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.
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