The Workingman's Paradise. Джон Миллер

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СКАЧАТЬ take your whole morning," she said. "You don't get many friends from the bush to see you, so just go away and I'll get on. I'm much obliged to you as it is, Nellie."

      Nellie did not object. After wiping her hands, face and neck with her handkerchief she put on her gloves and hat. The sharp-faced woman was already at the machine and amid the din, which drowned their good-byes, they departed as they came. Ned felt more at ease when his feet felt the first step of the narrow creaking stairway. It is hardly a pleasant sensation for a man to be in the room of a stranger who, without any unfriendliness, does not seem particularly aware that he is there. They left the door open. Far down the stifling stairs Ned could hear the ceaseless whirring of the machine driven by the woman who slaved ceaselessly for her children's bread in this Sydney sink. He looked around for the children when they got to the alley again but could not see them among the urchins who lolled about half-suffocated now. The sun was almost overhead for they had been upstairs for an hour. The heat in this mere canyon path between cliffs of houses was terrible. Ned himself began to feel queerly.

      "Let's get out of this, Nellie," he said.

      "How would you like never to be able to get out of it?" she answered, as they turned towards the bustling street, opposite to the way they had previously come.

      "Who's that Mrs. Somerville?" he asked, not answering.

      "I got to know her when I lived there," replied Nellie. "Her husband used to be well off, I fancy, but had bad luck and got down pretty low. There was a strike on at some building and he went on as a laborer, blacklegging. The pickets followed him to the house, abusing him, and made him stubborn, but I got her alone that night and talked to her and explained things a bit and she talked to him and next day he joined the union. Then he got working about as a labourer, and one day some rotten scaffolding broke, and he came down with it. The union got a few pounds for her, but the boss was a regular swindler who was always beating men out of their wages and doing anything to get contracts and running everything cheap, so there was nothing to be got out of him."

      "Did her husband die?"

      "Yes, next day. She had three children and another came seven months after. One died last summer just before the baby was born. She's had a pretty hard time of it, but she works all the time and she generally has work."

      "It seems quite a favour to get work here," observed Ned.

      "If you were a girl you'd soon find out what a favour it is sometimes," answered Nellie quietly, as they came out into the street.

CHAPTER III.

       Table of Contents

      SHORN LIKE SHEEP.

      "How many hours do you work?" asked Nellie of the waitress.

      "About thirteen," answered the girl, glancing round to see if the manager was watching her talking. "But it's not the hours so much. It's the standing."

      "You're not doing any good standing now," put in Ned. "Why don't you sit down and have a rest?"

      "They don't let us," answered the waitress, cautiously.

      "What do they pay?" asked Nellie, sipping her tea and joining in the waitress' look-out for the manager.

      "Fifteen! But they're taking girls on at twelve. Of course there's meals. But you've got to room yourself, and then there's washing, clean aprons and caps and cuffs and collars. You've got to dress, too. There's nothing left. We ought to get a pound."

      "What——"

      "S-s-s!" warned the waitress, straightening herself up as the manager appeared.

      * * * * *

      They were in a fashionable Sydney restaurant, on George-street, a large, painted, gilded, veneered, electro-plated place, full of mirrors and gas-fittings and white-clothed tables. It was not busy, the hour being somewhat late and the day Saturday, and so against the walls, on either side the long halls, were ranged sentinel rows of white-aproned, white-capped, black-dressed waitresses.

      They were dawdling over their tea—Ned and Nellie were, not the waitresses—having dined exceedingly well on soup and fish and flesh and pudding. For Ned, crushed by more sight-seeing and revived by a stroll to the Domain and a rest by a fountain under shady trees, further revived by a thunderstorm that suddenly rolled up and burst upon them almost before they could reach the shelter of an awning, had insisted on treating Nellie to "a good dinner," telling her that afterwards she could take him anywhere she liked but that meanwhile they would have something to cheer them up. And Nellie agreed, nothing loth, for she too longed for the momentary jollity of a mild dissipation, not to mention that this would be a favorable opportunity to see if the restaurant girls could not be organised. So they had "a good dinner."

      "This reminds me," said Nellie, as she ate her fish, "of a friend of mine, a young fellow who is always getting hard up and always raising a cheque, as he calls it. He was very hard up a while ago, and met a friend whom he told about it. Then he invited his friend to go and have some lunch. They came here and he ordered chicken and that, and a bottle of good wine. It took his last half-sovereign. When he got the ticket the other man looked at him. 'Well,' he said, 'if you live like this when you're hard up, how on earth do you live when you've got money?'"

      "What did he say?" asked Ned, laughing, wondering at the same time how Nellie came to know people who drank wine and spent half-sovereigns on chicken lunches.

      "Oh! He didn't say anything much, he told me. He couldn't manage to explain, he thought, that when he was at work and easy in his mind he didn't care what he had to eat but that when he didn't know what he'd do by the end of the week he felt like having a good meal if he never had another. He thought that made the half-sovereign go furthest. He's funny in some things."

      "I should think he was, a little. How did you know him?"

      "I met him where we're going tonight. He's working on some newspaper in

       Melbourne now. I haven't seen him or heard of for months."

      She chatted on, rather feverishly.

      "Did you ever read 'David Copperfield?'"

      Ned nodded, his mouth being full.

      "Do you recollect how he used to stand outside the cookshops? It's quite natural. I used to. It's pretty bad to be hungry and it's just about as bad not to have enough. I know a woman who has a couple of children, a boy and a girl. They were starving once. She said she'd sooner starve than beg or ask anybody to help them, and the little girl said she would too. But the boy said he wasn't going to starve for anybody, and he wasn't going to beg either; he'd steal. And sure enough he slipped out and came back with two loaves that he'd taken from a shop. They lived on that for nearly a week." Nellie laughed forcedly.

      "What did they do then?" asked Ned seriously.

      "Oh! She had been doing work but couldn't get paid. She got paid."

      "Where was her husband?"

      "Don't husbands die like other people?" she answered, pointedly. "Not that all husbands are much good when they can't get work or will always work when they can get it," she added.

      "Are СКАЧАТЬ