The People of the Abyss Page #3

"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

								

fists that I was able to get my feet into them at all. Then, with a few
shillings, a knife, a handkerchief, and some brown papers and flake
tobacco stowed away in my pockets, I thumped down the stairs and said
good-bye to my foreboding friends. As I passed out of the door, the
“help,” a comely middle-aged woman, could not conquer a grin that
twisted her lips and separated them till the throat, out of involuntary
sympathy, made the uncouth animal noises we are wont to designate as
“laughter.”

No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the
difference in status effected by my clothes. All servility vanished
from the demeanour of the common people with whom I came in contact.
Presto! in the twinkling of an eye, so to say, I had become one of
them. My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and
advertisement of my class, which was their class. It made me of like
kind, and in place of the fawning and too respectful attention I had
hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship. The man in
corduroy and dirty neckerchief no longer addressed me as “sir” or
“governor.” It was “mate” now—and a fine and hearty word, with a tingle
to it, and a warmth and gladness, which the other term does not
possess. Governor! It smacks of mastery, and power, and high
authority—the tribute of the man who is under to the man on top,
delivered in the hope that he will let up a bit and ease his weight,
which is another way of saying that it is an appeal for alms.

This brings me to a delight I experienced in my rags and tatters which
is denied the average American abroad. The European traveller from the
States, who is not a Croesus, speedily finds himself reduced to a
chronic state of self-conscious sordidness by the hordes of cringing
robbers who clutter his steps from dawn till dark, and deplete his
pocket-book in a way that puts compound interest to the blush.

In my rags and tatters I escaped the pestilence of tipping, and
encountered men on a basis of equality. Nay, before the day was out I
turned the tables, and said, most gratefully, “Thank you, sir,” to a
gentleman whose horse I held, and who dropped a penny into my eager
palm.

Other changes I discovered were wrought in my condition by my new garb.
In crossing crowded thoroughfares I found I had to be, if anything,
more lively in avoiding vehicles, and it was strikingly impressed upon
me that my life had cheapened in direct ratio with my clothes. When
before I inquired the way of a policeman, I was usually asked, “Bus or
’ansom, sir?” But now the query became, “Walk or ride?” Also, at the
railway stations, a third-class ticket was now shoved out to me as a
matter of course.

But there was compensation for it all. For the first time I met the
English lower classes face to face, and knew them for what they were.
When loungers and workmen, at street corners and in public-houses,
talked with me, they talked as one man to another, and they talked as
natural men should talk, without the least idea of getting anything out
of me for what they talked or the way they talked.

And when at last I made into the East End, I was gratified to find that
the fear of the crowd no longer haunted me. I had become a part of it.
The vast and malodorous sea had welled up and over me, or I had slipped
gently into it, and there was nothing fearsome about it—with the one
exception of the stoker’s singlet.




CHAPTER II.
JOHNNY UPRIGHT


I shall not give you the address of Johnny Upright. Let it suffice that
he lives in the most respectable street in the East End—a street that
would be considered very mean in America, but a veritable oasis in the
desert of East London. It is surrounded on every side by close-packed
squalor and streets jammed by a young and vile and dirty generation;
but its own pavements are comparatively bare of the children who have
no other place to play, while it has an air of desertion, so few are
the people that come and go.

Each house in this street, as in all the streets, is shoulder to
shoulder with its neighbours. To each house there is but one entrance,
the front door; and each house is about eighteen feet wide, with a bit
of a brick-walled yard behind, where, when it is not raining, one may
look at a slate-coloured sky. But it must be understood that this is
East End opulence we are now considering. Some of the people in this
street are even so well-to-do as to keep a “slavey.” Johnny Upright
keeps one, as I well know, she being my first acquaintance in this
particular portion of the world.

To Johnny Upright’s house I came, and to the door came the “slavey.”
Now, mark you, her position in life was pitiable and contemptible, but
it was with pity and contempt that she looked at me. She evinced a
plain desire that our conversation should be short. It was Sunday, and
Johnny Upright was not at home, and that was all there was to it. But I
lingered, discussing whether or not it was all there was to it, till
Mrs. Johnny Upright was attracted to the door, where she scolded the
girl for not having closed it before turning her attention to me.

No, Mr. Johnny Upright was not at home, and further, he saw nobody on
Sunday. It is too bad, said I. Was I looking for work? No, quite the
contrary; in fact, I had come to see Johnny Upright on business which
might be profitable to him.

A change came over the face of things at once. The gentleman in
question was at church, but would be home in an hour or thereabouts,
when no doubt he could be seen.

Would I kindly step in?—no, the lady did not ask me, though I fished
for an invitation by stating that I would go down to the corner and
wait in a public-house. And down to the corner I went, but, it being
church time, the “pub” was closed. A miserable drizzle was falling,
and, in lieu of better, I took a seat on a neighbourly doorstep and
waited.

And here to the doorstep came the “slavey,” very frowzy and very
perplexed, to tell me that the missus would let me come back and wait
in the kitchen.

“So many people come ’ere lookin’ for work,” Mrs. Johnny Upright
apologetically explained. “So I ’ope you won’t feel bad the way I
spoke.”

“Not at all, not at all,” I replied in my grandest manner, for the
nonce investing my rags with dignity. “I quite understand, I assure
you. I suppose people looking for work almost worry you to death?”

“That they do,” she answered, with an eloquent and expressive glance;
and thereupon ushered me into, not the kitchen, but the dining room—a
favour, I took it, in recompense for my grand manner.

This dining-room, on the same floor as the kitchen, was about four feet
below the level of the ground, and so dark (it was midday) that I had
to wait a space for my eyes to adjust themselves to the gloom. Dirty
light filtered in through a window, the top of which was on a level
with a sidewalk, and in this light I found that I was able to read

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