The People of the Abyss Page #5

"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

								

and all the people were very respectable. But the others have driven
our kind out. Those in this street are the only ones left. It’s
shocking, sir!”

And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental
value of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down.

“You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the others
do. We need more room. The others, the foreigners and lower-class
people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only
get one. So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford. It
is shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this
neighbourhood was just as nice as it could be.”

I looked at her. Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English
working-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowly
engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers
that be are pouring eastward out of London Town. Bank, factory, hotel,
and office building must go up, and the city poor folk are a nomadic
breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and
degrading neighbourhood by neighbourhood, driving the better class of
workers before them to pioneer, on the rim of the city, or dragging
them down, if not in the first generation, surely in the second and
third.

It is only a question of months when Johnny Upright’s street must go.
He realises it himself.

“In a couple of years,” he says, “my lease expires. My landlord is one
of our kind. He has not put up the rent on any of his houses here, and
this has enabled us to stay. But any day he may sell, or any day he may
die, which is the same thing so far as we are concerned. The house is
bought by a money breeder, who builds a sweat shop on the patch of
ground at the rear where my grapevine is, adds to the house, and rents
it a room to a family. There you are, and Johnny Upright’s gone!”

And truly I saw Johnny Upright, and his good wife and fair daughters,
and frowzy slavey, like so many ghosts flitting eastward through the
gloom, the monster city roaring at their heels.

But Johnny Upright is not alone in his flitting. Far, far out, on the
fringe of the city, live the small business men, little managers, and
successful clerks. They dwell in cottages and semi-detached villas,
with bits of flower garden, and elbow room, and breathing space. They
inflate themselves with pride, and throw out their chests when they
contemplate the Abyss from which they have escaped, and they thank God
that they are not as other men. And lo! down upon them comes Johnny
Upright and the monster city at his heels. Tenements spring up like
magic, gardens are built upon, villas are divided and subdivided into
many dwellings, and the black night of London settles down in a greasy
pall.




CHAPTER IV.
A MAN AND THE ABYSS


“I say, can you let a lodging?”

These words I discharged carelessly over my shoulder at a stout and
elderly woman, of whose fare I was partaking in a greasy coffee-house
down near the Pool and not very far from Limehouse.

“Oh yus,” she answered shortly, my appearance possibly not
approximating the standard of affluence required by her house.

I said no more, consuming my rasher of bacon and pint of sickly tea in
silence. Nor did she take further interest in me till I came to pay my
reckoning (fourpence), when I pulled all of ten shillings out of my
pocket. The expected result was produced.

“Yus, sir,” she at once volunteered; “I ’ave nice lodgin’s you’d likely
tyke a fancy to. Back from a voyage, sir?”

“How much for a room?” I inquired, ignoring her curiosity.

She looked me up and down with frank surprise. “I don’t let rooms, not
to my reg’lar lodgers, much less casuals.”

“Then I’ll have to look along a bit,” I said, with marked
disappointment.

But the sight of my ten shillings had made her keen. “I can let you
have a nice bed in with two hother men,” she urged. “Good, respectable
men, an’ steady.”

“But I don’t want to sleep with two other men,” I objected.

“You don’t ’ave to. There’s three beds in the room, an’ hit’s not a
very small room.”

“How much?” I demanded.

“’Arf a crown a week, two an’ six, to a regular lodger. You’ll fancy
the men, I’m sure. One works in the ware’ouse, an’ ’e’s been with me
two years now. An’ the hother’s bin with me six—six years, sir, an’ two
months comin’ nex’ Saturday. ’E’s a scene-shifter,” she went on. “A
steady, respectable man, never missin’ a night’s work in the time ’e’s
bin with me. An’ ’e likes the ’ouse; ’e says as it’s the best ’e can do
in the w’y of lodgin’s. I board ’im, an’ the hother lodgers too.”

“I suppose he’s saving money right along,” I insinuated innocently.

“Bless you, no! Nor can ’e do as well helsewhere with ’is money.”

And I thought of my own spacious West, with room under its sky and
unlimited air for a thousand Londons; and here was this man, a steady
and reliable man, never missing a night’s work, frugal and honest,
lodging in one room with two other men, paying two dollars and a half
per month for it, and out of his experience adjudging it to be the best
he could do! And here was I, on the strength of the ten shillings in my
pocket, able to enter in with my rags and take up my bed with him. The
human soul is a lonely thing, but it must be very lonely sometimes when
there are three beds to a room, and casuals with ten shillings are
admitted.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Thirteen years, sir; an’ don’t you think you’ll fancy the lodgin’?”

The while she talked she was shuffling ponderously about the small
kitchen in which she cooked the food for her lodgers who were also
boarders. When I first entered, she had been hard at work, nor had she
let up once throughout the conversation. Undoubtedly she was a busy
woman. “Up at half-past five,” “to bed the last thing at night,”
“workin’ fit ter drop,” thirteen years of it, and for reward, grey
hairs, frowzy clothes, stooped shoulders, slatternly figure, unending
toil in a foul and noisome coffee-house that faced on an alley ten feet
between the walls, and a waterside environment that was ugly and
sickening, to say the least.

“You’ll be hin hagain to ’ave a look?” she questioned wistfully, as I
went out of the door.

And as I turned and looked at her, I realized to the full the deeper
truth underlying that very wise old maxim: “Virtue is its own reward.”

I went back to her. “Have you ever taken a vacation?” I asked.

“Vycytion!”

“A trip to the country for a couple of days, fresh air, a day off, you
know, a rest.”

“Lor’ lumme!” she laughed, for the first time stopping from her work.
“A vycytion, eh? for the likes o’ me? Just fancy, now!—Mind yer
feet!”—this last sharply, and to me, as I stumbled over the rotten
threshold.

Down near the West India Dock I came upon a young fellow staring

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