Geisner slowly put down his book and went to the piano. "This is the only argument worth the name," he said. He ran his fingers over the keys, struck two or three chords apparently at hap-hazard, then sat down to play. A volume of sound rose, of clashing notes in fierce, swinging movement, a thrilling clamour of soul-stirring melody, at once short and sharp and long-drawn, at once soft as a mother's lullaby and savage as a hungry tiger's roar. It was the song of the world, the Marseillaise, the song that rises in every land when the oppressed rise against the oppressor, the song that breathes of wrongs to be revenged and of liberty to be won, of flying foes in front and a free people marching, and of blood shed like water for the idea that makes all nations kin. The hand of a master struck the keys and brought the notes out, clear and rhythmic, full strong notes that made the blood boil and the senses swim.
As the glorious melody rose and fell, sinking to a murmur, swelling out in heroic strains that rang like trumpet pealings, a great lump rose in Ned's throat and a mist of unquenchable tears filled his eyes. Roget de Lisle, dead and dust for generations, rose from the silent grave and spoke to him, spoke as heart speaks to heart, spoke and called and lived and breathed and was there, spoke of tortured lives and enslaved millions and of the fetid streets of great towns and of the slower anguish of the plundered country side, spoke of an Old Order based on the robbery of those who labour and on their weakness and on their ignorant sloth, spoke of virtue trampled down and little children weeping and Humanity bleeding at every pore and womanhood shamed and motherhood made a curse, spoke of all he hated and all he loved, pilloried the Wrong in front of him and bade him—to arms, to arms. "To arms!" with the patriot army whose trampling was the background of the music. "To arms!" with those whose desperate hands feared nothing and at whose coming thrones melted and kingdoms vanished and tyranny fled. To arms! To certain victory! To crash forward like a flood and sweep before the armed people all those who had worked it wrong!
Down Ned's cheeks the great tears rolled. He did not heed them. Why did not some one beat this mighty music through the Sydney slums, through those hateful back streets, through those long endless rows of mortgaged cottages and crowded apartment-houses? Why was it not carried out to the great West, hymned from shed to shed, told of in the huts and by the waterholes, given to the diggers in the great claims, to the drovers travelling stock, borne wherever a man was to be found who had a wrong to right and a long account to square? Ah! How they would all leap to it! How they would swell its victorious chanting and gather in their thousands and their hundred thousands to march on, march on, tramping time to its majestic notes! If he could only take it to them! If he could only make them feel as he felt! If he could only give to them in their poverty and misery all this wondrous music sounding here in this luxurious room! He could not; he could not. This Geisner could and would not, and he who would could not. The tears rained down his cheeks because of his utter impotence.
The music stopped. With a start he came to himself, ashamed of his weakness, and hastily blew his nose, fussing pretentiously with his handkerchief. But only one had noticed him—Geisner, who seemed to see and hear everything. Connie was sobbing quietly with her arms round Harry's neck, holding his head closely to her as he bent over her chair; all the while her foot beat time. Arty had suddenly grown moody again and sat with bent head, his cigar gone out in his listless hand. Ford had got up and was perched again on a corner of the table, smoking critically, apparently wholly engaged in watching the smoke wreaths he blew. George and Josie had taken each other's hands and sat breathlessly side by side on the lounge. Nellie lay back in her chair, her face flushed, a twisted handkerchief stretched over her eyes by both hands.
"I think that's the official version," observed Geisner, running his fingers softly over the keys again.
"It's above disputation, whatever it is," remarked Ford.
"Why should it be, if all true music isn't? And why should not this be the best rendering?"
He struck the grand melody again and it sounded softened, spiritualised, purified. Its fierce clamour, its triumphant crashing, were gone. It told of defeat and overthrow, of martyrs walking painfully to death, of prison cells and dungeons that never see the sun, of life-work unrewarded, of those who give their lives to Liberty and die before its shackled limbs are struck free. But it told, too, of an ideal held more sacred than life, rising ever from defeat, filling men's hearts and brains and driving them still to raise again the flag of Freedom against hopeless odds. It was a death march rolling out, the death march of sad-souled patriots going sorrowfully to seal their faith with all their earthly hopes and human loves and to meet, calm and pale, all that Fate has in store. They said to Liberty: "In death we salute thee." Without seeing her or knowing her, while the world around still slept in ignorance of her, they gave all up for her and in darkness died. Only they knew that there was no other way, that unless each man of himself dared to raise the chant and march forward alone, if need be, Liberty could never be.
"Well," said Geisner, coming unconcernedly into the circle where they sat in dead silence. "Don't you think the last rendering is the best, and isn't it the best simply because it expresses the composer's idea in the particular phase that we feel most at this present time?"
"Gracious! Don't start the argument again!" entreated Connie, vivacious again, though her eyes were red. "You'll never convert Ford or George or Harry here. They'll always have some explanation. Puritanism crushed the artistic sense out of the English, and they are only getting it back slowly by a judicious crossing with other peoples who weren't Puritanised into Philistinism. England has no national music. She has no national painting. She has no national sculpture. She has to borrow and adapt everything from the Continent. I nearly said she has no art at all."
"Here, I say," protested Ford. "Aren't you coming it a little too strong?
You've got the floor, Geisner. I've heard you stand up for English Art.
Stand up now, won't you?"
"Does it need standing up for?" asked Geisner. "Why, Connie doesn't forget that Puritanism with all its faults was in its day a religious movement, that is an emotional fervour, a veritable poem. That the Puritan cut love-locks off, wore drab, smashed painted windows and suppressed instrumental music in churches, is no proof of their being utterly inartistic. Their art-sense would simply find vent and expression in other directions if it existed strongly enough. And what do we find? This, that the Puritan period produced two of the masterpieces of English Art—Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress.' As an absolute master of English, of sentences rolling magnificently in great waves of melodious sound, trenchant in every syllable, not to be equalled even by Shakespeare himself, Milton stands out like a giant. As for Bunyan, the Englishman who has never read 'Pilgrim's Progress' does not know his mother tongue."
"Oh! Of course, we all admit English letters," interjected Connie.
"Do we?" answered Geisner, warming with his theme. "I'm not so sure of that; else, why should English people themselves put forward claims to excellencies which their nation has not got, and why should others dub them inartistic because of certain things lacking in the national arts? As far as music goes what has France got if you take away the Marseillaise? It is Germany, the kin of the English, which has the modern music. France has painting, England has literature and poetry—in that she leads the whole world."
"Still, to-day! How about Russia? How about France even—Flaubert,
Zola, Daudet, Ohnet, a dozen more?"
"Still! Ay, still and ever! Will these men live as the English writers live, think you? Look back a thousand years and see English growing, see how it comes to be the king of languages, destined, if civilisation lasts, to be the one language of the civilised world. There, in the Viking age, the English sweep the seas, great burly brutes, as Taine shows them to us, gorging on half-raw meat, swilling huge draughts of ale, lounging naked by the sedgy brooks under the mist-softened sun that cannot brown their fair pink bodies, until hunger drives them forth to foray; drinking and fighting and feasting and shouting and loving as Odin loved Frega. And the most honoured of all was the singer who sang in heroic verse of their battling and their love-making and their hunting. English was conceived then, and it was worthy conceiving."
"Other nations have literature," maintained Connie.
"What other living nations?" demanded Geisner. "Look at English! An endless list, such as surely before the world never saw. You cannot even name them all. Spencer and Chaucer living still. Shakespeare, whoever he was, immortal for all time, dimming like a noontide sun a galaxy of stars that to other nations would be suns indeed! Take Marlow, Beaumont and Fletcher, a dozen playwrights! The Bible, an imperishable monument of the people's English! Milton, Bunyan and Baxter, Wycherly and his fellows! Pope, Ben Johnson, Swift, Goldsmith, Junius, Burke, Sheridan! Scott and Byron, De Quincey, Shelley, Lamb, Chatterton! Moors and Burns wrote in English too! Look at Wordsworth, Dickens, George Eliott, Swinburne, Tennyson, the Brontes! There are gems upon gems in the second class writers, books that in other countries would make the writer immortal. Over the sea, in America, Poe, Whittier, Bret Harte, Longfellow, Emerson, Whitman. Here in Australia, the seed springing up! Even in South Africa, that Olive Schreiner writing like one inspired. By heavens! There are moments when I feel it must be a proud thing to be an Englishman."
"Bravo, Geisner! You actually make me for the minute," cried Ford.
"You should be! Has any other people anything to compare? There is not one other whose great writers could not almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. Spain has Cervantes and he is always being thrown at us. Germany has Goethe, Heine, Schiller. France so seldom sees literary genius that a man like Victor Hugo sends her into hysterics of self-admiration. But I'm afraid I'm lecturing."
"It's all right, Geisner," remarked Connie. "It's not only what you say but how you say it. But what are you driving at?"
"Just this! Nations seldom do all things with equal vigour and fervour and opportunity, so one excels another and is itself excelled. England excels in the simplest and strongest form of expression, literature. She is defective in other forms and borrows from us. But so we others borrow from her. Puritanism did not crush English art. English art, in the national way of expressing the national feeling, kept steadily on."
"Thanks! I think I'll sit down," he added, as Stratton handed him a tumbler half-filled with wine and a water-bottle. He filled the tumbler from the bottle, put them on the table, took cigarettes in a case from his pocket and lighted one at a gas jet behind him.
"Do you take water with your wine?" asked Stratton of Ned.
"I don't take wine at all, thank you," said Ned.
"What!" exclaimed Connie, sitting up. "You don't smoke and you don't drink wine. Why, you are a regular Arab. But you must have something. Arty! Rouse up and light the little stove again! You'll have some tea, Ned. Oh! It's no trouble. Arty will make it for me and it will do him good. What do you think of this oration of Geisner's?"
"I suppose it's all right," said Ned. "But I can't see what good it does myself."
"How's that?"
"Well, it's no use saying one thing and meaning another. This talk of 'art' seems to me selfish while the world to most people is a hell that it's pain to live in. I am sorry if I say what you don't like."
"Never mind that," said Connie, as cheerfully as ever. "You've been worrying, too. Have it out, so that we can all jump on you at once! I warn you, you won't have an ally."
"I suppose not," answered Ned, hotly. "You are all very kind and mean well, but do you know how people live, how they exist, what life outside is?"
Geisner had sat down in a low chair near by, his cigarette between his lips, his glass of wine and water on a shelf at his elbow. The others looked on in amazement at the sudden turn of the conversation. Connie smiled and nodded. Ned stared fiercely round at Geisner, who nodded also.
"Then listen to me," said Ned, bitterly. "Is it by playing music in fine parlours that good is to be done? Is it by drinking wine, by smoking, by laughing, by talking of pictures and books and music, by going to theatres, by living in clover while the world starves? Why do you not play that music in the back streets or to our fellows?" he asked, turning to Geisner again. "Are you afraid? Ah, if I could only play it!"
"Ned!" cried Nellie, sharply. But he went on, talking at Geisner:
"What do you do for the people outside? For the miserable, the wretched, those, weary of life? I suppose you are all 'interested in the Labour movement.' Well, what does all this do for it? What do you do for it? Would you give up anything, one puff of smoke, one drink of wine——"
"Stop, Ned! For shame's sake! How dare you speak to him like that?" Nellie interrupted, jumping up and coming between the two men. Ned leaned eagerly forward, his hands on his knees, his eyes flaming, his face quivering, his teeth showing. Geisner leaned back quietly, alternately sipping his wine and water and taking a whiff from his cigarette.
"Never mind," said Geisner. "Sit down, Nellie. It doesn't matter." Nellie sat down but she looked to Mrs. Stratton anxiously. The two women exchanged glances. Mrs. Stratton came quickly across to Geisner.
"It does matter," she said to him, laying her hands on his head and shoulder and facing Ned thus. "Not to you, of course, but to Ned there. He does not understand, and I don't think you understand everything either. It takes a woman to understand it all, Ned," and she laughed at the angry man. "Why do you say such things to Geisner? He does not deserve them."
Ned did not answer.
"I'm not defending the rest of us, only Geisner. If you only knew all he has done you would think of him as we do."
"Connie!" exclaimed Geisner, flushing. "Don't."
"Oh! I shall. If men will keep their lights under bushel baskets they must expect to get the covers knocked off sometimes. Ned! This man is a martyr. He has suffered so for the people, and he has borne it so bravely."
There was a hush in the room. Ned could see Connie's full underlip pouted tremulously and her eyes swimming, her hands moved caressingly to and fro. His face relaxed its passion. The tears came again into his eyes, also. Geisner smoked his cigarette, the most unmoved of any.
"If you had only known him years ago," went on Connie, her voice trembling. "He used to take me on his knee when I was a little girl, and keep me there for hours while great men talked great things and he was greatest of them all. He was young then and rich and handsome and fiery, and with a brain—oh, such a brain!—that put within his reach what other men care for most. And he gave it all up, everything—even Love," she added, softly. "When he played the Marseillaise just now, I thought of it. One day he came to our house and played it so, and outside the people in the streets were marching by singing it, and—and—" she set her teeth on a great sob. "My father never came back nor my brother, and Harry there came one night and took Josie and me away. We had no mother. And when we saw this man again he was what he is now. It was worse than death, ten thousand times worse. Oh! Geisner, Geisner!" The head her hand rested on had sunk down. What were the little man's thoughts? What were they?
"But his heart is still the same, Ned," she cried, triumphantly, her sweet voice ringing clear again. "Ah, yes! His heart is still the same, as brave and true and pure and strong. Oh, purer, better! If it came again, Ned, he would do it. Sometimes, I think, he doubts himself but I know. He would do it all again and suffer it all—that worse than death he suffered. For, you see, he only lives to serve the Cause, in a different way to the old way but still to serve it. And I serve the Cause also as best I can, even if I wear—" she shrugged her shoulders. "And Harry serves it still as loyally as when, a beardless lad, he risked his life to care for a slaughtered comrade's orphan children. And Ford, too, and Nellie here, and Arty and Josie and George. But Geisner serves it best of all if it be best to give most. He has given most all his life and he gives most still. And we love him for it. And that love, perhaps, is sweeter to him than all he might have been."
She knelt by his side as she ceased speaking, and put her arms round his neck as he crouched there. "Geisner!" Nellie who was nearest heard her whisper in her childhood's tongue. "Geisner! We have seen the dry bones become men. We have poured our blood and our brain into them and if only for a moment they have lived, they have lived. Ah, comrade, do you recollect how you breathed soul into them when they shrank back that day? They moved, Geisner. They moved. We felt them move. They will move again, some day, dear heart. They will move again." Then, choking with sobs, she laid her head on his knees. He put his arms tenderly round her and they saw that this immovable little man was weeping like a child. One by one the others went softly out to the verandah. Only Ned remained. He had buried his face in his hands and sat, overwhelmed with shame, wishing that the floor would open and swallow him. From outside came the ceaseless lap-lap-lapping of water, imperceptibly eating away the granite rock, caring not for time, blindly working, destroying the old and building up the new.
The touch of a hand roused Ned. He looked up. Mrs. Stratton had gone through the door concealed by the hangings. Geisner stood before him, calmly lighting another cigarette with a match. There was no trace of emotion on his face. He turned to drop the match into an ash tray, then held out both hands, on his face the kindly smile that transfigured him. Ned grasped them eagerly, wringing them in a grip that would have made most men wince. They stood thus silently for a minute or two, looking at one another, the young, hot-tempered bushman, the grey-haired, cool-tempered leader of men; between them sprang up, as they stood, the bond of that friendship which death itself only strengthens. The magnetism of the elder, his marvellous personality, the strength and majesty of the mighty soul that dwelt in his insignificant body, stole into Ned's heart and conquered it. And the spirit of the younger, his fierce indignation, his angry sorrow, his disregard for self, his truth, his strong manhood, appealed to the weary man as an echoing of his own passionate youth. Then they loosened hands and without a word Geisner commenced to walk slowly backwards and forwards, his hands behind him, his head bent down.
Ned watched him, studying him feature by feature. Yes, he had been handsome. He was ugly only because of great wrinkles that scored his cheeks and disfigured the fleshless face and discoloured skin. His eyebrows and eyelashes were very thin, too. His hair looked dried up and was strongly greyed; it had once been almost black. His lips were thin, his mouth shapeless, only because he had closed them in his fight against pain and anguish and despair and they had set thus by the habit of long years. His nose was still fine and straight, the nostrils swelling wide. His forehead was rugged and broad under its wrinkles. His chin was square. His frame still gave one the impression of tireless powers of endurance. His blue eyes still gleamed unsubdued in their dark, overhanging caverns. Yes! He had lived, this man. He had lived and suffered and kept his manhood still. To be like him! To follow him into the Valley of the Shadow! To live only for the Cause and by his side to save the world alive! Ned thought thus, as Connie came back, her face bathed and beaming again, her theatre dress replaced by a soft red dressing gown, belted loosely at the waist and trimmed with an abundance of coffee coloured lace. Her first words were a conundrum to Ned:
"Geisner! Haven't you dropped that unpleasant trick of yours after all these years? Two long steps and a short step! Turn! Two long steps and a short stop! Turn! Now, just to please me, do three long steps."
He smiled. "Connie, you are becoming quite a termagant."
She looked at Ned questioningly: "Well?"
"Oh, Ned and I are beginning to understand one another," said Geisner.
"Of course," she replied. "All good men and women are friends if they get to the bottom of each other. Let us go on the verandah with the rest. Do you know I feel quite warm now. I do believe it was only that ridiculous dress which made me feel so cold. Give me your arm, Ned. Bring me along a chair, Geisner."
CHAPTER VII.
A MEDLEY OF CONVERSATION.
Ned dreaded that rejoining the others on the verandah, but he need not have. They had forced the conversation at first, but gradually it became natural. It had turned on the proper sphere of woman, and went on without being interrupted by the new-comers. Nobody took any notice of them. The girls were seated. Stratton lay smoking in the hammock. The other men perched smoking on the railing. The gaslight had been turned down and in the gloom the cigar ends gleamed with each respiration. In spite of the damp it was very cosy. From the open door behind a ray of light fell upon the darkness-covered water below. Beyond were circling the lights of Sydney. Dotting the black night here and there were the signal lamps of anchored ships.
"We want perfect equality for woman with man," asserted Ford, in a conclusive tone of voice.
"We want woman in her proper sphere," maintained Stratton, from the hammock.
"What do you call 'her proper sphere?'" asked Nellie.
"This: That she should fulfil the functions assigned to her by Nature. That she should rule the home and rear children. That she should be a wife and a mother. That she should be gentle as men are rough, and, to pirate the Americanism, as she rocked the cradle should rock the world."
"How about equality?" demanded Ford.
"Equality! What do you mean by equality? Is it equality to scramble with men in the search for knowledge, narrow hipped and flat-chested? Is it equality to grow coarse and rough and unsexed in the struggle for existence? Ah! Let our women once become brutalised, masculinised, and there will be no hope for anything but a Chinese existence."
"Who wants to brutalise them?" asked Ford.
"What would your women be like?" asked Nellie.
"Look out for Madame there, Stratton!" said George.
"What would my women be like? Full-lipped and broad-hearted, fit to love and be loved! Full-breasted and broad-hipped fit to have children! Full-brained and broad-browed, fit to teach them! My women should be the embodiment of the nation, and none of them should work except for those they loved and of their own free will."
"Sort of queen bees!" remarked Nellie. "Why have them work at all?"
"Why? Is it 'work' for a mother to nurse her little one, to wash it, to dress it, to feed it, to watch it at night, to nurse it when it sickens, to teach it as it grows? And if she does that does she not do all that we have a right to ask of her? Need we ask her to earn her own living and bear children as well? Shall we make her a toy and a slave, or harden her to battle with men? I wouldn't. My women should be such that their children would hold them sacred and esteem all women for their sakes. I don't want the shrieking sisterhood, hard-voiced and ugly and unlovable, perpetuated. And they will not be perpetuated. They can't make us marry them. Their breed must die out."
"In other words," observed Nellie; "you would leave the present relationship of woman to Society unchanged, except that you would serve her out free rations."
"No! She should be absolutely mistress of her own body, and sole legal guardian of her own children."
"Which means that you would institute free divorce, and make the family matriarchal instead of patriarchal; replace one lopsided system by another."
"Give it him, Nellie," put in Connie. "I haven't heard those notions of his for years. I thought he had recanted long ago."
"Well, yes! But you needn't be so previous in calling it lopsided," said
Stratton.
"It is lop-sided, to my mind!" replied Nellie. "What women really want is to be left to find their own sphere, for whenever a man starts to find it for them he always manages to find something else. No man understands woman thoroughly. How can he when she doesn't even understand herself? Yet you propose to crush us all down to a certain pattern, without consulting us. That's not democratic. Why not consult us first I should like to know?"
"Probably because they wouldn't agree to it if you led the opposition,
Nellie. We are all only democratic when we think Demos is going our way."
This from Ford.
Arty slipped quietly off the railing and went into the sitting-room. Connie leaned back and watched him through the open door. "He's started to write," she announced. "He's been terribly down lately so it'll be pretty strong, poor fellow." She laughed good-naturedly; the others laughed with her. "Go on, Nellie dear. It's very interesting, and I didn't mean to interrupt."
"Oh! He won't answer me," declared Nellie, in a disgusted tone.
"I should think not," retorted Stratton. "I know your womanly habit of tying the best case into a tangled knot with a few Socratic questions. I leave the truth to prove itself."
"Just so! But you won't leave the truth about woman to prove itself. You want us to be good mothers, first and last. Why not let us be women, true women, first, and whatever it is fitting for us to be afterwards?"
"I want you to be true women."
"What is a true woman? A true woman to me is just what a true man is— one who is free to obey the instincts of her nature. Only give us freedom, opportunity, and we shall be at last all that we should be."
"Is it not freedom to be secure against want, to be free to——"
"To be mothers."
"Yes; to be mothers—the great function of women. To cradle the future.
To mould the nation that is to be."
"That is so like a man. To be machines, you mean—well cared for, certainly, but machines just the same. Don't you know that we have been machines too long? Can't you see that it is because we have been degraded into machines that Society is what it is?"
"How?" questioned Stratton.
"He knows it well, Nellie," cried Connie, clapping her hands.
"Because you can't raise free men from slave women. We want to be free, only to be free, to be let alone a little, to be treated as human beings with souls, just as men do. We have hands to work with, and brains to think with, and hearts to feel with. Why not join hands with us in theory as you do in fact? Do you tell us now that you won't have our help in the movement? Will you refuse us the fruit of victory when the fight is won? If I thought you would, I for one would cease to care whether the Cause won or not."
"I, too, Nellie. We'd all go on strike," cried Connie.
"What is it to you whether women are good mothers or not? What objections can you have to our rivalling men in the friendly rivalry that would be under fair conditions? Are our virtues, our woman instincts, so weak and frail that you can't trust us to go straight if the whole of life is freely open to us? Why, when I think of what woman's life is now, what it has been for so long, I wonder how it is that we have any virtues left." She spoke with intense feeling.
"What are we now," she went on, "in most cases? Slaves, bought and sold for a home, for a position, for a ribbon, for a piece of bread. With all their degradation men are not degraded as we are. To be womanly is to be shamed and insulted every day. To love is to suffer. To be a mother is to drink the dregs of human misery. To be heartless, to be cold, to be vicious and a hypocrite, to smother all one's higher self, to be sold, to sell one's self, to pander to evil passions, to be the slave of the slave, that is the way to survive most easily for a woman. And see what we are in spite of everything! Geisner said he would sometimes be proud if he were an Englishman. Sometimes I'm foolish enough to be proud I'm a woman.
"Why should we be mothers, unless it pleases us to be mothers? Why should we not feel that life is ours as men may feel it, that we help hold up the world and owe nothing to others except that common debt of fraternity which they owe also to us? Don't you think that Love would come then as it could in no other way? Don't you think that women, who even now are good mothers generally, would be good mothers to children whose coming was unstained with tears? And would they be worse mothers if their brains were keen and their bodies strong and their hearts brave with the healthy work and intelligent life that everybody should have, men and women alike?"
"You seem to have an objection to mothers somehow, Nellie," observed
Geisner.
"Oh, I have! It seems to me such a sin, such a shameful sin, to give life for the world that we have. I can understand it being a woman's highest joy to be a mother. I have seen poor miserable women looking down at their puny nursing babies with such unutterable bliss on their faces that I've nearly cried for pure joy and sympathy. But in my heart all the time I felt that this was weakness and folly; that what was bliss to the mother, stupefying her for a while to the hollowness and emptiness of her existence, was the beginning of a probable life of misery to the child that could end only with death. And I have vowed to myself that never should child of mine have cause to reproach me for selfishness that takes a guise which might well deceive those who have nothing but the animal instincts to give them joy in living."
"You will never have children?" asked Geisner.
"I will never marry," she answered. "There is little you can teach a girl who has worked in Sydney, and I know there are ideas growing all about which to me seem shameful and unwomanly, excepting that they spare the little ones. For me, I shall never marry. I will give my life to the movement, but I will give no other lives the pain of living."
"You will meet him some day, Nellie," said Connie.
"Then I will be strong if it breaks my heart." Ned often thought of this in after days. Just then he hardly realised how the girl's words affected him. He was so breathlessly interested. Never had he heard people talk like this before. He began to dimly understand how it touched the Labour movement.
"You will miss the best part of life, my dear," said Connie. "I say it even after what you have seen of that husband of mine."
"You are wrong, Nellie," said Geisner, slowly. "Above us all is a higher Law, forcing us on. To give up what is most precious for the sake of the world is good. To give up that which our instincts lead us to for fear of the world cannot but be bad. For my part, I hold that no door should be closed to woman, either by force of law or by force of conventionalism. But if she claims entrance to the Future, it seems to me that she should not close Life's gate against herself."
"I would close Life's gate altogether if I could," cried Nellie, passionately. "I would blot Life out. I would—oh, what would I not do? The things I see around me day after day almost drive me mad."
There was silence for a moment, broken then by Connie's soft laugh. "Nellie, my dear child," she observed, "you seem quite in earnest. I hope you won't start with us."
"Don't mind her, Nellie," said Josie, softly, speaking for the first time. "Connie laughs because if she didn't she would cry."
"I know that," said Nellie. "I don't mind her. Is there one of us who does not feel what a curse living is?"
Geisner's firm voice answered: "And is there one of us who does not know what a blessing living might be? Nellie, my girl, you are sad and sorrowful, as we all are at times, and do not feel yet God in all working itself out in unseen ways."
"God!" she answered, scornfully. "There is no God. How can there be?"
"I do not know. It is as one feels. I do not mean that petty god of creeds and religions, the feeble image that coarse hands have made from vague glimpses caught by those who were indeed inspired. I mean the total force, the imperishable breath, of the universe. And of that breath, my child, you and I and all things are part."
Stratton took his cigar from his mouth and quoted:
"'I am the breath of the lute, I am the mind of man, Gold's glitter, the light of the diamond and the sea-pearl's lustre wan. I am both good and evil, the deed and the deed's intent—Temptation, victim, sinner, crime, pardon and punishment.'"
"Yes," said Geisner; "that and more. Brahma and more than Brahma. What
Prince Buddha thought out too. What Jesus the Carpenter dimly recognised.
Not only Force, but Purpose, or what for lack of better terms we call
Purpose, in it all."
"And that Purpose; what is it?" Ned was surprised to hear his own voice uttering his thought.
"Who shall say? There are moments, a few moments, when one seems to feel what it is, moments when one stands face to face with the universal Life and realises wordlessly what it means." Geisner spoke with grave solemnity. The others, hardly breathing, understood how this man had thought these things out.
"When one is in anguish and sorrow unendurable. When one has seen one's soul stripped naked and laid bare, with all its black abysses and unnatural sins; the brutishness that is in each man's heart known and understood—the cowardice, the treachery, the villainy, the lust. When one knows oneself in others, and sinks into a mist of despair, hopeless and heart-wrung, then come the temptations, as the prophets call them, the miserable ambitions dressed as angels of light, the religions which have become more drugged pain-lullers, the desire to suppress thought altogether, to end life, to stupefy one's soul with bodily pain, with mental activity. And if," he added slowly, "if one's pain is for others more than for oneself, if in one's heart Humanity has lodged itself, then it may be that one shall feel and know. And from that time you never doubt God. You may doubt yourself but never that all things work together for good."
"I do not see it," cried Nellie.
"Hush!" said Connie. "Go on, Geisner."
"To me," the little man went on, as if talking rather to himself than to the others. "To me the Purpose of Life is self-consciousness, the total Purpose I mean. God seeking to know God. Eternal Force one immeasurable Thought. Humanity the developing consciousness of the little fragment of the universe within our ken. Art, the expression of that consciousness, the outward manifestation of the effort to solve the problem of Life. Genius, the power of expressing in some way or other what many thought but could not articulate. I do not mean to be dogmatic. Words fail us to define our meaning when we speak of these things. Any quibbler can twist the meaning of words, while only those who think the thought can understand. That is why one does not speak much of them. Perhaps we should speak of them more."
"It is a barren faith to me," said Nellie.
"Then I do not express it well," said Geisner. "But is it more barren-sounding than utter Negation? Besides, where do we differ really? All of us who think at all agree more or less. We use different terms, pursue different lines of thought, that is all. It is only the dullard, who mistakes the symbol for the idea, the letter for the spirit, the metaphor for the thought within, who is a bigot. The true thinker is an artist, the true artist is a thinker, for Art is the expression of thought in thing. The highest thought, as Connie rightly told us before you came, is Emotion."
"I recollect the Venus in the Louvre," interjected Harry. "When I saw it first it seemed to me most beautiful, perfect, the loveliest thing that ever sculptor put chisel to. But as I saw it more I forgot that it was beautiful or perfect. It grew on me till it lived. I went day after day to see it, and when I was glad it laughed at me, and when I was downhearted it was sad with me, and when I was angry it scowled, and when I dreamed of Love it had a kiss on its lips. Every mood of mine it changed with; every thought of mine it knew. Was not that Art, Nellie?"
"The artist in you," she answered.
"No. More than that. The artist in the sculptor, breathing into the stone a perfect sympathy with the heart of men. His genius grasped this, that beauty, perfect beauty, is the typifying not of one passion, one phase of human nature, but of the aggregation of all the moods which sway the human mind. There is a great thought in that. It is 'the healthy mind in the healthy body,' as the sculptor feels it. And 'the healthy mind in the healthy body' is one of the great thoughts of the past. It is a thought which is the priceless gift of Greek philosophy to the world. I hold it higher than that of the Sphinx, which Ford admires so."
"What does the Sphinx mean?" asked Ned.
"Much the same, differently expressed," answered Ford. "That Life with us is an intellectual head based on a brutish body, fecund and powerful; that Human Nature crouches on the ground and reads the stars; that man has a body and a mind, and that both must be cared for."
"They had a strange way of caring for both, your Egyptians," remarked
Nellie. "The people were all slaves and the rulers were all priests."
At this criticism, so naive and pithy and so like Nellie, there was a general laugh.
"At least the priests were wise and the slaves were cared for," retorted Ford, nothing abashed. "I recollect when I was a little fellow in England. My people were farm labourers, west of England labourers. We lived in a little stone cottage that had little diamond-paned windows. The kitchen floor was below the ground, and on wet days my mother used to make a little dam of rags at the door to keep the trickling water back. We lived on bread and potatoes and broad beans, and not too much of that. We got a little pig for half-a-crown, and killed it when it was grown to pay the rent. Don't think such things are only done in Ireland! We herded together like pigs ourselves. The women of the place often worked in the fields. The girls, too, sometimes. You know what that means where the people are like beasts, the spirit worn out of them. The cottages were built two together, and our neighbour's daughter, a girl of 18 or so, had two children. It was not thought anything. The little things played at home with our neighbour's own small children, and their grandmother called them hard names when they bothered her.
"My father was a bent-shouldered hopeless man, when I recollect him. He got six shillings a week then, with a jug of cider every day. When he stopped from the wet, and there was no work in the barns, his wages were stopped. So he worked in the wet very often, for it generally rains in England, you know. The wet came through our roof. Gives the natives such pretty pink skins, eh, Geisner?" and he laughed shortly. "My father got rheumatism, and used to keep us awake groaning at nights. He had been a good-looking young fellow, my old granny used to say. I never saw him good-looking. In the winter we always had poor relief. We should have starved if we hadn't. My father got up at four and came home after dark. My mother used to go weeding and gleaning. I went to scare crows when I was five years old. All the same, we were a family of paupers. Proud to be an Englishman, Geisner! Be an English pauper, and then try!"
"You'll never get to the priests, Ford, if you start an argument," interposed Mrs. Stratton.
"I'll get to them all right. Our cottage was down a narrow, muddy lane. On one side of the lane was a row of miserable stone hovels, just like ours. On the other was a great stone wall that seemed to me, then, to be about a hundred feet high. I suppose it was about twenty feet. You could just see the tops of trees the other side. Some had branches lopped short to prevent them coming over the wall. At the corner of the highway our lane ran to was a great iron gate, all about it towering trees, directly inside a mound of shrub-covered rockery that prevented anybody getting a peep further. The carriage drive took a turn round this rockery and disappeared. Once, when the gate was open and nobody about, I got a peep by sneaking round this rockery like a little thief. There was a beautiful lawn and clumps of flowers, and a summer house and a conservatory, and a big grey-fronted mansion. I thought heaven must be something like that. It made me radical."
"How do you mean?" asked Mrs. Stratton.
"Well, it knocked respect for constituted authority out of me. I didn't know enough to understand the wrong of one lazy idler having this splendid place while the people he lived on kennelled in hovels. But it struck me as so villainously selfish to build that wall, to prevent us outside from even looking at the beautiful lawn and flowers. I was only a little chap but I recollect wondering if it would hurt the place to let me look, and when I couldn't see that it would I began to hate the wall like poison. There we were, poor, ragged, hungry wretches, without anything beautiful in our lives, so miserable and hopeless that I didn't even know it wasn't the right thing to be a pauper, and that animal ran up a great wall in our faces so that we couldn't see the grass—curse him!" Ford had gradually worked himself into a white rage.
"He didn't know any better," said Geisner. "Was he the priest?"
"Yes, the rector, getting £900 a-year and this great house, and paying a skinny curate £60 for doing the work. A fat impostor, who drove about in a carriage, and came to tell the girl next door as she lay a-bed that she would go to hell for her sin and burn there for ever. I hated his wall and him too. Out in the fields I used to draw him on bits of slate. In the winter when there weren't any crows or any weeding I went to school. You see, unless you sent your children to the church school a little, and went to church regularly, you didn't get any beef or blanket at Christmas. I tell you English charity is a sweet thing. Well, I used to draw the parson at school, a fat, pompous, double chinned, pot-bellied animal, with thin side-whiskers, and a tall silk hat, and a big handful of a nose. I drew nothing else. I studied the question as it were and I got so that I could draw the brute in a hundred different ways. You can imagine they weren't complimentary, and one day the parson came to the school, and we stood up in class with slates to do sums, and on the back of my slate was one of the very strongest of my first attempts at cartooning. It was a hot one." And at the remembrance Ford laughed so contagiously that they all joined. "The parson happened to see it. By gum! It was worth everything to see him."
"What did he do?"
"What didn't he do? He delivered a lecture, how I was a worthy relative of an uncle of mine who'd been shipped out this way years before for snaring a rabbit, and so on. I got nearly skinned alive, and the Christmas beef and blanket wore stopped from our folks. And there another joke comes in. An older brother of mine, 14 years old, I was about 12, took to going to the Ranters' meetings instead of to church. My mother and father used to tie him up on Saturday nights and march him to church on Sunday like a young criminal going to gaol. They were afraid of losing the beef and blanket, you see. He sometimes ran out of church when they nodded or weren't looking, and the curate was always worrying them about him. It was the deadliest of all sins, you know, to go to the Ranters. Well, when the beef and blanket were stopped, without any chance of forgiveness, we all went to the Ranters."
"I've often wondered where you got your power from, Ford," remarked
Connie. "I see now."
"Yes, that great wall made me hate the great wall that bars the people from all beautiful things; that fat hypocrite made me hate all frauds. I can never forget the way we all swallowed those things as sacred. When I get going with a pencil I feel towards whatever it is just as I felt to the parson, and I try to make everybody feel the same. Yet would you believe it, I don't care much for cartooning. I want to paint."
"Why don't you?" asked Nellie.
"Well, there's money you know. Then it was sheer luck that made me a cartoonist and I can't expect the same run of luck always."
"Don't believe him, Nellie," said Connie. "He feels that he has a chance now to give all frauds such a hammering that he hesitates to give it up. You've paid the parson, Ford, full measure, pressed down and running over!"
"Not enough!" answered Ford. "Not enough! Not till the wall is down flat all the world over! Do you think Egypt would have lasted 20,000 years if her priests had been like my parson, and her slaves like my people?"
"I'd forgotten all about Egypt," said Nellie. "But I suppose her rulers had sense enough to give men enough to eat and enough to drink, high wages and constant employment, as M'Ilwraith used to say. Yes; it was wiser than the rulers of to-day are. You can rob for a long while if you only rob moderately. But the end comes some time to all wrong. It's coming faster with us, but it came in Egypt, too."
"Here is Arty, finished!" interrupted Connie, who every little while had looked through the door at the young man. She jumped up. "Come along in and see what it is this time."
They all went in, jostling and joking one another. Arty was standing up in the middle of the room looking at some much blotted slips of paper. He appeared to be very well satisfied, and broke into a broad smile as he looked up at them all. Geisner and Ned found themselves side by side near the piano, over the keys of which Geisner softly ran his fingers with loving touch. "You are in luck to-night," he remarked to Ned. "You know Arty's signature, of course. He writes as——," mentioning a well-known name.
"Of course I know. Is that him?" answered Ned, astonished. "Verses which bore that signature were as familiar to thousands of western bushmen as their own names. Who is Ford?" he added.
"Ford! Oh, Ford signs himself——." Geisner mentioned another signature.
"Is he the one who draws in the Scrutineer?" demanded Ned more astonished than ever.
"Yes; you know his work?"
"Know his work! Had not every man in Australia laughed with his pitiless cartoons at the dignified magnates of Society and the utter rottenness of the powers that be?"
"And what is Mr. Stratton?"
"A designer for a livelihood. An artist for love of Art. His wife is connected with the press. You wouldn't know her signature, but some of her work is very fine. George there is a journalist."
"But I thought the newspapers were against unions."
"Naturally they are. They are simply business enterprises, conducted in the ordinary commercial way for a profit, and therefore opposed to everything which threatens to interfere with profit-making. But the men and women who work on the press are very different. They are really wage-workers to begin with. Besides, they are often intelligent enough to sympathise thoroughly with the Labour movement in spite of the surroundings which tend to separate them from it. Certainly, the most popular exponents of Socialism are nearly all press writers."
"We are only just beginning to hear about these things in the bush," said
Ned. "What is Socialism?"
"That's a big question," answered Geisner. "Socialism is——"
He was interrupted. "Silence, everybody!" cried Mrs. Stratton. "Listen to
Arty's latest!"
CHAPTER VIII.
THE POET AND THE PRESSMAN.
"Silence, everybody!" commanded Mrs. Stratton. "Listen to Arty's latest!"
She had gone up to him as they all came in. "Is it good?" she asked, looking over his arm. For answer he held the slips down to her and changed them as she read rapidly, only pausing occasionally to ask him what a more than usually obscured word was. There was hardly a line as originally written. Some words had been altered three and four times. Whole lines had been struck out and fresh lines inserted. In some verses nothing was left of the original but the measure and the rhymes.
"No wonder you were worrying if you had all this on your mind," she remarked, as he finished, smiling at him. "Let me read it to them."
He nodded. So when the buzz of conversation had stopped she read his verses to the others, holding his arm in the middle of the room, her sweet voice conveying their spirit as well as their words. And Arty stood by her, jubilant, listening proudly and happily to the rhythm of his new-born lines, for all the world like a young mother showing her new-born babe.
THE VISION OF LABOUR.
There's a sound of lamentation 'mid the murmuring nocturne noises,
And an undertone of sadness, as from myriad human voices,
And the harmony of heaven and the music of the spheres,
And the ceaseless throb of Nature, and the flux and flow of years,
Are rudely punctuated with the drip of human tears
—As Time rolls on!
Yet high above the beat of surf, and Ocean's deep resounding,
And high above the tempest roar of wind on wave rebounding,
There's a burst of choral chanting, as of victors in a fight,
And a battle hymn of triumph wakes the echoes of the night,
And the shouts of heroes mingle with the shriekings of affright
—As Time rolls on!
There's a gleam amid the darkness, and there's sight amid the blindness,
And the glow of hope is kindled by the breath of human kindness,
And a phosphorescent glimmer gilds the spaces of the gloom,
Like the sea-lights in the midnight, or the ghost-lights of the tomb,
Or the livid lamps of madness in the charnel-house of doom
—As Time rolls on!
And amidst the weary wand'rers on the mountain crags belated
There's a hush of expectation, and the sobbings are abated,
For a word of hope is spoken by a prophet versed in pain,
Who tells of rugged pathways down to fields of golden grain,
Where the sun is ever shining, and the skies their blessings rain
—As Time rolls on!
Where the leafy chimes of gladness in the tree-tops aye are ringing,
Answering to the joyous chorus which the birds are ever singing;
Where the seas of yellow plenty toss with music in the wind;
Where the purple vines are laden, and the groves with fruit are lined;
Where all grief is but a mem'ry, and all pain is left behind
—As Time rolls on!
But it lies beyond a desert 'cross which hosts of Death are marching,
And a hot sirocco wanders under skies all red and parching,
Lined with skeletons of armies through the centuries fierce and acre
Bones of heroes and of sages marking Time's lapse year by year,
Unmoistened by the night-dews 'mid the solitudes of fear
—As Time rolls on!
* Kindly written by Mr. F. J. Broomfield for insertion here.
"Well done, Arty"! cried Ford. "I'd like to do a few 'thumbnails' for that."
"Let me see it, please! Why don't you say 'rushes' for 'wanders' in the last verse, Arty?" asked George, reaching out his hand for the slips.
"Go away!" exclaimed Mrs. Stratton, holding them out of reach. "Can't you wait two minutes before you begin your sub-editing tricks? Josie, keep him in order!"
"He's a disgrace," replied Josie. "Don't pay any heed to him, Arty!
They'll cut up your verses soon enough, and they're just lovely."
The others laughed, all talking at once, commending, criticising, comparing. Arty laughed and joked and quizzed, the liveliest of them all. Ned stared at him in astonishment. He seemed like somebody else. He discussed his own verses with a strange absence of egotism. Evidently he was used to standing fire.
"The metaphor in that third verse seems to me rather forced," said
Stratton finally. "And I think George is right. 'Rushes' does sound
better than 'wanders.' I like that 'rudely punctuated' line, but I think
I'd go right through it again if it was mine."
"I think I will, too," answered Arty. "There are half-a-dozen alterations
I want to make now. I'll touch it up to-morrow. It'll keep till then."
"That sort of stuff would keep for years if it wasn't for the Scrutineer," said Stratton. "Very few papers care to publish it nowadays."
"The Scrutineer is getting just like all the rest of them," commented George. "It's being run for money, only they make their pile as yet by playing to the gallery while the other papers play to the stalls and dress circle."
"It has done splendid work for the movement, just the same," said Ford. "Admit it's a business concern and that everybody growls at it, it's the only paper that dares knock things."
"It's a pity there isn't a good straight daily here," said Geisner. "That's the want all over the world. It seems impossible to get them, though."
"Why is it?" demanded Nellie. "It's the working people who buy the evening papers at least. Why shouldn't they buy straight papers sooner than these sheets of lies that are published?"
"I've seen it tried," answered Geisner, "but I never saw it done. The
London Star is going as crooked as the others I'm told."
"I don't see why the unions shouldn't start dailies," insisted Nellie. "I suppose it costs a great deal but they could find the money if they tried hard."
"They haven't been able to run weeklies yet," said George, authoritatively. "And they never will until they get a system, much less run dailies."
"Why?" asked Ned. "You see," he continued, "our fellows are always talking of getting a paper. They get so wild sometimes when they read what the papers say about the unions and know what lies most of it is that I've seen them tear the papers up and dance a war-dance on the pieces."
"It's along story to explain properly," said George. "Roughly it amounts to this that papers live on advertisements as well as on circulation and that advertisers are sharp business men who generally put the boycott on papers that talk straight. Then the cable matter, the telegraph matter, the news matter, is all procured by syndicates and companies and mutual arrangement between papers which cover the big cities between them and run on much the same lines, the solid capitalistic lines, you know. Then newspaper stock, when it pays, is valuable enough to make the holder a capitalist; when it doesn't pay he's still more under the thumb of the advertisers. The whole complex organisation of the press is against the movement and only those who're in it know how complex it is."
"Then there'll never be a Labour press, you think?"
"There will be a Labour press, I think," said George, turning Josie's hair round his fingers. "When the unions get a sound system it'll come."
"What do you mean by your sound system, George?" asked Geisner.
"Just this! That the unions themselves will publish their own papers, own their own plant, elect their own editors, paying for it all by levies or subscriptions. Then they can snap their fingers at advertisers and as every union man will get the union paper there'll be a circulation established at once. They can begin with monthlies and come down to weeklies. When they have learnt thoroughly the system, and when every colony has its weekly or weeklies, then they'll have a chance for dailies, not before."
"How would you get your daily?" enquired Geisner.
"Expand the weeklies into dailies simultaneously in every Australian capital," said George, waxing enthusiastic. "That would be a syndicate at once to co-operate on cablegrams and exchange intercolonial telegrams. Start with good machinery, get a subsidy of 6d. a month for a year and 3d. a month afterwards, if necessary, from the unions for every member, and then bring out a small-sized, neat, first-rate daily for a ha'penny, three-pence a week, and knock the penny evenings off their feet."
"A grand idea!" said Geisner, his eyes sparkling. "It sounds practical.
It would revolutionise politics."
"Who'd own the papers, though, after the unions had subsidised them?" asked Ned, a little suspiciously.
"Why, the unions, of course," said George. "Who else? The unions would find the machinery and subsidise the papers on to their feet, for you couldn't very well get every man to take a daily. And the unions would elect trustees to hold them and manage them and an editor to edit each one and would be able to dismiss editors or trustees either if it wasn't being run straight. There'd be no profits because every penny made would go to make the papers better, there being no advertising income or very little. And every day, all over the continent, there would be printing hundreds of thousands of copies, each one advancing and defending the Labour movement."
"It's a grand idea," said Geisner again, "but who'd man the papers, George. Could Labour papers afford to pay managers and editors what the big dailies do?"
"I don't know much about managers, but an editor who wouldn't give up a lot to push the Cause can't think much of it. Why, we're nothing but literary prostitutes," said George, energetically. "We just write now what we're told, selling our brains as women on the streets do their bodies, and some of us don't like it, some of the best too, as you know well, Geisner. My idea would be to pay a living salary, the same all round, to every man on the literary staff. That would be fair enough as an all round wage if it was low pay for editing and leader writing and fancy work. Many a good man would jump at it, to be free to write as he felt, and as for the rest of the staff by paying such a wage we'd get the tip-top pick of the ordinary men who do the pick-up work that generally isn't considered important but in my opinion is one of the main points of a newspaper."
"Would you take what you call a 'living salary' on such a paper?" asked
Connie.
"I'd take half if Josie—" He looked at her with tender confidence. The love-light was in her answering eyes. She nodded, proud of him.
"And they'd all publish my poetry?" asked Arty.
"Would they? They'd jump at it."
"Then when they come along, I'll write for a year for nothing."
"How about me?" asked Ford, "Where do I come in?"
"And me?" asked Connie.
"You can all come in," laughed George. "Geisner shall do the political and get his editor ten years for sedition. Stratton will supply the mild fatherly sociological leaders. Mrs. Stratton shall prove that there can't be any true Art so long as we don't put the police on to everything that is ugly and repulsive. Nellie, here, shall blossom out as the Joan of Arc of women's rights, with a pen for a sword. And Arty we'll keep chained upon the premises and feed him with peppercorns when we want something particularly hot. Ford can retire to painting and pour his whole supply of bile out in one cartoon a week that we'll publish as a Saturday's supplement. Hawkins shall be our own correspondent who'll give the gentle squatter completely away in weekly instalments. And Josie and I'll slash the stuffing out of your 'copy' if you go writing three columns when there's only room for one. We'll boil down on our papers. Every line will be essence of extract. Don't you see how it's done already?"
"We see it," said Nellie, stifling a yawn. "The next thing is to get the unions to see it."
"That's so," retorted George, "so I'll give you my idea to do what you can with."
"We must go," said Nellie, getting up from her chair. "It must be after one and I'm tired."
"It's ten minutes to two," said Ford, having pulled out his watch.
"Why don't you stay all night, Nellie," asked Connie. "We can put Ned up, if he doesn't mind a shake-down. Then we can make a night of it. Geisner is off again on Monday or Tuesday."
"Tuesday," said Geisner, who had gone to the book-shelf again.
"Then I'll come Monday evening," said Nellie, for his tone was an invitation. "I feel like a walk, and I don't feel like talking much."
"All right," said Connie, not pressing, with true tact. "Will you come on
Monday too, Ned?" she asked, moving to the door under the hangings with
Nellie. Josie slipped quickly out on to the verandah with George.
"I must be off on Monday," replied Ned, regretfully. "There's a shed starts the next week, and I said I'd be up there to see that it shore union. I'm very sorry, but I really can't wait."
"I'm so sorry, too. But it can't be helped. Some other time, Ned." And nodding to him Connie went out with Nellie.
"So we shan't see you again," said Stratton, lighting a cigar at the gas.
Ford had resumed his puffing at his black pipe and his seat on the table.
"Not soon at any rate," answered Ned. "I shall be in Western Queensland this time next week."
"The men are organising fast up that way, aren't they?" asked Stratton.
"They had to," said Ned. "What with the Chinese and the squatters doing as they liked and hating the sight of a white man, we'd all have been cleared out if we hadn't organised."
"Coloured labour has been the curse of Queensland all through," remarked
Ford.
"I think it has made Queensland as progressive as it is, too," remarked Geisner. "It was a common danger for all the working classes, and from what I hear has given them unity of feeling earlier than that has been acquired in the south."
"Some of the old-fashioned union ideas that they have in Sydney want knocking badly," remarked Arty, smoking cheerfully.
"They'll be knocked safely enough if they want knocking," said Geisner.
"There are failings in all organisation methods everywhere as well as in
Sydney. New Unionism is only the Old Unionism reformed up to date. It'll
need reforming itself as soon as it has done its work."
"Is the New Unionism really making its way in England, Geisner?" asked
Stratton.
"I think so. A very intelligent man is working with two or three others to organise the London dock laborers on the new lines. He told me he was confident of success but didn't seem to realise all it meant. If those men can be organised and held together for a rise in wages it'll be the greatest strike that the world has seen yet. It will make New Unionism."
"Do you think it possible?" asked Ford. "I know a little about the London dockers. They are the drift of the English labour world. When a man is hopeless he goes to look for work at the docks."
"There is a chance if the move is made big enough to attract attention and if everything is prepared beforehand. If money can be found to keep a hundred thousand penniless men out while public opinion is forming they can win, I think. Even British public opinion can't yet defend fourpence an hour for casual work."
"Men will never think much until they are organised in some form or other," said Stratton. "Such a big move in London would boom the organisation of unskilled men everywhere."
"More plots!" cried Connie, coming back, followed by Nellie, waterproofed and hatted.
"It's raining," she went on, to Ned, "so I'll give you Harry's umbrella and let Ford take his waterproof. You'll have a damp row, Nellie. I suppose you know you've got to go across in George's boat, Ned."
Ned didn't know, but just then George's "Ahoy!" sounded from outside.
"We mustn't keep him waiting in the wet," exclaimed Nellie. She shook hands with them all, kissing Mrs. Stratton affectionately. Ned felt as he shook hands all round that he was leaving old friends.
"Come again," said Stratton, warmly. "We shall always be glad to see you."
"Indeed we shall," urged Connie. "Don't wait to come with Nellie. Come and see us any time you're in Sydney. Day or night, come and see if we're in and wait here if we're not."
Geisner and Stratton put on their hats and went with them down the verandah stops to the little stone quay below. Josie was standing there, in the drizzle, wrapped in a cloak and holding a lantern. In a rowing skiff, alongside, was George; another lantern was set on one of the seats.
"Are you busy to-morrow afternoon?" asked Geisner of Ned, as Nellie was being handed in, after having kissed Josie.
"Not particularly," answered Ned.
"Then you might meet me in front of the picture gallery between one and two, and we can have a quiet chat."
"All aboard!" shouted George.
"I'll be there," answered Ned, shaking hands again with Geisner and Stratton and with Josie, noticing that that young lady had a very warm clinging hand.
"Good-bye! Good-bye! Good-bye!" From the three on shore.
"Good-bye! Good-bye! Good-bye!" From the three in the boat as George shoved off.
"Good-bye!" cried Connie's clear voice from the verandah. "Put up the umbrella, Ned!"
Ned obediently put up the umbrella she had lent him, overcoming his objections by pointing out that it would keep Nellie's hat from being spoiled. Then George's oars began to dip into the water, and they turned their backs to the pleasant home and faced out into the wind and wet.
The last sound that came to them was a long melodious cry that Josie sent across the water to George, a loving "Good-bye!" that plainly meant "Come back!"