The Workingmans Paradise | Page 5

of wax apples under a glass shade, a sideboard and a
pair of white lace curtains hanging from a pole, with various ornaments
and pictures of noticeable appearance, also linoleum for the floor, had
finally been gathered together and were treasured for a time as
household gods indeed. In those days there was hardly a commandment
in the decalogue that Mephistopheles might not have induced Mrs.
Phillips to commit by judicious praise of her "room." Her occasional
"visitors" were ushered into it with an air of pride that was alone
enough to illuminate the dingy, musty little place. Between herself and
those of her neighbours who had "rooms" there was a fierce rivalry,
while those of inferior grade--and they were in the majority--regarded
her with an envy not unmixed with dislike.
But those times were gone for poor Mrs. Phillips. We all know how
they go, excepting those who do not want to know. Work gradually
became more uncertain, wages fell and rents kept up. They had one
room of the small five-roomed house let already. They let
another--"they" being her and Joe. Finally, they had to let the room.
The chairs, the round table and the sofa wore bartered at a second-hand
store for bedroom furniture. The mirror and the sideboard were brought
out into the kitchen, and on the sideboard the wax fruit still stood like
the lingering shrine of a departed faith.
The "room" was now the lodging of two single men, as the good old
ship-phrase goes. Upstairs, in the room over the kitchen, the Phillips
family slept, six in all. There would have been seven, only the eldest

girl, a child of ten, slept with Nellie in the little front room over the
door, an arrangement which was not in the bond but was volunteered
by the single woman in one of her fits of indignation against pigging
together. The other front room was also rented by a single man when
they could get him. Just now it was tenantless, an additional cause of
sorrow to Mrs. Phillips, whose stock card, "Furnished Lodgings for a
Single Man," was now displayed at the front window, making the
house in that respect very similar to half the houses in the street, or in
this part of the town for that matter. Yet with all this crowding and
renting of rooms Mrs. Phillips did not grow rich. She was always
getting into debt or getting out of it, this depending in inverse ratio
upon Joe being in work or out.
When the rooms were all let they barely paid the rent and were always
getting empty. The five children--they had one dead and another
coming--ate so much and made so much work. There were boots and
clothes and groceries to pay for, not to mention bread. And though Joe
was not like many a woman's husband yet he did get on the spree
occasionally, a little fact which in the opinion of the pious will account
for all Mrs. Phillips' weariness and all the poverty of this crowded
house. But however that may be she was a weary hopeless faded
woman, who would not cause passers-by to turn, pity-stricken, and
watch her when she hurried along on her semi-occasional escapes from
her prison-house only because such women are so common that it is
those who do not look hopeless and weary whom we turn to watch if by
some strange chance one passes. The Phillips' kitchen was a cheerless
place, in spite of the mirror that was installed in state over the
side-board and the wax flowers. Its one window looked upon a
diminutive back yard, a low broken wall and another row of similar
two-storied houses. On the plastered walls were some shelves bearing a
limited supply of crockery. Over the grated fireplace was a long high
shelf whereon stood various pots and bottles. There were some chairs
and a table and a Chinese-made safe. On the boarded floor was a
remnant of linoleum. Against one wall was a narrow staircase.
It was the breakfast things that Nellie had been helping to wash up. The
little American clock on the sideboard indicated quarter past nine.

Nellie went to the front door, opened it, and stood looking out. The
view was a limited one, a short narrow side street, blinded at one end
by a high bare stone wall, bounded at the other by the almost as narrow
by-thoroughfare this side street branched from. The houses in the
thoroughfare were three-storied, and a number wore used as shops of
the huckstering variety, mainly by Chinese. The houses in the side
street were two-storied, dingy, jammed tightly together, each one
exactly like the next. The pavement was of stone, the roadway of some
composite, hard as iron; roadway and pavement were