The Workingman's Paradise Part 5

"Hire him instead of letting him hire you," answered Nellie, oracularly.

"Those fat men are only good to put in museums, but these lean men are all right so long as you keep them in their place. They are our worst enemies when they're against us but our best friends when they're for us.

They say Mr. Strong isn't like most of the swell set. He is straight to his wife and good to his children and generous to his friends and when he says a thing he sticks to it. Only he sees everything from the other side and doesn't understand that all men have got the same coloured blood."

"How can we hire him?" said Ned, after a pause. "They own everything."

Nellie shrugged her shoulders.

"You think we might take it," said Ned.

Nellie shrugged her shoulders again.

"I don't see how it can be done," he concluded.

"That's just it. You can't see how it can be done, and so nothing's done.

Some men get drunk, and some men get religious, and others get enthusiastic for a pound a hundred. You haven't got votes up in Queensland, and if you had you'd probably give them to a lot of ignorant politicians. Men don't know, and they don't seem to want to know much, and they've got to be squeezed by men like him"--she nodded at Strong--"before they take any interest in themselves or in those who belong to them. For those who have an ounce of heart, though, I should think there'd been squeezing enough already."

She looked at Ned angrily. The scenes of the morning rose before him and tied his tongue.

"How do you know all these jokers, Nellie?" he asked. He had been going to put the question a dozen times before but it had slipped him in the interest of conversation.

"I only know them by sight. Mrs. Stratton takes me to the theatre with her sometimes and tells me who people are and all about them."

"Who's Mrs. Stratton? You were talking of Mr. Stratton, too, just now, weren't you?"

"Yes. The Strattons are very nice people, They're interested in the Labour movement, and I said I'd bring you round when I go to-night. I generally go on Sat.u.r.day nights. They're not early birds, and we don't want to get there till half-past ten or so."

"Half-past ten! That's queer time."

"Yes, isn't it? Only----"

At that moment a waitress who had been arranging the next table came and took her place against the wall close behind Nellie. Such an opportunity to talk unionism was not to be lost, so Nellie unceremoniously dropped her conversation with Ned and enquired, as before stated, into the becapped girl's hours. The waitress was tall and well-featured, but sallow of skin and growing haggard, though barely 20, if that. Below her eyes were bluish hollows. She suffered plainly from the disorders caused by constant standing and carrying, and at this end of her long week was in evident pain.

"You're not allowed to talk either?" she asked the waitress, when the manager had disappeared.

"No. They're very strict. You get fined if you're seen chatting to customers and if you're caught resting. And you get fined if you break anything, too. One girl was fined six shillings last week."

"Why do you stand it? If you were up in our part of the world we'd soon bring 'em down a notch or two." This from Ned.

"Out in the bush it may be different," said the girl, identifying his part of the world by his dress and sunburnt face. "But in towns you've got to stand it."

"Couldn't you girls form a union?" asked Nellie.

"What's the use, there's plenty to take our places."

"But if you were all in a union there wouldn't be enough."

"Oh, we can't trust a lot of girls. Those who live at home and just work to dress themselves are the worst of the lot. They'd work for ten shillings or five."

"But they'd be ashamed to blackleg if once they were got into the union,"

persisted Nellie. "It's worth trying, to get a rise in wages and to stop fining and have shorter hours and seats while you're waiting."

"Yes, it's worth trying if there was any chance. But there are so many girls. You're lucky if you get work at all now and just have to put up with anything. If we all struck they could get others to-morrow."

"But not waitresses. How'd they look here, trying to serve dinner with a lot of green hands?" argued Nellie. "Besides, if you had a union, you could get a lot without striking at all. They know now you can't strike, so they do just exactly as they like."

"They'd do what they----" began the waitress. Then she broke off with another "s-s-s" as the manager crossed the room again.

"They'd do what they like, anyway," she began once more. "One of our girls was in the union the Melbourne waitresses started. They had a strike at one of the big restaurants over the manager insulting one of the girls. They complained to the boss and wanted the manager to apologise, but the boss wouldn't listen and said they were getting very nice. So at dinner time, when the bell rang, they all marched off and put on their hats. The customers were all waiting for dinner and the girls were all on strike and the boss nearly went mad. He was going to have them all arrested, but when the gentlemen heard what it was about they said the girls were right and if the manager didn't apologise they'd go to some other restaurant always. So the manager went to the girl and apologised."

"By gum!" interjected Ned. "Those girls were hummers."

"I suppose the boss victimised afterwards?" asked Nellie, wiser in such matters.

"That's just it," said the girl, in a disheartened tone. "In two or three weeks every girl who'd had anything to do with stirring the others up was bounced for something or other. The manager did what he liked afterwards."

"Just talk to the other girls about a union, will you?" asked Nellie.

"It's no use giving right in, you know."

"I'll see what some of them say, but there's a lot I wouldn't open my mouth to," answered the waitress.

"What time do you get away on Thursdays?"

"Next Thursday I'm on till half-past ten."

"Well, I'll meet you then, outside, to see what they say," said Nellie.

"My name's Nellie Lawton and some of us are trying to start a women's union. You'll be sure to be there?"

"All right," answered the waitress, a little dubiously. Then she added more cordially, as she wrote out the pay ticket:

"My name's Susan Finch. I'll see what I can do."

So Ned and Nellie got up and, the former having paid at the counter, walked out into the street together. It was nearly three. The rain had stopped, though the sky was still cloudy and threatening. The damp afternoon was chilly after the sultry broiling morning. Neither of them felt in the mood for walking so at Nellie's suggestion they put in the afternoon in riding, on trams and 'busses, hither and thither through the mazy wilderness of the streets that make up Sydney.

Intuitively, both avoided talking of the topics that before had engaged them and that still engrossed their thoughts. For a while they chatted on indifferent matters, but gradually relapsed into silence, rarely broken.

The impression of the morning walk, of Mrs. Somerville's poor room, of Nellie's stuffy street, came with full force to Ned's mind. What he saw only stamped it deeper and deeper.

When, in a bus, they rode through the suburbs of the wealthy, past shrubberied mansions and showy villas, along roads where liveried carriages, drawn by high-stepping horses, dashed by them, he felt himself in the presence of the fat man who jingled sovereigns, of the lean man whose slender fingers reached north to the Peak Downs and south to the Murray, filching everywhere from the worker's hard-earned wage. When in the tram they were carried with clanging and jangling through endless rows of houses great and small, along main thoroughfares on either side of which crowded side-streets extended like fish-bones, over less crowded districts where the cottages were generally detached or semi-detached and where pleasant homely houses were thickly sprinkled, oven here he wondered how near those who lived in happier state were to the life of the slum, wondered what struggling and pinching and sc.r.a.ping was going on behind the half-drawn blinds that made homes look so cosy.

What started him on this idea particularly was that, in one train, a grey-bearded propertied-looking man who sat beside him was grumbling to a spruce little man opposite about the increasing number of empty houses.

"You can't wonder at it," answered the spruce little man. "When the working cla.s.ses aren't prospering everybody feels it but the exporters.

Wages are going down and people are living two families in a house where they used to live one in a house, or living in smaller houses."

"Oh! Wages are just as high. There's been too much building. You building society men have overdone the thing."

"My dear sir!" declared the spruce little man. "I'm talking from facts.

My society and every other building society is finding it out. When men can't get as regular work it's the same thing to them as if wages were coming down. The number of surrenders we have now is something appalling.