The People of the Abyss Page #10

"The People of the Abyss" by Jack London, published in 1903, is a work of investigative journalism in which London documents the extreme poverty and harsh living conditions in the East End of London during the early 20th century.

• Journals
• Non-Fiction

								

of the Jago.” While the buildings housed more people than before, it
was much healthier. But the dwellings were inhabited by the
better-class workmen and artisans. The slum people had simply drifted
on to crowd other slums or to form new slums.

“An’ now,” said the sweated one, the ’earty man who worked so fast as
to dazzle one’s eyes, “I’ll show you one of London’s lungs. This is
Spitalfields Garden.” And he mouthed the word “garden” with scorn.

The shadow of Christ’s Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and in
the shadow of Christ’s Church, at three o’clock in the afternoon, I saw
a sight I never wish to see again. There are no flowers in this garden,
which is smaller than my own rose garden at home. Grass only grows
here, and it is surrounded by a sharp-spiked iron fencing, as are all
the parks of London Town, so that homeless men and women may not come
in at night and sleep upon it.

As we entered the garden, an old woman, between fifty and sixty, passed
us, striding with sturdy intention if somewhat rickety action, with two
bulky bundles, covered with sacking, slung fore and aft upon her. She
was a woman tramp, a houseless soul, too independent to drag her
failing carcass through the workhouse door. Like the snail, she carried
her home with her. In the two sacking-covered bundles were her
household goods, her wardrobe, linen, and dear feminine possessions.

We went up the narrow gravelled walk. On the benches on either side
arrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of which
would have impelled Doré to more diabolical flights of fancy than he
ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of rags and filth, of all
manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness,
indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind
was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping
for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging
in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly of nine
months, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor
covering, nor with any one looking after it. Next half-a-dozen men,
sleeping bolt upright or leaning against one another in their sleep. In
one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother’s arms,
and the husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On
another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a
knife, and another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents.
Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a
man, his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the lap
of a woman, not more than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.

It was this sleeping that puzzled me. Why were nine out of ten of them
asleep or trying to sleep? But it was not till afterwards that I
learned. It is a law of the powers that be that the homeless shall not
sleep by night. On the pavement, by the portico of Christ’s Church,
where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a stately row, were
whole rows of men lying asleep or drowsing, and all too deep sunk in
torpor to rouse or be made curious by our intrusion.

“A lung of London,” I said; “nay, an abscess, a great putrescent sore.”

“Oh, why did you bring me here?” demanded the burning young socialist,
his delicate face white with sickness of soul and stomach sickness.

“Those women there,” said our guide, “will sell themselves for
thru’pence, or tu’pence, or a loaf of stale bread.”

He said it with a cheerful sneer.

But what more he might have said I do not know, for the sick man cried,
“For heaven’s sake let us get out of this.”




CHAPTER VII.
A WINNER OF THE VICTORIA CROSS


I have found that it is not easy to get into the casual ward of the
workhouse. I have made two attempts now, and I shall shortly make a
third. The first time I started out at seven o’clock in the evening
with four shillings in my pocket. Herein I committed two errors. In the
first place, the applicant for admission to the casual ward must be
destitute, and as he is subjected to a rigorous search, he must really
be destitute; and fourpence, much less four shillings, is sufficient
affluence to disqualify him. In the second place, I made the mistake of
tardiness. Seven o’clock in the evening is too late in the day for a
pauper to get a pauper’s bed.

For the benefit of gently nurtured and innocent folk, let me explain
what a ward is. It is a building where the homeless, bedless, penniless
man, if he be lucky, may casually rest his weary bones, and then work
like a navvy next day to pay for it.

My second attempt to break into the casual ward began more
auspiciously. I started in the middle of the afternoon, accompanied by
the burning young socialist and another friend, and all I had in my
pocket was thru’pence. They piloted me to the Whitechapel Workhouse, at
which I peered from around a friendly corner. It was a few minutes past
five in the afternoon but already a long and melancholy line was
formed, which strung out around the corner of the building and out of
sight.

It was a most woeful picture, men and women waiting in the cold grey
end of the day for a pauper’s shelter from the night, and I confess it
almost unnerved me. Like the boy before the dentist’s door, I suddenly
discovered a multitude of reasons for being elsewhere. Some hints of
the struggle going on within must have shown in my face, for one of my
companions said, “Don’t funk; you can do it.”

Of course I could do it, but I became aware that even thru’pence in my
pocket was too lordly a treasure for such a throng; and, in order that
all invidious distinctions might be removed, I emptied out the coppers.
Then I bade good-bye to my friends, and with my heart going pit-a-pat,
slouched down the street and took my place at the end of the line.
Woeful it looked, this line of poor folk tottering on the steep pitch
to death; how woeful it was I did not dream.

Next to me stood a short, stout man. Hale and hearty, though aged,
strong-featured, with the tough and leathery skin produced by long
years of sunbeat and weatherbeat, his was the unmistakable sea face and
eyes; and at once there came to me a bit of Kipling’s “Galley Slave”:—

“By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel;
By the welt the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal;
By eyes grown old with staring through the sun-wash on the brine,
I am paid in full for service . . . ”


How correct I was in my surmise, and how peculiarly appropriate the
verse was, you shall learn.

“I won’t stand it much longer, I won’t,” he was complaining to the man
on the other side of him. “I’ll smash a windy, a big ’un, an’ get run
in for fourteen days. Then I’ll have a good place to sleep, never fear,
an’ better grub than you get here. Though I’d miss my bit of
baccy”—this as an after-thought, and said regretfully and resignedly.

								Rate this book:5.0 / 1 vote