The picnic party had moved on while they talked, but a mult.i.tude of sitters and walkers were now everywhere, particularly as they climbed the slope to the level. There the Sunday afternoon meetings were in full swing.

On platforms of varying construction, mostly humble, the champions of mult.i.tudinous creeds and opinions were holding forth to audiences which did not always greet their utterances approvingly. They stood for a while near a vigorous iconoclast, who from the top of a kitchen chair laid down the Law of the Universe as revealed by one Clifford, overwhelming with contumely a Solitary opponent in the crowd who was foolish enough to attempt to raise an argument on the subject of "atoms." Near at hand, a wild-eyed religionary was trying to persuade a limited and drifting audience that a special dispensation had enabled him to foretell exactly the date of the Second Coming of Christ. Then came the Single Tax platform, a camp-stool with a board on it, wherefrom a slender lad, dark-eyed and good-looking, held forth, with a flow of language and a power of expression that was remarkable, upon the effectiveness of a land tax as a remedy for all social ills.

Ned had never seen such a ma.s.s of men with such variegated shades of thought a.s.sembled together before. There was a well-dressed bald-headed individual laying down the axioms of that very Socialism of which Geisner and he had been talking. There was an ascetic looking man just delivering a popular hymn, which he sang with the a.s.sistance of a few gathered round, as the conclusion of open-air church. There was the Anarchist he had seen at Paddy's Market, fervidly declaring that all government is wrong and that men are slaves and curs for enduring it and tyrants for taking part in it. There was the inevitable temperance orator, the rival touters for free trade and protection, and half-a-dozen others with an opinion to air. They harangued and shouted there amid the trees, on the gra.s.s, in the brilliant afternoon sunshine that already threw long shadows over the swaying, moving thousands.

It was a great crowd, a good many thousands altogether, men and women and children and lads. It was dressed in its Sunday best, in attire which fluctuated from bright tints of glaring newness to the dullness of well-brushed and obtrusive shabbiness. There were every-looking men you could think of and women and girls, young and old, pretty and plain and repulsive. But it was a working-people crowd. There was no room among it for the idlers. Probably it was not fashionable for them to be there.

And there was this about the crowd, which impressed Ned, everybody seemed dissatisfied, everybody was seeking for a new idea, for something fresh.

There was no confidence in the Old, no content with what existed, no common faith in what was to come. There was on many a face the same misery that he had seen in Paddy's Market. There was no happiness, no face free from care, excepting where lovers pa.s.sed arm-in-arm. There was the clash of ideas, the struggling of opinions, the blind leading the blind. He saw the socialistic orator contending with a dozen others. Who were the nostrum vendors? Which was the truth?

He turned round, agitated in thought, and his glance fell on Geisner, who was standing with bent head, his hands behind him, ugly, impa.s.sive.

Geisner looked up quickly: "So you are doubting already," he remarked.

"I am not doubting," answered Ned. "I'm only thinking."

"Well?"

"It is a good thought, that Socialism," answered Ned slowly, as they walked on. "There's nothing in it that doesn't seem fit for men to do.

It's a part with Nellie kissing that woman in the wet. What tries to make us care for each other and prevent harm being done to one another can't be very far wrong and what tries to break down the state of affairs that is must be a little right. I don't care, either, whether it's right or wrong. It feels right in my heart somehow and I'll stand by it if I'm the only man left in the world to talk up for it."

Geisner linked his arm in Ned's.

"Remember this when you are sorrowful," he said. "It is only through Pain that Good comes. It is only because the world suffers that Socialism is possible. It is only as we conquer our own weaknesses that we can serve the Cause."

They strolled on till they came to the terraced steps of the Gardens.

Before them stretched in all its wondrous glory the matchless panorama of grove and garden, hill-closed sea and villa'd sh.o.r.e, the blue sky and the declining sun tipping with gold and silver the dark ma.s.ses of an inland cloud.

"What is Life that we should covet it?" said Geisner, halting there.

"What is Death that we should fear it so? What has the world to offer that we should swerve to the right hand or the left from the path our innermost soul approves? In the whole world, there is no lovelier spot than this, no purer joy than to stand here and look. Yet, it seems to me, Paradise like this would be bought dearly by one single thought unworthy of oneself."

"We are here to-day," he went on, musingly. "To-morrow we are called dead. The next day men are here who never heard our names. The most famous will be forgotten even while Sydney Harbour seems unchanged. And Sydney Harbour is changing and pa.s.sing, and the continent is changing and pa.s.sing, and the world is changing and pa.s.sing, and the whole universe is changing and pa.s.sing.

"It is all change, universal change. Our religions, our civilisations, our ideas, our laws, change as do the nebulae and the shifting continents we build on. Yet through all changes a thread of continuity runs. It is all changing and no ending. Always Law and always, so far as we can see, what we call progression. A man is a fool who cares for his life. He is the true madman who wastes his years in vain and selfish ambition.

"Listen, Ned," he pursued, turning round. "There, ages ago, millions and millions of years ago, in the warm waters yonder, what we call Life on this earth began. Minute specks of Life appeared, born of the sunshine and the waters some say, coming in the fitness of Time from the All-Life others. And those specks of Life have changed and pa.s.sed, and come and gone, unending, reproducing after their kind in modes and ways that changed and pa.s.sed and still are as all things change and pa.s.s and are.

And from them you and I and all the forms of Life that breathe to-day have ascended. We struggled up, obedient to the Law around us and we still struggle. That is the Past, or part of it. What is the Future, as yet no man knows. We do more than know--we feel and dream, and struggle on to our dreaming. And Life itself to the dreamer is as nothing only the struggling on.

"And this has raised us, Ned, this has made us men and opened to us the Future, that we learned slowly and sadly to care for each other. From the mother instinct in us all good comes. This is the highest good as yet, that all men should live their life and lay down their life when need is for their fellows. With all our blindness we can see that. With all our weakness we can strive to reach nearer that ideal. It is but Just that we should live so for others since happiness is only possible where others live so for us."

He turned again and gazed intently across the sail-dotted harbour.

"There is one thing I would like to say." He spoke without turning. "Man without Woman is not complete. They two are but one being, complete and life-giving. Love when it comes is the keystone of this brief span of Life of ours. They who have loved have tasted truly of the best that Life can give to them. And this is the great wrong of civilisation to-day, that it takes Love from most and leaves in us only a feverish, degrading l.u.s.t. It is when we l.u.s.t that Woman drags us down to the level of that l.u.s.t and blackens our souls with the blackness of h.e.l.l. When we love Woman raises us to the level of Love and girds on us the armour that wards our own weakness from us.

"Love comes to few, I think. Society is all askew and, then, we have degraded women. So they are often well-nigh unfit for loving as men are often as unfit themselves. Physically unfit for motherhood, mentally unfit to cherish the monogamic idea that once was sacred with our people, s.e.xually unfit to rouse true s.e.x-pa.s.sion--such women are being bred by the million in crowded cities and by degenerate country life. They match well with the slaves who 'move on' at the bidding of a policeman, or with the knaves who only see in Woman the toy of a feeble l.u.s.t.

"There are two great reforms needed, Ned, two great reforms which must come if Humanity is to progress, and which must come, sooner or later, either to our race or to some other, because Humanity must progress. One reform is the Reorganisation of Industry. The other is the Recognition of Woman's Equality. These two are the practical steps by which we move up to the socialistic idea.

"If it ever comes to you to love and be loved by a true woman, Ned, let nothing stand between you and her. If you are weak and lose her you will have lost more than Life itself. If you are strong and win her you can never lose her again though the universe divided you and though Death itself came between you, and you will have lived indeed and found joy in living."

"Should one give up the Cause for a woman?" asked Ned.

Geisner turned round at last and looked him full in the face.

"l.u.s.t only," he answered, "and there is no shame to which Woman cannot drag Man. Love and there is nothing possible but what is manly and true."

As he spoke, along the terraced path below them came Nellie, advancing towards them with her free swinging walk and tall lissom figure, noticeable even at a distance among the Sunday promenaders.

"See?" said Geisner, smiling, laying his hand on Ned's arm. "This is Paradise and there comes Eve."

PART II. HE KNEW HIMSELF NAKED.

In yesterday's reach and to-morrow's, Out of sight though they lie of to-day, There have been and there yet shall be sorrows That smite not and bite not in play.

The life and the love thou despisest, These hurt us indeed and in vain, O wise among women, and, wisest, Our Lady of Pain.--SWINBURNE.

CHAPTER I.

THE SLAUGHTER OF AN INNOCENT.

Mrs. Hobb's baby was dying.

"It had clung to its little life so long, in the close Sydney streets, in the stuffy, stifling rooms which were its home; it had battled so bravely; it was being vanquished at last.

"The flame of its life had flickered from its birth, had shrunk to a bluish wreathing many a time, had never once leapt upward in a strong red blaze. Again and again it had lain at its mother's breast, half-dead; again and again upon its baby face Death had laid the tips of its pinching fingers; again and again it had struggled moaning from the verge of the grave and beaten Lack the grim Destroyer by the patient filling of its tiny lungs. It wanted so to live, all unconsciously. The instinct to exist bore it up and with more than Spartan courage stood for it time and again in the well-nigh carried breach. Now, it was over, the battling, the struggling. Death loitered by the way but the fight was done.

"The poor little baby! Poor unknown soldier! Poor unaided heroic life that was spent at last! There were none to help it, not one. In all the world, in all the universe, there was none to give it the air it craved, the food it needed, the living that its baby-soul faded for not having.

It had fought its fight alone. It lay dying now, unhelped and helpless, forsaken and betrayed."

So thought Nellie, sitting there beside it, her head thrown back, over her eyes her hands clasped, down her cheeks the tears of pa.s.sionate pity streaming.

"What had its mother done for it? The best she could, indeed, but what was that? The worst she could when she gave it life, when she bore it to choke and struggle and drown in the fetid stream that sweeps the children of the poor from infancy to age; the life she gave it only a flickering, half-lighted life; the blood she gave it thin with her own weariness and vitiate from its drunken sire; the form she gave it soft-boned and angle-headed, more like overgrown embryo than child of the boasted Australian land. Even the milk it drew from her unwieldy b.r.e.a.s.t.s was tainted with city smoke and impure food and unhealthy housing. Its playground was the cramped kitchen floor and the kerb and the gutter. Its food for a year had been the food that feeds alike the old and the young who are poor. All around conspired against it, yet for two years and more it had clung to its life and lived, as if defying Fate, as if the impulse that throbbed in it from the Past laughed at conditions and would have it grow to manhood in spite of all. In the strength of that impulse, do not millions grow so? But millions, like this little one, are crushed and overborne.

"It had no chance but the chance that the feeble spark in it gave it. It had no chance, even with that, to do more than just struggle through.

None came to scatter wide the prison walls of the slum it lived in and give it air. None came to lift the burden of woe that pressed on all around it and open to it laughter and joy. None came to stay the robbery of the poor and to give to this brave little baby fresh milk and strengthening food. In darkness and despair it was born; in darkness and despair it lived; in darkness and despair it died. To it Death was more merciful than Life. Yet it was a crime crying for vengeance that we should have let it waste away and die so."

So thought Nellie, weeping there beside it, all the woman in her aching and yearning for this poor sickly little one.