The Workingman's Paradise. Джон Миллер

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 passages 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 unbuttoned from ground floor windows, or came out into the passage-ways slatternly. In one court two unkempt vile-tongued women of the town wrangled and abused each other to the amusement 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.

      "How's mother, Johnny?" asked Nellie of one of them, a small pinched little fellow of six or seven, who nursed a baby of a year or so old, an ill-nourished baby that seemed wilting in the heat.

      "She's working," answered the little fellow, looking anxiously at Nellie as she felt in her pocket.

      "There's a penny for you," said Nellie, "and here's a penny for Dicky," patting a little five-year-old on the head, "and here's one to buy some milk for the baby."

      Johnny rose with glad eagerness, the baby in his arms and the pennies in his hand.

      "I shall buy 'specks' with mine," he cried joyfully.

      "What's 'specks?'" asked Ned, puzzled, as the children went off, the elder staggering under his burden.

      "'Specks!' Damaged fruit, half rotten. The garbage of the rich sold as a feast to these poor little ones?" cried Nellie, a hot anger in her face and voice that made Ned dumb.

      She entered the doorway. Ned followed her through a room where a man and a couple of boys were hammering away at some boots, reaching thereby a narrow, creaking stairway, hot as a chimney, almost pitch dark, being lighted only by an occasional half-opened door, up which he stumbled clumsily. Through one of these open doors he caught a glimpse of a couple of girls sewing; through another of a woman with a baby in arms tidying-up a bare floored room, which seemed to be bedroom, kitchen and dining room in one; from behind a closed door came the sound of voices, one shrilly laughing. Unused to stairways his knees ached before they reached the top. He was glad enough when Nellie knocked loudly at a door through which came the whirring of a sewing machine. The noise stopped for a moment while a sharp voice called them to "come in," then started again. Nellie opened the door.

      At the open window of a small room, barely furnished with a broken iron bedstead, some case boards knocked together for a table and fixed against the wall, a couple of shaky chairs and a box, a sharp featured woman sat working a machine, as if for dear life. The heat of the room was made hotter by the little grate in which a fire had recently been burning and on which still stood the teapot. Some cups and a plate or two, with a cut loaf of bread and a jam tin of sugar, littered the table. The scanty bed was unmade. The woman wore a limp cotton dress of uncertain colour, rolled up at the sleeves and opened at the neck for greater coolness. She was thin and sharp; she was so busy you understood that she had no time to be clean and tidy. She seemed pleased to see Nellie and totally indifferent at seeing Ned, but kept on working after nodding to them.

      Nellie motioned Ned to sit down, which he did on the edge of the bed, not caring to trust the shaky chairs. She went to the side of the sharp-featured woman, and sitting down on the foot of the bed by the machine watched her working without a word. Ned could see on the ground, in a paper parcel, a heap of cloth of various colours, and on the bed some new coats folded and piled up. On the machine was another coat, being sewn.

      It was ten minutes before the machine stopped, ten minutes for Ned to look about and think in. He knew without being told that this miserable room was the home of the three children to whom Nellie had given the pennies, and that here their mother worked to feed them. Their feeding he could see on the table. Their home he could see. The work that gave it to them he could see. For the first time in his life he felt ashamed of being an Australian.

      Finally the machine stopped. The sharp-faced woman took the coat up, bit a thread with her teeth, and laying it on her knee began to unpick the tackings.

      "Let me!" said Nellie, pulling off her gloves and taking off her hat. "We came to see you, Ned and I," she went on with honest truthfulness, "because he's just down from the bush, and I wanted him to see what Sydney was like. Ned, this is Mrs. Somerville."

      Mrs. Somerville nodded at Ned. "You're right to come here," she remarked, grimly, getting up while Nellie took her place as if she often did it. "You know just what it is, Nellie, and I do, too, worse luck. Perhaps it's good for us. When we're better off we don't care for those who're down. We've got to get down ourselves to get properly disgusted with it."

      She spoke with the accent of an educated woman, moving to the make-shift table and beginning to "tidy-up." As she passed between him and the light Ned could see that the cotton dress was her only covering.

      "How are the children?" asked Nellie.

      "How can you expect them to be?" retorted the other.

      "You ought to wean the baby," insisted Nellie, as though it was one of their habitual topics.

      "Wean the baby! That's all very well for those who can buy plenty of milk. It's a pity it's ever got to be weaned."

      "Plenty of work this week?" asked Nellie, changing the subject.

      "Yes; plenty of work this week. You know what that means. No work at all when they get a stock ahead, so as to prevent us feeling too independent I suppose." She paused, then added: "That girl downstairs says she isn't going to work any more. I talked to her a little but she says one might just as well die one way as another, and that she'll have some pleasure first. I couldn't blame her much. She's got a good heart. She's been very kind to the children."

      Nellie did not answer; she did not even look up.

      "They're going to reduce prices