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 newspaper print.
And here, while waiting 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 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 civilisation.
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 characterises 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 colour 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 myself 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.
