldest
girl, a child of ten, slept with Nellie in the little front room over the
door, an arrangement which was not in the bond but was volunteered by the
single woman in one of her fits of indignation against pigging together.
The other front room was also rented by a single man when they could get
him. Just now it was tenantless, an additional cause of sorrow to Mrs.
Phillips, whose stock card, "Furnished Lodgings for a Single Man," was
now displayed at the front window, making the house in that respect very
similar to half the houses in the street, or in this part of the town for
that matter. Yet with all this crowding and renting of rooms Mrs.
Phillips did not grow rich. She was always getting into debt or getting
out of it, this depending in inverse ratio upon Joe being in work or out.
When the rooms were all let they barely paid the rent and were always
getting empty. The five children--they had one dead and another
coming--ate so much and made so much work. There were boots and clothes and
groceries to pay for, not to mention bread. And though Joe was not like
many a woman's husband yet he did get on the spree occasionally, a little
fact which in the opinion of the pious will account for all Mrs.
Phillips' weariness and all the poverty of this crowded house. But
however that may be she was a weary hopeless faded woman, who would not
cause passers-by to turn, pity-stricken, and watch her when she hurried
along on her semi-occasional escapes from her prison-house only because
such women are so common that it is those who do not look hopeless and
weary whom we turn to watch if by some strange chance one passes. The
Phillips' kitchen was a cheerless place, in spite of the mirror that was
installed in state over the side-board and the wax flowers. Its one
window looked upon a diminutive back yard, a low broken wall and another
row of similar two-storied houses. On the plastered walls were some
shelves bearing a limited supply of crockery. Over the grated fireplace
was a long high shelf whereon stood various pots and bottles. There were
some chairs and a table and a Chinese-made safe. On the boarded floor was
a remnant of linoleum. Against one wall was a narrow staircase.
It was the breakfast things that Nellie had been helping to wash up. The
little American clock on the sideboard indicated quarter past nine.
Nellie went to the front door, opened it, and stood looking out. The view
was a limited one, a short narrow side street, blinded at one end by a
high bare stone wall, bounded at the other by the almost as narrow
by-thoroughfare this side street branched from. The houses in the
thoroughfare were three-storied, and a number wore used as shops of the
huckstering variety, mainly by Chinese. The houses in the side street
were two-storied, dingy, jammed tightly together, each one exactly like
the next. The pavement was of stone, the roadway of some composite, hard
as iron; roadway and pavement were overrun with children. At the corner
by a dead wall was a lamp-post. Nearly opposite Nellie a group of excited
women were standing in an open doorway. They talked loudly, two or three
at a time, addressing each other indiscriminately. The children screamed
and swore, quarrelled and played and fought, while a shrill-voiced mother
occasionally took a hand in the diversion of the moment, usually to scold
or cull some luckless offender. The sunshine radiated that sickly heat
which precedes rain.
Nellie stood there and waited for Ned. She was 20 or so, tall and slender
but well-formed, every curve of her figure giving promise of more
luxurious development. She was dressed in a severely plain dress of black
stuff, above which a faint line of white collar could be seen clasping
the round throat. Her ears had been bored, but she wore no earrings. Her
brown hair was drawn away from her forehead and bound in a heavy braid on
the back of her neck. But it was her face that attracted one, a pale sad
face that was stamped on every feature with the impress of a determined
will and of an intense womanliness. From the pronounced jaw that melted
its squareness of profile in the oval of the full face to the dark brown
eyes that rarely veiled themselves beneath their long-lashed lids,
everything told that the girl possessed the indefinable something we call
character. And if there was in the drooping corners of her red lips a
sternness generally unassociated with conceptions of feminine loveliness
one forgot it usually in contemplating the soft attractiveness of the
shapely forehead, dashed beneath by straight eyebrows, and of the
pronounced cheekbones that crossed the symmetry of a Saxon face. Mrs.
Phillips was a drooping wearied woman but there was nothing drooping
about Nellie and never could be. She might be torn down like one of the
blue gums under which she had drawn in the fresh air of her girlhood, but
she could no more bend than can the tree which must stand erect in the
fiercest storm or must go down altogether. Pale she was, from the close
air of the close street and close rooms, but proud she was as woman can
be, standing erect in the door-way amid all this pandemonium of cries,
waiting for Ned. Ned was her old playmate, a Darling Downs boy, five
years older to be sure, but her playmate in the old days, nevertheless,
as lads who have no sisters are apt to be with admiring little girls who
have no brothers. Selectors' children, both of them, from neighbouring
farms, born above the frost line under the smelting Queensland sun,
drifted hither and thither by the fitful gusts of Fate as are the
paper-sailed ships that boys launch on flood water pools, meeting here in
Sydney after long years of separation. Now, Nellie was a dressmaker in a
big city shop, and Ned a sun-burnt shearer to whom the great trackless
West was home. She thought of the old home sadly as she stood there
waiting for him.
It had not been a happy home altogether and yet, and yet--it was better
than this. There was pure air there, at least, and grass up to the door,
and trees rustling over-head; and the little children were brown and
sturdy and played with merry shouts, not with these vile words she heard
jabbered in the wretched street. Her heart grew sick within her--a
habit it had, that heart of Nellie's--and a passion of wild revolt
against her surroundings made her bite her lips and press her nails
against her palms. She looked across at the group opposite. More children
being born! Week in and week out they seemed to come in spite of all the
talk of not having any more. She could have cried over this holocaust of
the innocents, and yet she shrank with an unreasoning shrinking from the
barrenness that was coming to be regarded as the most comfortable state
and being sought after, as she knew well, by the younger married women.
What were they all coming to? Were they all to go on like this without a
struggle until they vanished altogether as a people, perhaps to make room
for the round-cheeked, bland-faced Chinaman who stood in the doorway of
his shop in the crossing thorough-fare, gazing expressionlessly at her?
She loathed that Chinaman. He always seemed to be watching her, to be
waiting for something. She would dream of him sometimes as creeping upon
her from behind, always with that bland round face. Yet he never spoke to
her, never insulted her, only he seemed to be always watching her, always
waiting. And it would come to her sometimes like a cold chill, that this
yellow man and such men as he were watching them all slowly going down
lower and lower, were waiting to leap upon them in their last
helplessness and enslave them all as white girls were sometimes enslaved,
even already, in those filthy opium joints whose stench nauseated the
hurrying passers-by. Perhaps under all their meekness these Chinese were
braver, more stubborn, more vigorous, and it was doomed that they should
conquer at last and rule in the land where they had been treated as
outcasts and intruders. She thought of this--and, just then, Ned turned
the corner by the lamp.
Ned was a Down's native, every inch of him. He stood five feet eleven in
his bare feet yet was so broad and strong that he hardly looked over the
medium height. He had blue eyes and a heavy moustache just tinged with
red. His hair was close-cut and dark; his forehead, nose and chin wore
large and strong; his lips were strangely like a woman's. He walked with
short jerky steps, swinging himself awkwardly as men do who have been
much in the saddle. He wore a white shirt, as being holiday-making, but
had not managed a collar; his pants were dark-blue, slightly belled; his
coat, dark-brown; his boots wore highly polished; round his neck was a
silk handkerchief; round his vestless waist, a discoloured leather belt;
above all, a wide-brimmed cabbage tree hat, encircled by a narrow leather
strap. He swung himself along rapidly, unabashed by the stares of the
women or the impudent comment of the children. Nellie, suddenly, felt all
her ill-humour turn against him. He was so satisfied with himself. He
had talked unionism to her when she met him two weeks before, on his way
to visit a brother who had taken up a selection in the Hawkesbury
district. He had laughed when she hinted at the possibilities of the
unionism he championed so fanatically. "We only want what's fair," he
said. "We're not going to do anything wild. As long as we get £1 a
hundred and rations at a fair figure we're satisfied." And then he had
inconsistently proceeded to describe how the squatters treated the men
out West, and how the union would make them civil, and how the said
squatters were mostly selfish brutes who preferred Chinese to their own
colour and would stop at no trick to beat the men out of a few shillings.
She had said nothing at the time, being so pleased to see him, though she
determined to have it out with him sometime during this holiday they had
planned. But somehow, as he stepped carelessly along, a dashing manliness
in every motion, a breath of the great plains coming with his sunburnt
face and belted waist, he and his self-conceit jarred to her against this
sordid court and these children's desolate lives. How dared he talk as he
did about only wanting what was fair, she thought! How had he the heart
to care only for himself and his mates while in these city slums such
misery brooded! And then it shot through her that he did not know. With a
rapidity, characteristic of herself, she made up her mind to teach him.
"Well, Nellie," he cried, cheerily, coming up to her. "And how are you
again?"
"Hello, Ned," she answered, cordially, shaking hands. "You look as though
you were rounding-up."
"Do I?" he questioned, seriously, looking down at himself. "Shirt and
all? Well, if I am it's only you I came to round up. Are you ready? Did
you think I wasn't coming?"
"It won't take me a minute," she replied. "I was pretty sure you'd come.
I took a holiday on the strength of it, anyway, and made an engagement
for you to-night. Come in a minute, Ned. You must see Mrs. Phillips while
I get my hat. You'll have to sleep here to night. It'll be so late when
we get back. Unless you'd sooner go to a hotel."
"I'm not particular," said Ned, looking round curiously, as he followed
her in. "I'd never have found the place, Nellie, if it hadn't been for
that pub, near the corner, where we saw that row on the other night."
The women opposite had suspended their debate upon Mrs. Hobbs' latest, a
debate fortified by manifold reminiscences of the past and possibilities
of the future. It was known in the little street that Nellie Lawton
intended taking a holiday with an individual who was universally accepted
as her "young man," and Ned's appearance upon the stage naturally made
him a subject for discussion which temporarily over-shadowed even Mrs.
Hobbs' baby.
"I'm told he's a sort of a farmer," said one.
"He's a shearer; I had it from Mrs. Phillips herself," said another.
"He's a strapping man, whatever he is," commented a third.
"Well, she's a big lump of a girl, too," contributed a fourth.
"Yes, and a vixen with her tongue when she gets started, for all her prim
looks," added a fifth.
"She has tricky ways that get over the men-folks. Mine won't hear a word
against her." This from the third speaker, eager to be with the tide,
evidently setting towards unfavorable criticism.
"I don't know," objected the second, timidly. "She sat up all night with
my Maggie once, when she had the fever, and Nellie had to work next day,
too."
"Oh, she's got her good side," retorted the fifth, opening her dress to
feed her nursing baby with absolute indifference for all onlookers. "But
she knows a great deal too much for a girl of her age. When she gets
married will be time enough to talk as she does sometimes." The chorus of
approving murmurs showed that Nellie had spoken plainly enough on some
subjects to displease some of these slatternly matrons.
"She stays out till all hours, I'm told," one slanderer said.
"She's a union girl, at any rate," hazarded Nellie's timid defender.
There was an awkward pause at this. It was an apple of discord with the
women, evidently. A tall form turning the corner afforded further reason
for changing the subject.
"Here's Mrs. Macanany," announced one. "You'd better not say anything
against Nellie Lawton when she's about." So they talked again of Mrs.
Hobbs' baby, making it the excuse to leave undone for a few minutes the
endless work of the poor man's wife.
And sad to tell when, a few minutes afterwards, Ned and Nellie came out
again and walked off together, the group of gossipers unanimously
endorsed Mrs. Macanany's extravagant praises, and agreed entirely with
her declaration that if all the women in Sydney would only stand by
Nellie, as Mrs. Macanany herself would, there would be such a doing and
such an upsetting and such a righting of things that ever after every man
would be his own master and every woman would only work eight hours and
get well paid for it. Yet it was something that of six women there were
two who wouldn't slander a girl like Nellie behind her back.