Boys -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Slums -- Fiction
As for the Perrotts, they could easily find another room, at the high
rent always charged for the privilege of residence in the Jago. To have
remained in one room four or five years, and to have paid rent with
indifferent good regularity was a feat sufficiently rare to be
notorious, and to cause way to be made for them wherever a room was
falling vacant, or could be emptied. They went no farther than across
the way, to a room wherein a widow had died over her sack-making two
days before, and had sat on the floor with her head between her knees
for hours, while her children, not understanding, cried that they were
hungry. These children were now gone to the workhouse: more fortunate
than the many they left behind. And the room was a very fair one, ten
feet square or so.
The rest of the tenants thought not at all of new quarters, and did
nothing to find them, till they found themselves and their belongings
roofless in Old Jago Street. Then with one accord they demanded lodgings
of the vicar. Most of them had never inhabited any rooms so long as they
had these which they must now leave--having been ejected again and
again because of unpaid rent. Nevertheless, they clamoured for redress
as they might have clamoured had they never changed dwellings in their
lives.
Nobody resisted the police; for there were too many of them. Moreover,
Father Sturt was there, and few had hardihood for any but their best
behaviour in his presence. Still, there were disputes among the Jagos
themselves, that sometimes came very near to fights. Ginger Stagg's
missis professed to recognise a long-lost property in a tin kettle
brought into the outer air among the belongings of Mrs Walsh. The
miscellaneous rags and sticks that were Cocko Harnwell's household goods
got mingled in the roadway with those appertaining to the Fishers; and
their assortment without a turn of family combat was a task which tried
the vicar's influence to the utmost. Mrs Rafferty, too, was suspected of
undue pride in a cranky deal wash-stand, and thereby of a disposition to
sneer at the humbler turn-out of the Regans from the next floor: giving
occasion for a shrill and animated row.
The weather was dry, fortunately, and the evicted squatted in the
roadway, by their heaps, or on them, squabbling and lamenting. Ginger
Stagg, having covered certain crockery with the old family mattress,
forgetfully sat on it, and came upon Father Sturt with an indignant
demand for compensation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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