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- Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
A profound and moving piece of investigative journalism, Jack London's study of the London underworld remains, a century after it was written, a timely tale of poverty and injustice.In 1902, Jack London purchased some second-hand clothes, rented a room in the East End, and set out to discover how the London poor lived. His research makes shocking reading. Moving through the slums as one of the poor; eating, drinking and socialising with the underclass; queuing to get into a doss-house, London was scandalised and brutalised by the experience of living rough in Britain's capital. His clear-eyed reflections on the iniquities of class are a shaming testament to the persistence of social inequality in modern Britain.
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The People of the Abyss
Jack London
Contents
Foreword
Even before Jack London was born he was all over the newspapers. His pregnant mother, Flora, ran out of a San Francisco boarding house and shot herself in the forehead.
‘A Discarded Wife. Driven from House for Refusing to Destroy her Unborn Infant – A Chapter of Heartlessness and Domestic Misery,’ raged the local headline. The scoundrel – it’s important to pay attention here: as with all stories about Jack and his mother, bafflement rapidly sets in – was said to be Professor W.H. Chaney, an itinerant astrologer, who insisted he couldn’t be Jack’s father because he was impotent due to too much ‘brain work’.
But the bullet had missed; the laudanum Flora had swallowed the night before hadn’t been enough. After the blood was wiped off, she rushed away to meet her next man, a carpenter called John London. It was from him that Jack took his stability and his name.
Jack London was born, in 1876, into poverty and fibs. On the advice of spirits conjured up at parlour seances, Flora invested the carpenter’s earnings in lottery tickets, so had to make stern economies elsewhere: when Jack and his half-sister Eliza were close to dying from diphtheria, Eliza woke up briefly from her coma to overhear their mother wondering if it would be cheaper to squeeze both children into one coffin.
Much of Jack’s life (it doesn’t seem right to call such an unsettled character by his second name) and most of his writings are characterised by a struggle for escape – from cold, from predators, from social oppression, and from Mother. Aged thirteen, he scratched together two dollars and bought a small boat with leaks, ramming and battering about the docks until he learned to sail. By fourteen, he’d obtained a second-hand skiff. At fifteen, he became a pirate. For $300, sponged off a friend, he bought a sloop called the Razzle Dazzle, stole the girlfriend of the man who sold it to him, and spent the nights raiding privately owned oyster beds alongside thieving desperadoes with names like Spider and Whiskey Bob. Reckless, expert and mostly blind drunk, Jack was the hero of his dreams. He had a bestial ability to endure hard work and a suicidal obsession with romance. Frenchie Frank – the fellow who’d sold him the sloop – tried to run him down with a bigger boat in a jealous rage. Jack saw him off: steering Razzle Dazzle with his feet, he whipped out a shotgun and kept it trained on Frenchie until the sloop had sliced past the bows and Jack was away, laughing among the waves. When police raided, he charmed them with his choicest stolen oysters, doused in pepper sauce. On a third occasion – though many biographers throw up their hands in disbelief at about this point – he boarded a boat full of knife-wielding Chinese shrimp-raiders, rounded up eighteen of the most murderous, and marched them off to hokey with a gun that was really just two fingers in his pocket.
Jack’s favourite boyhood book, and the one that first made him want to become a writer, was Signa, by Ouida: the story of the illegitimate child of a peasant girl and a footloose artist, who fights his way out of penury to become one of Italy’s most famous composers. There’s no equivalent to Ouida writing now, but she belongs in the same bracket – though Ouida is clever, funnier and much more overblown – as Jackie Collins.
After oysters, what boyhood splendour didn’t Jack enjoy? He spent eight months on a schooner, killing seals off Japan, boozing in Yokohama bars, diving into the harbour to escape the Port Authorities. He dodged across America as a hobo, jumping trains; tried to kill himself by floating out to sea on his back – and turned seventeen.
Jack London’s famous Alaskan novels and short stories are driven by the spirit of this boy. Brutish, sentimental, and featuring superhuman resistance to low temperatures, they made gentlemen cuss and ladies go pink. Yet critics insist it was these frostbitten man vs. dog/ship/big mountain tumbles around the Alaskan waste that slapped nineteenth-century American literature into shape. ‘When Son of the Wolf was released in the spring of 1900, it met with instantaneous critical success. The book was like a time-bomb blowing open the new century,’ insists his adoring biographer Irvine Stone.
The scientific attitude toward evolution and the strife among species, the amoral values of people who lived without fear of being excommunicated by the parson, the bold approach to life’s cruelty and ugliness and grimness as well as the beautiful and the good… all tolled the death knell of the anaemic, the sentimental, the evasive, the hypocritical, that marked nineteenth-century literature.
It sold next to nothing.
I read White Fang when I was a child and it put me off Jack’s books almost for good. It begins with a thrilling scene: a wolf pack hunting down a pair of prospectors, plucking away the dogs of the sled team day by day. But it ends in gush. Captured, beaten, starved, throat ripped in dog fight, White Fang gazes adoringly at his final, kind human owner and thinks of him as a ‘love-master’.
The People of the Abyss is an entirely different sort of book – at first sight. It’s an account of Jack’s brief experiences in the slums of the East End of London, 7,000 miles away from the land of toothy dogs. The American Press Association had commissioned him in 1902 to go to South Africa to report the aftermath of the Boer War, then abruptly cancelled the plan when his boat reached England. Needing something to do, Jack jumped in a hansom cab and demanded the cabbie inject him into the slums of London among the ‘starved and depraved population’.
Unlike George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London, Jack had no irritating pretence that he was experiencing what it was like to be inescapably destitute: he’d come as an observer, because he was strong enough and fluent enough – in short, sufficiently unlike the people who lived there without choice – to get away with it. After he’d put on his disguise, he scuttled off to rent a secret hideaway for those times when the stench and discomfort of the streets got too much, which turned out usually to be after about three days. As an objective, trustworthy analysis, Abyss won’t do at all. On every page, Jack bursts his shirt buttons with fury and astonishment.
At the start of the twentieth century, 939 out of 1,000 people in London died in poverty; one in every four in a workhouse, infirmary or lunatic asylum; fifty-five per cent of East End children never made it to five. Many families could not afford to bury the baby at once: the corpse was stored in the bed during the day, on the kitchen table at night and, if neither of those was free, on the pantry shelf.
‘No other book of mine,’ he wrote to his friend Upton Sinclair, ‘took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor.’
Until a year ago, I’d never heard of Abyss. It sold in America, but the English, not surprisingly, didn’t take to it. I hadn’t heard either of The Iron Heel, Jack’s futurist novel about the collapse of the plutocracy, or his essays Revolution, Tramp and Why I am a Socialist. Gentlemen didn’t just cuss when Jack’s socialist books appeared: they leapt for their cutlasses. The America of 1900 was as frightened of left-wing language as it is today, and Jack wanted class war: America didn’t even believe it had classes. Ladies swooned – and not entirely from horror. He was a handsome man, built like a moose. One wrote, giving her minister as a character reference, and begged him to impregnate her.
How did the schmaltzy dog-yarner turn into this firebrand? It wasn’t the East End that did it. Jack’s conversion to socialism had taken place almost a decade earlier, when America suffered a financial crash, banks collapsed, tens of thousands were on the streets, and wages were cut by forty to sixty per cent. Jack, then eighteen, had got a job shovelling coal at a power plant for eight cents an hour, thirteen hours a day. Several weeks in, he discovered he’d taken over employment for two people, was slaving for half the rate of a single person, and that one of the men he’d ousted had committed suicide because he couldn’t find any other work. Jack walked out, became a tramp, hitched, rode the hobo trains some more, stole food from homeless people, and began to think seriously about socialist revolution. In New York, in a park outside City Hall, he was drinking a glass of milk, when a policeman thwacked him across the head with a truncheon. At Niagara Falls he was arrested for vagrancy for sleeping in a field, and sentenced to thirty days’ hard labour. It was what he saw inside that jail – the quiet murders, the beatings, the screams as one tribe of men, with truncheons, battered at another locked in cells – that turned him completely. When he got back to California, he launched himself on a Herculean programme of self-education in politics, science, history and activism. When he rushed off for adventure again, this time to join the Alaskan gold rush, he saw his learning applied in practice, even if only to dogs and prospectors: the power of evolution, the ruthlessness of the struggle to survive, the importance of unity and the desolation of the weak.
It’s only at first sight that Abyss and the Alaskan novels appear so different. Jack’s aim, here as in his pot-boilers, was to combine yarn and socialist propoganda. And there are moments in Abyss when you feel Jack’s heart is more in the phrasing than in reformation – the fangs of the wolf have been replaced by the teeth of the social machine. He wanted to kick politicians and put fire in the belly of reformers. But he wanted to sell copies too – not for money, but not quite for altruism either. To help the people, yes; to provoke change, certainly! But also to raise the combative image of Jack.
After he came back from London, Jack told his wife he wanted to move with her and their daughters to a ranch in Southern California. Then, the same afternoon, he changed his mind after spending a few hours chatting to a woman who was dangling about in a hammock nearby. With the cruelty typical of men who puff their excellent principles and fine sense of honour, he sauntered back to his wife, dumped her without explanation, and walked out on his children. He was not a man without ignobleness. Nor were his politics always brotherly: he was a eugenic socialist. There was fascist breast-beating mingled with his love of Man. Socialism was for white folks: ‘It is devised so as to give more strength to these certain kindred favoured races so that they may survive and inherit the earth to the extinction of the lesser, weaker races.’
But it was this disdainful assumption of superiority that also gave Jack the courage to dash into the East End on the week of the coronation of King Edward VII, even as the bells of Westminster pealed with delight – and to dash out again two months later clutching this horrific, mesmerising exposé of civic savagery and human waste.
– Alexander Masters, 2009
The People of the Abyss
The chief priests and rulers cry:
‘O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built;
Behold thine images how they stand
Sovereign and sole through all our land.
‘Our task is hard – with sword and flame,
To hold thine earth forever the same,
And with sharp crooks of steel to keep,
Still as thou leftest them, thy sheep.’
Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl whose fingers thin
Crushed from her faintly want and sin.
These set he in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment hem
For fear of defilement, ‘Lo, here,’ said he,
‘The images ye have made of me.’
– James Russell Lowell, A Parable
Preface
The experiences related in this volume fell to me in the summer of 1902. I went down into the underworld of London with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer. I was open to be convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who had seen and gone before. Further, I took with me certain simple criteria with which to measure the life of the underworld. That which made for more life, for physical and spiritual health, was good; that which made for less life, which hurt, and dwarfed, and distorted life, was bad.
It will be readily apparent to the reader that I saw much that was bad. Yet it must not be forgotten that the time of which I write was considered ‘good times’ in England. The starvation and lack of shelter I encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery which is never wiped out, even in the periods of greatest prosperity.
Following the summer in question came a hard winter. To such an extent did the suffering and positive starvation increase that society was unable to cope with it. Great numbers of the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time, and daily marched through the streets of London crying for bread. Mr Justin McCarthy, writing in the month of January 1903, to the New York Independent, briefly epitomizes the situation as follows:
The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving crowds who are craving every day and night at their doors for food and shelter. All the charitable institutions have exhausted their means in trying to raise supplies of food for the famishing residents of the garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys. The quarters of the Salvation Army in various parts of London are nightly besieged by hosts of the unemployed and the hungry for whom neither shelter nor the means of sustenance can be provided.
It has been urged that the criticism I have passed on things as they are in England is too pessimistic. I must say, in extenuation, that of optimists I am the most optimistic. But I measure manhood less by political aggregations than by individuals. Society grows, while political machines rack to pieces and become ‘scrap’. For the English, so far as manhood and womanhood and health and happiness go, I see a broad and smiling future. But for a great deal of the political machinery, which at present mismanages for them, I see nothing else than the scrap heap.
– Jack London, Piedmont, California
The Descent
‘But you can’t do it, you know,’ friends said, to whom I applied for assistance in the matter of sinking myself down into the East End of London. ‘You had better see the police for a guide,’ they added, on second thought, painfully endeavoring to adjust themselves to the psychological processes of a madman who had come to them with better credentials than brains.
‘But I don’t want to see the police,’ I protested. ‘What I wish to do is to go down into the East End and see things for myself. I wish to know how those people are living there, and why they are living there, and what they are living for. In short, I am going to live there myself.’
‘You don’t want to live down there!’ everybody said, with disapprobation writ large upon their faces. ‘Why, it is said there are places where a man’s life isn’t worth tu’pence.’
‘The very places I wish to see,’ I broke in.
‘But you can’t, you know,’ was the unfailing rejoinder.
‘Which is not what I came to see you about,’ I answered brusquely, somewhat nettled by their incomprehension. ‘I am a stranger here, and I want you to tell me what you know of the East End, in order that I may have something to start on.’
‘But we know nothing of the East End. It is over there, somewhere.’ And they waved their hands vaguely in the direction where the sun on rare occasions may be seen to rise.
‘Then I shall go to Cook’s,’ I announced.
‘Oh yes,’ they said, with relief. ‘Cook’s will be sure to know.’
But O Cook, O Thomas Cook & Son, path-finders and trail-clearers, living signposts to all the world, and bestowers of first aid to bewildered travellers – unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Tibet, but to the East End of London, barely a stone’s throw distant from Ludgate Circus, you know not the way!
‘You can’t do it, you know,’ said the human emporium of routes and fares at Cook’s Cheapside branch. ‘It is so – ahem – so unusual.’
‘Consult the police,’ he concluded authoritatively, when I persisted. ‘We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place at all.’
‘Never mind that,’ I interposed, to save myself from being swept out of the office by his flood of negations. ‘Here’s something you can do for me. I wish you to understand in advance what I intend doing, so that in case of trouble you may be able to identify me.’
‘Ah, I see! Should you be murdered, we would be in position to identify the corpse.’
He said it so cheerfully and cold-bloodedly that on the instant I saw my stark and mutilated cadaver stretched upon a slab where cool waters trickle ceaselessly, and him I saw bending over and sadly and patiently identifying it as the body of the insane American who would see the East End.
‘No, no,’ I answered; ‘merely to identify me in case I get into a scrape with the “bobbies”.’ This last I said with a thrill; truly, I was gripping hold of the vernacular.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is a matter for the consideration of the Chief Office.’
‘It is so unprecedented, you know,’ he added apologetically.
The man at the Chief Office hemmed and hawed. ‘We make it a rule,’ he explained, ‘to give no information concerning our clients.’
‘But in this case,’ I urged, ‘it is the client who requests you to give the information concerning himself.’
Again he hemmed and hawed.
‘Of course,’ I hastily anticipated, ‘I know it is unprecedented, but –’
‘As I was about to remark,’ he went on steadily, ‘it is unprecedented, and I don’t think we can do anything for you.’
However, I departed with the address of a detective who lived in the East End, and took my way to the American consul-general. And here, at last, I found a man with whom I could ‘do business’. There was no hemming and hawing, no lifted brows, open incredulity, or blank amazement. In one minute I explained myself and my project, which he accepted as a matter of course. In the second minute he asked my age, height, and weight, and looked me over. And in the third minute, as we shook hands at parting, he said, ‘All right, Jack. I’ll remember you and keep track.’
I breathed a sigh of relief. Having built my ships behind me, I was now free to plunge into that human wilderness of which nobody seemed to know anything. But at once I encountered a new difficulty in the shape of my cabby, a grey-whiskered and eminently decorous personage who had imperturbably driven me for several hours about the ‘City’.
‘Drive me down to the East End,’ I ordered, taking my seat.
‘Where, sir?’ he demanded with frank surprise.
‘To the East End, anywhere. Go on.’
The hansom pursued an aimless way for several minutes, then came to a puzzled stop. The aperture above my head was uncovered, and the cabman peered down perplexedly at me.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘wot plyce yer wanter go?’
‘East End,’ I repeated. ‘Nowhere in particular. Just drive me around anywhere.’
‘But wot’s the haddress, sir?’
‘See here!’ I thundered. ‘Drive me down to the East End, and at once!’
It was evident that he did not understand, but he withdrew his head, and grumblingly started his horse.
Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject poverty, while five minutes’ walk from almost any point will bring one to a slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending slum. The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels, but partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot.
Not a hansom did I meet with in all my drive, while mine was like an apparition from another and better world, the way the children ran after it and alongside. And as far as I could see were the solid walls of brick, the slimy pavements, and the screaming streets; and for the first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me. It was like the fear of the sea; and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea, lapping about me and threatening to well up and over me.
‘Stepney, sir; Stepney Station,’ the cabby called down.
I looked about. It was really a railroad station, and he had driven desperately to it as the one familiar spot he had ever heard of in all that wilderness.
‘Well,’ I said.
He spluttered unintelligibly, shook his head, and looked very miserable. ‘I’m a strynger ’ere,’ he managed to articulate. ‘An’ if yer don’t want Stepney Station, I’m blessed if I know wotcher do want.’
A shop where old clothes are sold
‘I’ll tell you what I want,’ I said. ‘You drive along and keep your eye out for a shop where old clothes are sold. Now, when you see such a shop, drive right on till you turn the corner, then stop and let me out.’
I could see that he was growing dubious of his fare, but not long afterwards he pulled up to the curb and informed me that an old-clothes shop was to be found a bit of the way back.
‘Won’tcher py me?’ he pleaded. ‘There’s seven an’ six owin’ me.’
‘Yes,’ I laughed, ‘and it would be the last I’d see of you.’
‘Lord lumme, but it’ll be the last I see of you if yer don’t py me,’ he retorted.
But a crowd of ragged onlookers had already gathered around the cab, and I laughed again and walked back to the old-clothes shop.
Here the chief difficulty was in making the shop man understand that I really and truly wanted old clothes. But after fruitless attempts to press upon me new and impossible coats and trousers, he began to bring to light heaps of old ones, looking mysterious the while and hinting darkly. This he did with the palpable intention of letting me know that he had ‘piped my lay’, in order to bulldoze me, through fear of exposure, into paying heavily for my purchases. A man in trouble, or a high-class criminal from across the water, was what he took my measure for – in either case, a person anxious to avoid the police.
But I disputed with him over the outrageous difference between prices and values, till I quite disabused him of the notion, and he settled down to drive a hard bargain with a hard customer. In the end I selected a pair of stout though well-worn trousers, a frayed jacket with one remaining button, a pair of brogans which had plainly seen service where coal was shoveled, a thin leather belt, and a very dirty cloth cap. My underclothing and socks, however, were new and warm, but of the sort that any American waif, down on his luck, could acquire in the ordinary course of events.
‘I must sy yer a sharp ’un,’ he said, with counterfeit admiration, as I handed over the ten shillings finally agreed upon for the outfit. ‘Blimey, if you ain’t ben up an’ down Petticut Lane afore now. Yer trouseys is wuth five bob to hany man, an’ a docker ’ud give two an’ six for the shoes, to sy nothin’ of the coat an’ cap an’ new stoker’s singlet an’ hother things.’
‘How much will you give me for them?’ I demanded suddenly. ‘I paid you ten bob for the lot, and I’ll sell them back to you, right now, for eight! Come, it’s a go!’
But he grinned and shook his head, and though I had made a good bargain, I was unpleasantly aware that he had made a better one.
I found the cabby and a policeman with their heads together, but the latter, after looking me over sharply, and particularly scrutinizing the bundle under my arm, turned away and left the cabby to wax mutinous by himself. And not a step would he budge till I paid him the seven shillings and sixpence owing him. Whereupon he was willing to drive me to the ends of the earth, apologizing profusely for his insistence, and explaining that one ran across queer customers in London Town.
But he drove me only to Highbury Vale, in North London, where my luggage was waiting for me. Here, next day, I took off my shoes (not without regret for their lightness and comfort), and my soft, grey travelling suit, and, in fact, all my clothing; and proceeded to array myself in the clothes of the other and unimaginable men, who must have been indeed unfortunate to have had to part with such rags for the pitiable sums obtainable from a dealer.
Inside my stoker’s singlet, in the armpit, I sewed a gold sovereign (an emergency sum certainly of modest proportions); and inside my stoker’s singlet I put myself. And then I sat down and moralized upon the fair years and fat, which had made my skin soft and brought the nerves close to the surface; for the singlet was rough and raspy as a hair shirt, and I am confident that the most rigorous of ascetics suffer no more than I did in the ensuing twenty-four hours.
The remainder of my costume was fairly easy to put on, though the brogans, or brogues, were quite a problem. As stiff and hard as if made of wood, it was only after a prolonged pounding of the uppers with my 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 goodbye 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 demeanor 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, on 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.
Johnny Upright
The people live in squalid dens, where there can be no health and no hope, but dogged discontent at their own lot, and futile discontent at the wealth which they see possessed by others.
– James Edwin Thorold Rogers,Six Centuries of Work and Wages
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 neighbors. 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-colored 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 neighborly 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 favor, 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 newspaper print.
And here, while awaiting the coming of Johnny Upright, let me explain my errand. While living, eating, and sleeping with the people of the East End, it was my intention to have a port of refuge, not too far distant, into which I could run now and again to assure myself that good clothes and cleanliness still existed. Also in such port I could receive my mail, work up my notes, and sally forth occasionally in changed garb to civilization.
But this involved a dilemma. A lodging where my property would be safe implied a landlady apt to be suspicious of a gentleman leading a double life; while a landlady who would not bother her head over the double life of her lodgers would imply lodgings where property was unsafe. To avoid the dilemma was what had brought me to Johnny Upright. A detective of thirty-odd years’ continuous service in the East End, known far and wide by a name given him by a convicted felon in the dock, he was just the man to find me an honest landlady, and make her rest easy concerning the strange comings and goings of which I might be guilty.
His two daughters beat him home from church – and pretty girls they were in their Sunday dresses; withal it was the certain weak and delicate prettiness which characterizes the cockney lasses, a prettiness which is no more than a promise with no grip on time, and doomed to fade quickly away like the color from a sunset sky.
They looked me over with frank curiosity, as though I were some sort of a strange animal, and then ignored me utterly for the rest of my wait. Then Johnny Upright himself arrived, and I was summoned upstairs to confer with him.
‘Speak loud,’ he interrupted my opening words. ‘I’ve got a bad cold, and I can’t hear well.’
Shades of Old Sleuth and Sherlock Holmes! I wondered as to where the assistant was located whose duty it was to take down whatever information I might loudly vouchsafe. And to this day, much as I have seen of Johnny Upright and much as I have puzzled over the incident, I have never been quite able to make up my mind as to whether or not he had a cold, or had an assistant planted in the other room. But of one thing I am sure: though I gave Johnny Upright the facts concerning my self and project, he withheld judgment till next day, when I dodged into his street conventionally garbed and in a hansom. Then his greeting was cordial enough, and I went down into the dining room to join the family at tea.
‘We are humble here,’ he said, ‘not given to the flesh, and you must take us for what we are, in our humble way.’
The girls were flushed and embarrassed at greeting me, while he did not make it any the easier for them.
‘Ha! ha!’ he roared heartily, slapping the table with his open hand till the dishes rang. ‘The girls thought yesterday you had come to ask for a piece of bread! Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho! Ho!’
This they indignantly denied, with snapping eyes and guilty red cheeks, as though it were an essential of true refinement to be able to discern under his rags a man who had no need to go ragged.
And then, while I ate bread and marmalade, proceeded a play at cross purposes, the daughters deeming it an insult to me that I should have been mistaken for a beggar, and the father considering it as the highest compliment to my cleverness to succeed in being so mistaken. All of which I enjoyed, and the bread, the marmalade, and the tea, till the time came for Johnny Upright to find me a lodging, which he did, not half-a-dozen doors away, in his own respectable and opulent street, in a house as like to his own as a pea to its mate.
