The Workingmans Paradise | Page 6

overrun with
children. At the corner by a dead wall was a lamp-post. Nearly opposite
Nellie a group of excited women were standing in an open doorway.
They talked loudly, two or three at a time, addressing each other
indiscriminately. The children screamed and swore, quarrelled and
played and fought, while a shrill-voiced mother occasionally took a
hand in the diversion of the moment, usually to scold or cull some
luckless offender. The sunshine radiated that sickly heat which
precedes rain.
Nellie stood there and waited for Ned. She was 20 or so, tall and
slender but well-formed, every curve of her figure giving promise of
more luxurious development. She was dressed in a severely plain dress
of black stuff, above which a faint line of white collar could be seen
clasping the round throat. Her ears had been bored, but she wore no
earrings. Her brown hair was drawn away from her forehead and bound
in a heavy braid on the back of her neck. But it was her face that
attracted one, a pale sad face that was stamped on every feature with
the impress of a determined will and of an intense womanliness. From
the pronounced jaw that melted its squareness of profile in the oval of
the full face to the dark brown eyes that rarely veiled themselves
beneath their long-lashed lids, everything told that the girl possessed
the indefinable something we call character. And if there was in the
drooping corners of her red lips a sternness generally unassociated with
conceptions of feminine loveliness one forgot it usually in
contemplating the soft attractiveness of the shapely forehead, dashed
beneath by straight eyebrows, and of the pronounced cheekbones that
crossed the symmetry of a Saxon face. Mrs. Phillips was a drooping
wearied woman but there was nothing drooping about Nellie and never

could be. She might be torn down like one of the blue gums under
which she had drawn in the fresh air of her girlhood, but she could no
more bend than can the tree which must stand erect in the fiercest storm
or must go down altogether. Pale she was, from the close air of the
close street and close rooms, but proud she was as woman can be,
standing erect in the door-way amid all this pandemonium of cries,
waiting for Ned. Ned was her old playmate, a Darling Downs boy, five
years older to be sure, but her playmate in the old days, nevertheless, as
lads who have no sisters are apt to be with admiring little girls who
have no brothers. Selectors' children, both of them, from neighbouring
farms, born above the frost line under the smelting Queensland sun,
drifted hither and thither by the fitful gusts of Fate as are the
paper-sailed ships that boys launch on flood water pools, meeting here
in Sydney after long years of separation. Now, Nellie was a dressmaker
in a big city shop, and Ned a sun-burnt shearer to whom the great
trackless West was home. She thought of the old home sadly as she
stood there waiting for him.
It had not been a happy home altogether and yet, and yet--it was better
than this. There was pure air there, at least, and grass up to the door,
and trees rustling over-head; and the little children were brown and
sturdy and played with merry shouts, not with these vile words she
heard jabbered in the wretched street. Her heart grew sick within her--a
habit it had, that heart of Nellie's--and a passion of wild revolt against
her surroundings made her bite her lips and press her nails against her
palms. She looked across at the group opposite. More children being
born! Week in and week out they seemed to come in spite of all the talk
of not having any more. She could have cried over this holocaust of the
innocents, and yet she shrank with an unreasoning shrinking from the
barrenness that was coming to be regarded as the most comfortable
state and being sought after, as she knew well, by the younger married
women. What were they all coming to? Were they all to go on like this
without a struggle until they vanished altogether as a people, perhaps to
make room for the round-cheeked, bland-faced Chinaman who stood in
the doorway of his shop in the crossing thorough-fare, gazing
expressionlessly at her? She loathed that Chinaman. He always seemed
to be watching her, to be waiting for something. She would dream of

him sometimes as creeping upon her from behind, always with that
bland round face. Yet he never spoke to her, never insulted her, only he
seemed to be always watching her, always waiting. And it would come
to her sometimes like a cold chill, that this yellow man and