The People of the Abyss | Page 9

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.
CHAPTER III--MY
LODGING AND SOME OTHERS

From an East London standpoint, the room I rented for six shillings, or
a dollar and a half, per week, was a most comfortable affair. From the
American standpoint, on the other hand, it was rudely furnished,
uncomfortable, and small. By the time I had added an ordinary
typewriter table to its scanty furnishing, I was hard put to turn around;
at the best, I managed to navigate it by a sort of vermicular progression
requiring great dexterity and presence of mind.

Having settled myself, or my property rather, I put on my knockabout
clothes and went out for a walk. Lodgings being fresh in my mind, I
began to look them up, bearing in mind the hypothesis that I was a poor
young man with a wife and large family.
My first discovery was that empty houses were few and far between--
so far between, in fact, that though I walked miles in irregular circles
over a large area, I still remained between. Not one empty house could
I find--a conclusive proof that the district was "saturated."
It being plain that as a poor young man with a family I could rent no
houses at all in this most undesirable region, I next looked for rooms,
unfurnished rooms, in which I could store my wife and babies and
chattels. There were not many, but I found them, usually in the singular,
for one appears to be considered sufficient for a poor man's family in
which to cook and eat and sleep. When I asked for two rooms, the
sublettees looked at me very much in the manner, I imagine, that a
certain personage looked at Oliver Twist when he asked for more.
Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his
family, but I learned that many families, occupying single rooms, had
so much space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two. When
such rooms can be rented for from three to six shillings per week, it is a
fair conclusion that a lodger with references should obtain floor space
for, say, from eightpence to a shilling. He may even be able to board
with the sublettees for a few shillings more. This, however, I failed to
inquire into--a reprehensible error on my part, considering that I was
working on the basis of a hypothetical family.
Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I learned
that there were no bath-tubs in all the thousands of houses I had seen.
Under the circumstances, with my wife and babies and a couple of
lodgers suffering from the too great spaciousness of one room, taking a
bath in a tin wash-basin would be an unfeasible undertaking. But, it
seems, the compensation comes in with the saving of soap, so all's well,
and God's still in heaven.
However, I rented no rooms, but returned to my own Johnny Upright's

street. What with my wife, and babies, and lodgers, and the various
cubby-holes into which I had fitted them, my mind's eye had become
narrow-angled, and I could not quite take in all of my own room at
once. The immensity of it was awe-inspiring. Could this be the room I
had rented for six shillings a week? Impossible! But my landlady,
knocking at the door to learn if I were comfortable, dispelled my
doubts.
"Oh yes, sir," she said, in reply to a question. "This street is the very
last. All the other streets were like this eight or ten years ago, 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