The Workingman's Paradise An Australian Labour Novel

Excerpt

CHAPTER I.

WHY NELLIE SHOWS NED ROUND.

Nellie was waiting for Ned, not in the best of humours.

"I suppose he'll get drunk to celebrate it," she was saying, energetically drying the last cup with a corner of the damp cloth. "And I suppose she feels as though it's something to be very glad and proud about."

"Well, Nellie," answered the woman who had been rinsing the breakfast things, ignoring the first supposition. "One doesn't want them to come, but when they do come one can't help feeling glad."

"Glad!" said Nellie, scornfully.

"If Joe was in steady work, I wouldn't mind how often it was. It's when he loses his job and work so hard to get—" Here the speaker subsided in tears.

"It's no use worrying," comforted Nellie, kindly. "He'll get another job soon, I hope. He generally has pretty fair luck, you know."

"Yes, Joe has had pretty fair luck, so far. But nobody knows how long it'll last. There's my brother wasn't out of work for fifteen years, and now he hasn't done a stroke for twenty-three weeks come Tuesday. He's going out of his mind."

"He'll get used to it," answered Nellie, grimly.

"How you do talk, Nellie!" said the other. "To hear you sometimes one would think you hadn't any heart."

"I haven't any patience."

"That's true, my young gamecock!" exclaimed a somewhat discordant voice.
Nellie looked round, brightening suddenly.

A large slatternly woman stood in the back doorway, a woman who might possibly have been a pretty girl once but whose passing charms had long been utterly sponged out. A perceptible growth of hair lent a somewhat repulsive appearance to a face which at best had a great deal of the virago in it. Yet there was, in spite of her furrowed skin and faded eyes and drab dress, an air of good-heartedness about her, made somewhat ferocious by the muscularity of the arms that fell akimbo upon her great hips, and by the strong teeth, white as those of a dog, that flashed suddenly from between her colourless lips when she laughed.

"That's true, my young gamecock!" she shouted, in a deep voice, strangely cracked. "And so you're at your old tricks again, are you? Talking sedition I'll be bound. I've half a mind to turn informer and have the law on you. The dear lamb!" she added, to the other woman.

"Good morning, Mrs. Macanany," said Nellie, laughing. "We haven't got yet so that we can't say what we like, here."

"I'm not so sure about that. Wait till you hear what I came to tell you, hearing from little Jimmy that you were at home and going to have a holiday with a young man from the country. We'll sherrivvery them if he takes her away from us, Mrs. Phillips, the only one that does sore eyes good to see in the whole blessed neighborhood! You needn't blush, my dear, for I had a young man myself once, though you wouldn't imagine it to look at me. And if I was a young man myself it's her"—pointing Nellie out to Mrs. Phillips—that I'd go sweethearting with and not with the empty headed chits that—"

"Look here, Mrs. Macanany!" interrupted Nellie....