The Workingman's Paradise Part 7

"I'm not tired," said Nellie, leaning against the doorway. Ned sat up on the stall by her side; his feet were sore, unused to the hard paved city streets.

"I suppose Mr. Hawkins is one of us," said Sim, perching himself up again.

"I don't know what you call 'one of us,'" answered Nellie, with a smile.

"He's a beginner. Some day he may get as far as you and Jones and the rest of the dynamiters."

Sim laughed genially. "Do you know, I really believe that Jones would use dynamite if he got an opportunity," he commented. "I'm not joking. I'm positively convinced of it."

"Has he got it as bad as that?" asked Nellie. Ned began to feel interested. He also noticed that Sim used book-words.

"Has he got it as bad as that! 'Bad' isn't any name for it. He's the stubbornest man I over met, and he's full of the most furious hatred against the capitalists. He has it as a personal feeling. Then the life he's got is sufficient to drive a man mad."

"Selecting is pretty hard," agreed Nellie, sadly.

"Nellie and I know a little about that, Mr. Sim," said Ned.

"Well, Jones' selection is a hard one," went on Sim, goodhumouredly. "I prefer to sell trotters, when I sell out like this, to attempting it. The soil is all stones, and there is not a drop of water when the least drought comes on. Poor Jones toils like a team of horses and hardly gets sufficient to keep him alive. I never saw a man work as he does. For a man who thinks and has ideas to be buried like that in the bush is terrible. He has no one to converse with. He goes mooning about sometimes and muttering to himself enough to frighten one into a fit."

"Does he still do any printing?" asked Nellie, archly.

"Oh, the printing," answered Sim, laughing again. "He initiated me into the art of wood-engraving. You see, Mr. Hawkins"--turning to Ned-- "Jones hasn't got any type, and of course he can't afford to buy it, but he's got hold of a little second-hand toy printing press. To print from he takes a piece, of wood, cut across the grain and rubbed smooth with sand, and cuts out of it the most revolutionary and blood-curdling leaflets, letter by letter. If you only have patience it's quite easy after a few weeks' practice."

"Does he print them?" asked Ned

"Print them! I should say he did. Every old sc.r.a.p of paper he can collect or got sent him he prints his leaflets on and gets them distributed all over the country. Many a night I've sat up a.s.sisting with the pottering little press. Talk about Nihilism! Jones vows that there is only one way to cure things and that is to destroy the rule of Force."

"He's along while starting," remarked Nellie with a slight sneer. "Those people who talk so much never do anything."

"Oh, Jones isn't like that," answered Sim, with cheerful confidence.

"He'll do anything that he thinks is worth while. But I suppose I'm horrifying you, Mr. Hawkins? Miss Lawton here knows what we are and is accustomed to our talk."

"It'll take considerable to horrify me," replied Ned, standing down as Nellie straightened herself out for a move-on. "You can blow the whole world to pieces for all I care. There's not much worth watching in it as far as I can see."

"You're pretty well an anarchist," said the brown-bearded trotter-seller, his kindly intellectual face lighted up. "It'll come some day, that's one satisfaction. Do you think that many here will regret it?" He waved his hand to include the crowd that moved to and fro before them, its voices covered with the din of its dragging feet.

"That'll do, Sim!" said Nellie. "Don't stuff Ned's head with those absurd anarchisticall night-mares of yours. We're going; we've got somewhere to go. Good-bye! Tell Jones you saw me when you write, and remember me to him, will you? I like him--he's so good-hearted, though he does rave."

"He's as good-hearted a man as there is in New South Wales," corroborated Sim, shaking hands. "I'm expecting to meet a friend--here or I'd stroll along. Good-bye! Glad to have met you, Mr. Hawkins."

He re-mounted the stall again as they moved off. In another minute he was lost to their sight as they were swallowed up once more in the living tide that ebbed and flowed through Paddy's Market.

After that Ned did not notice much, so absorbed was he. He vaguely knew that they drifted along another arcade and then crossed a street to an open cobble-paved s.p.a.ce where there were shooting-tunnels and merry-go-rounds and try-your-weights and see-how-much-you-lifts. He looked dazedly at wizen-faced lads who gathered round ice-cream stalls, and at hungry folks who ate stewed peas. Everything seemed grimy and frayed and sordid; the flaring torches smelt of oil; those who shot, or ate, or rode, by spending a penny, were the envied of standers-by. Amid all this drumming and hawking and flaring of lights were swarms of boys and growing girls, precocious and vicious and foul-tongued.

Ten o'clock struck. "For G.o.d's sake, let us get out of this, Nellie!"

cried Ned, as the ringing bell-notes roused him.

"Have you had enough of Sydney?" she asked, leading the way out.

"I've had enough of every place," he answered hotly. She did not say any more.

As they stood in George-street, waiting for their 'bus, a high-heeled, tightly-corsetted, gaily-hatted larrikiness flounced out of the side door of a hotel near by. A couple of larrikin acquaintances were standing there, shrivelled young men in high-heeled pointed-toed shoes, belled trousers, gaudy neckties and round soft hats tipped over the left ear.

"h.e.l.lo, you blokes!" cried the larrikiness, slapping one on the shoulder.

"Isn't this a blank of a time you're having?"

It was her ideal of pleasure, hers and theirs, to parade the street or stand in it, to gape or be gaped at.

CHAPTER V.

WERE THEY CONSPIRATORS?

Neither Ned nor Nellie spoke as they journeyed down George street in the rumbling 'bus. "I've got tickets," was all she said as they entered the ferry shed at the Circular Quay. They climbed to the upper deck of the ferry boat in silence. He got up when she did and went ash.o.r.e by her side without a word. He did not notice the glittering lights that encircled the murky night. He did not even know if it were wet or fine, or whether the moon shone or not. He was in a daze. The horrors of living stunned him. The miseries of poor Humanity choked him. The foul air of these noisome streets sickened him. The wretched faces he had seen haunted him.

The oaths of the gutter children and the wailing of the blind beggar-girl seemed to mingle in a shriek that shook his very soul.

If he could have persuaded himself that the bush had none of this, it would have been different. But he could not. The stench of the stifling shearing-sheds and of the crowded sleeping huts where men are packed in rows like trucked sheep came to him with the sickening smell of the slums. On the faces of men in the bush he had seen again and again that hopeless look as of goaded oxen straining through a mud-hole, that utter degradation, that humble plea for charity. He had known them in Western Queensland often in spite of all that was said of the free, brave bush.

It was not new to him, this dark side of life; that was the worst of it.

It had been all along and he had known that it had been, but never before had he understood the significance of it, never before had he realised how utterly civilisation has failed. And this was what crushed him--the hopelessness of it all, the black despair that seemed to fill the universe, the brutal weariness of living, the ceaseless round of sorrow and sin and shame and unspeakable misery.

Often in the bush it had come to him, lying sleepless at night under the star-lit sky, all alone excepting for the tinkling of his horse-bell: "What is to be the end for me? What is there to look forward to?" And his heart had sunk within him at the prospect. For what was in front? What could be? Shearing and waiting for shearing--that was his life. Working over the sweating sheep under the hot iron shed in the sweltering summer time; growing sick and losing weight and bickering with the squatter till the few working months wore over; then an occasional job, but mostly enforced idling till the season came round again; looking for work from shed to shed; struggling against conditions; agitating; organising; and in the future years, aged too soon, wifeless and childless, racked with rheumatism, shaken with fevers, to lie down to die on the open plain perchance or crawl, feebled and humbled, to the State-charity of Dunwich.

He used to shut his eyes to force such thoughts from him, fearing lest he go mad, as were those travelling swagmen he met sometimes, who muttered always to themselves and made frantic gestures as they journeyed, solitary, through the monotonous wilderness. He had flung himself into unionism because there was nothing else that promised help or hope and because he hated the squatters, who took, as he looked at it, contemptible advantage of the bushmen. And he had felt that with unionism men grew better and heartier, gambling less and debating more, drinking less and planning what the union would do when it grew strong enough. He had worked for the union before it came, had been one of those who preached it from shed to shed and argued for it by smouldering camp fires before turning in. And he had seen the union feeling spread until the whole Western country throbbed with it and until the union itself started into life at the last attempt of the squatter to force down wages and was extending itself now as fast as even he could wish to see it. "We only want what is fair," he had told Nellie; "we're not going in for anything wild. So long as we get a pound a hundred and rations at a fair figure we're satisfied." And Nellie had shown him things which had struck him dumb and broken through the veneer of satisfaction that of late had covered over his old doubts and fears.

"What is to be the end for me?" he used to think, then force himself not to think in terror. Now, he himself seemed so insignificant, the union he loved so seemed so insignificant, he was only conscious for the time being of the agony of the world at large, which dulled him with the reflex of its pain. Oh, these puny foul-tongued children! Oh, these haggard weary women! Oh, these hopeless imbruted men! Oh, these young girls steeped in viciousness, these awful streets, this hateful life, this h.e.l.l of Sydney. And beyond it--h.e.l.l, still h.e.l.l. Ah, he knew it now, unconsciously, as in a swoon one hears voices. The sorrow of it all!

The hatefulness of it all! The weariness of it all! Why do we live?

Wherefore? For what end, what aim? The selector, the digger, the bushman, as the townman, what has life for them? It is in Australia as all over the world. Wrong triumphs. Life is a mockery. G.o.d is not. At least, so it came gradually to Ned as he walked silently by Nellie's side.

They had turned down a tree-screened side road, descending again towards the harbour. Nellie stopped short at an iron gate, set in a hedge of some kind. A tree spanned the gateway with its branches, making the gloomy night still darker. The click of the latch roused her companion.

"Do you think it's any good living?" he asked her.

She did not answer for a moment or two, pausing in the gateway. A break in the western sky showed a grey cloud faintly tinged with silver. She looked fixedly up at it and Ned, his eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom, thought he saw her face working convulsively. But before he could speak again, she turned round sharply and answered, without a tremor in her voice:

"I suppose that's a question everybody must answer for themselves."

"Well, do you?"

"For myself, yes."

"For others, too?"

"For most others, no." The intense bitterness of her tone stamped her words into his brain.

"Then why for you any more than anybody else?"

"I'll tell you after. We must go in. Be careful! You'd better give me your hand!"