The Workingman's Paradise Part 2

"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.

CHAPTER II.

SWEATING IN THE SYDNEY SLUMS.

"Well! Where shall we go, Nellie?" began Ned jauntily, as they walked away together. To tell the truth he was eager to get away from this poor neighborhood. It had saddened him, made him feel unhappy, caused in him a longing to be back again in the bush, on his horse, a hundred miles from everybody. "Shall we go to Manly or Bondi or Watson's Bay, or do you know of a better place?" He had been reading the newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nts and had made enquiries of the waitress, as he ate his breakfast, concerning the spot which the waitress would prefer were a young man going to take her out for the day. He felt pleased with himself now, for not only did he like Nellie very much but she was attractive to behold, and he felt very certain that every man they pa.s.sed envied him. She had put on a little round straw hat, black, trimmed with dark purple velvet; in her hands, enclosed in black gloves, she carried a parasol of the same colour.

"Where would you like to go, Ned?" she answered, colouring a little as she heard her name in Mrs. Macanany's hoa.r.s.e voice, being told thereby that she and Ned were the topic of conversation among the jury of matrons a.s.sembled opposite.

"Anywhere you like, Nellie."

"Don't you think, Ned, that you might see a little bit of real Sydney?

Strangers come here for a few days and go on the steamers and through the gardens and along George-street and then go away with a notion of the place that isn't the true one. If I were you, Ned, right from the bush and knowing nothing of towns, I'd like to see a bit of the real side and not only the show side that everybody sees. We don't all go picnicking all the time and we don't all live by the harbour or alongside the Domain."

"Do just whatever you like, Nellie," cried Ned, hardly understanding but perfectly satisfied, "you know best where to take a fellow."

"But they're not pleasant places, Ned."

"I don't mind," answered Ned, lightly, though he had been looking forward, rather, to the quiet enjoyment of a trip on a harbour steamer, or at least to the delight of a long ramble along some beach where he thought he and Nellie might pick up sh.e.l.ls. "Besides, I fancy it's going to rain before night," he added, looking up at the sky, of which a long narrow slice showed between the tall rows of houses.

There were no clouds visible. Only there was a deepening grey in the hard blueness above them, and the breathless heat, even at this time of day, was stifling.

"I don't know that you'd call this a pleasant place," he commented, adding with the frankness of an old friend: "Why do you live here, Nellie?"

She shrugged her shoulders. The gesture meant anything and everything.

"You needn't have bothered sending me that money back," said Ned, in reply to the shrug.

"It isn't that," explained Nellie. "I've got a pretty good billet. A pound a week and not much lost time! But I went to room there when I was pretty hard up. It's a small room and was cheap. Then, after, I took to boarding there as well. That was pretty cheap and suited me and helped them. I suppose I might get a better place but they're very kind, and I come and go as I like, and--" she hesitated. "After all," she went on, "there's not much left out of a pound."

"I shouldn't think so," remarked Ned, looking at her and thinking that she was very nicely dressed.

"Oh! You needn't look," laughed Nellie. "I make my own dresses and trim my own hats. A woman wouldn't think much of the stuff either."

"I want to tell you how obliged I was for that money, Ned," continued Nellie, an expression of pain on her face. "There was no one else I could ask, and I needed it so. It was very kind--"

"Ugh! That's nothing," interrupted Ned, hiding his bashfulness under a burst of boisterousness. "Why, Nellie, I'd like you to be sending to me regular. It might just as well come to you as go any other way. If you ever do want a few pounds again, Nellie,"--he added, seriously, "I can generally manage it. I've got plenty just now--far more than I'll ever need." This with wild exaggeration. "You might as well have it as not.

I've got n.o.body."

"Thanks, just the same, Ned! When I do want it I'll ask you. I'm afraid I'll never have any money to lend you if you need it, but if I ever do you know where to come."

"It's a bargain, Nellie," said Ned. Then, eager to change the subject, feeling awkward at discussing money matters because he would have been so willing to have given his last penny to anybody he felt friends with, much less to the girl by his side:

"But where are we going?"

"To see Sydney!" said Nellie.

They had turned several times since they started but the neighborhood remained much the same. The streets, some wider, some narrower, all told of sordid struggling. The shops were greasy, fusty, grimy. The groceries exposed in their windows damaged specimens of bankrupt stocks, discolored tinned goods, grey sugars, mouldy dried fruits; at their doors, flitches of fat bacon, cut and dusty. The meat with which the butchers' shops overflowed was not from show-beasts, as Ned could see, but the cheaper flesh of over-travelled cattle, ancient oxen, ewes too aged for bearing; all these lean scraggy flabby-fleshed carca.s.ses surrounded and blackened by buzzing swarms of flies that invaded the foot-path outside in clouds.

The draperies had tickets, proclaiming unparalleled bargains, on every piece; the whole stock seemed displayed outside and in the doorway. The fruiterers seemed not to be succeeding in their rivalry with each other and with the Chinese hawkers. The Chinese shops were dotted everywhere, dingier than any other, surviving and succeeding, evidently, by sheer force of cheapness. The roadways everywhere were hard and bare, reflecting the rays of the ascending sun until the streets seemed to be Turkish baths, conducted on a new and gigantic method. There was no green anywhere, only unlovely rows of houses, now gasping with open doors and windows for air.

Air! That was what everything clamoured for, the very stones, the dogs, the shops, the dwellings, the people. If it was like this soon after ten, what would it be at noon?

Already the smaller children were beginning to weary of play. In narrow courts they lolled along on the flags, exhausted. In wider streets, they sat quietly on door-steps or the kerb, or announced their discomfort in peevish wailings. The elder children quarrelled still and swore from their playground, the gutter, but they avoided now the sun and instinctively sought the shade and it is pretty hot when a child minds the sun. At shop doors, shopmen, sometimes shopwomen, came to wipe their warm faces and examine the sky with anxious eyes. The day grow hotter and hotter. Ned could feel the rising heat, as though he were in an oven with a fire on underneath. Only the Chinese looked cool.

Nellie led the way, sauntering along, without hurrying. Several times she turned down pa.s.sages that Ned would hardly have noticed, and brought him out in courts closed in on all sides, from which every breath of air seemed purposely excluded. Through open doors and windows he could see the inside of wretched homes, could catch glimpses of stifling bedrooms and close, crowded little kitchens. Often one of the denizens came to door or window to stare at Nellie and him; sometimes they were accosted with impudent chaff, once or twice with pitiful obscenity.

The first thing that impressed him was the abandonment that thrust itself upon him in the more crowded of these courts and alley-ways and back-streets, the despairing abandonment there of the decencies of living. The thin dwarfed children kicked and tumbled with naked limbs on the ground; many women leaned half-dressed and much unb.u.t.toned from ground floor windows, or came out into the pa.s.sage-ways slatternly. In one court two unkempt vile-tongued women of the town wrangled and abused each other to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the neighborhood, where the working poor were huddled together with those who live by shame. The children played close by as heedlessly as if such quarrels were common events, cursing themselves at each other with nimble filthy tongues.

"There's a friend of mine lives here," said Nellie, turning into one of these narrow alleys that led, as they could see, into a busier and bustling street. "If you don't mind we'll go up and I can help her a bit, and you can see how one sort of sweating is done. I worked at it for a spell once, when dressmaking was slack. In the same house, too."

She stopped at the doorway of one of a row of three-storied houses. On the doorstep were a group of little children, all barefooted and more or less ragged in spite of evident attempts to keep some of them patched into neatness. They looked familiarly at Nellie and curiously at Ned.