The Workingmans Paradise | Page 3

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. "You didn't come in
to make fun of me."
"Making fun! There, have your joke with the old woman! You didn't
hear that my Tom got the run yesterday, did you?"
"Did he? What a pity! I'm very sorry," said Nellie.
"Everybody'll be out of work and then what'll we all do?" said Mrs.
Philips, evidently cheered, nevertheless, by companionship in
misfortune.
"What'll we all do! There'd never be anybody at all out of work if
everybody was like me and Nellie there," answered the amazon.
"What did he get the run for?" asked Nellie.
"What can we women do?" queried Mrs. Phillips, doleful still.
"Wait a minute till I can tell you! You don't give a body time to begin
before you worry them with questions about things you'd hear all about
it if you'd just hold your tongues a minute. You're like two blessed
babies! It was this way, Mrs. Phillips, as sure as I'm standing here. Tom
got trying to persuade the other men in the yard--poor sticks of men
they are!--to have a union. I've been goading him to it, may the Lord
forgive me, ever since Miss Nellie there came round one night and

persuaded my Tessie to join. 'Tom,' says I to him that very night, 'I'll
have to be lending you one of my old petticoats, the way the poor weak
girls are beginning to stand up for their rights, and you not even daring
to be a union man. I never thought I'd live to be ashamed of the father
of my children!' says I. And yesterday noon Tom came home with a
face on him as long as my arm, and told me that he'd been sacked for
talking union to the men.
"'It's a man you are again, Tom,' says I. 'We've lived short before and
we can live it again, please God, and it's myself would starve with you
a hundred times over rather than be ashamed of you,' says I. 'Who was
it that sacked you?' I asked him.
"'The foreman,' says Tom. 'He told me they didn't want any agitators
about.'
"'May he live to suffer for it,' says I. 'I'll go down and see the boss
himself.'
"So down I went, and as luck would have it the boy in the front office
wasn't educated enough to say I was an old image, I suppose, for would
you believe it I actually heard him say that there was a lady, if you
please, wanting to see Mister Paritt very particularly on personal
business, as I'd told him. So of course I was shown in directly, the very
minute, and the door was closed on me before the old villain, who's a
great man at church on Sundays, saw that he'd made a little mistake.
"'What do you want, my good woman?' says he, snappish like. 'Very
sorry,' says he, when I'd told him that I'd eleven children and that Tom
had worked for him for four years and worked well, too. 'Very sorry,'
says he, my good woman, 'but your husband should have thought of
that before. It's against my principles,' says he, 'to have any unionists
about the place. I'm told he's been making the other men discontented. I
can't take him back. You must blame him, not me,' says he.
"I could feel the temper in me, just as though he'd given me a couple of
stiff nobblers of real old whisky. 'So you won't take Tom back,' says I,
'not for the sake of his eleven children when it's their poor heart-broken

mother that asks you?'
"'No,' says he, short, getting up from his chair. 'I can't. You've bothered
me long enough,' says he.
"I So then I decided it was time to tell the old villain just what I thought
of his grinding men down to the last penny and insulting every decent
girl that ever worked for him. He got as black in the face as if he was
smoking already on the fiery furnace that's waiting for him below,
please God, and called the shrimp of an office boy to throw me out.
'Leave the place, you disgraceful creature, or I'll send for the police,'
says he. But I left when I got