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?”