The People of the Abyss Page #12

"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

								

Poplar, or the streets and night. Both men were anxious for a bed, for
they were “about gone,” as they phrased it. The Carter, fifty-eight
years of age, had spent the last three nights without shelter or sleep,
while the Carpenter, sixty-five years of age, had been out five nights.

But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds and
airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is
to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London’s
streets! Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come and
gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver till you were
ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would
marvel that you could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon a
bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would
rouse you and gruffly order you to “move on.” You may rest upon the
bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on
you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets.
Should you, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley or dark
passageway and lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out
just the same. It is his business to rout you out. It is a law of the
powers that be that you shall be routed out.

But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home to
refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your
adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would grow into a mighty
story. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a
Homer.

Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with me.
And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in London
Town this night. Please don’t remember it as you go to bed; if you are
as soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as usual. But for
old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor
blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in
mad search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them
again, and to do this five nights and days—O dear, soft people, full of
meat and blood, how can you ever understand?

I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter. Mile
End Road is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East London, and
there were tens of thousands of people abroad on it. I tell you this so
that you may fully appreciate what I shall describe in the next
paragraph. As I say, we walked along, and when they grew bitter and
cursed the land, I cursed with them, cursed as an American waif would
curse, stranded in a strange and terrible land. And, as I tried to lead
them to believe, and succeeded in making them believe, they took me for
a “seafaring man,” who had spent his money in riotous living, lost his
clothes (no unusual occurrence with seafaring men ashore), and was
temporarily broke while looking for a ship. This accounted for my
ignorance of English ways in general and casual wards in particular,
and my curiosity concerning the same.

The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at which we walked (he told me
that he had eaten nothing that day), but the Carpenter, lean and
hungry, his grey and ragged overcoat flapping mournfully in the breeze,
swung on in a long and tireless stride which reminded me strongly of
the plains wolf or coyote. Both kept their eyes upon the pavement as
they walked and talked, and every now and then one or the other would
stoop and pick something up, never missing the stride the while. I
thought it was cigar and cigarette stumps they were collecting, and for
some time took no notice. Then I did notice.

From the slimy, spittle-drenched, sidewalk, they were picking up bits
of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and, they were eating
them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for
the kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of
peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be
apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and
chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven
o’clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the
heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world
has ever seen.

These two men talked. They were not fools, they were merely old. And,
naturally, their guts a-reek with pavement offal, they talked of bloody
revolution. They talked as anarchists, fanatics, and madmen would talk.
And who shall blame them? In spite of my three good meals that day, and
the snug bed I could occupy if I wished, and my social philosophy, and
my evolutionary belief in the slow development and metamorphosis of
things—in spite of all this, I say, I felt impelled to talk rot with
them or hold my tongue. Poor fools! Not of their sort are revolutions
bred. And when they are dead and dust, which will be shortly, other
fools will talk bloody revolution as they gather offal from the
spittle-drenched sidewalk along Mile End Road to Poplar Workhouse.

Being a foreigner, and a young man, the Carter and the Carpenter
explained things to me and advised me. Their advice, by the way, was
brief, and to the point; it was to get out of the country. “As fast as
God’ll let me,” I assured them; “I’ll hit only the high places, till
you won’t be able to see my trail for smoke.” They felt the force of my
figures, rather than understood them, and they nodded their heads
approvingly.

“Actually make a man a criminal against ’is will,” said the Carpenter.
“’Ere I am, old, younger men takin’ my place, my clothes gettin’
shabbier an’ shabbier, an’ makin’ it ’arder every day to get a job. I
go to the casual ward for a bed. Must be there by two or three in the
afternoon or I won’t get in. You saw what happened to-day. What chance
does that give me to look for work? S’pose I do get into the casual
ward? Keep me in all day to-morrow, let me out mornin’ o’ next day.
What then? The law sez I can’t get in another casual ward that night
less’n ten miles distant. Have to hurry an’ walk to be there in time
that day. What chance does that give me to look for a job? S’pose I
don’t walk. S’pose I look for a job? In no time there’s night come, an’
no bed. No sleep all night, nothin’ to eat, what shape am I in in the
mornin’ to look for work? Got to make up my sleep in the park somehow”
(the vision of Christ’s Church, Spitalfield, was strong on me) “an’ get
something to eat. An’ there I am! Old, down, an’ no chance to get up.”

“Used to be a toll-gate ’ere,” said the Carter. “Many’s the time I’ve
paid my toll ’ere in my cartin’ days.”

“I’ve ’ad three ’a’penny rolls in two days,” the Carpenter announced,
after a long pause in the conversation. “Two of them I ate yesterday,
an’ the third to-day,” he concluded, after another long pause.

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