CHAPTER XIII--DAN CULLEN, DOCKER
I stood, yesterday, in a room in one of the "Municipal Dwellings,"
not far from Leman Street. If I looked into a dreary future and saw
that I would have to live in such a room until I died, I should
immediately go down, plump into the Thames, and cut the tenancy
short.
It was not a room. Courtesy to the language will no more permit it
to be called a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a
mansion. It was a den, a lair. Seven feet by eight were its
dimensions, and the ceiling was so low as not to give the cubic air
space required by a British soldier in barracks. A crazy couch,
with ragged coverlets, occupied nearly half the room. A rickety
table, a chair, and a couple of boxes left little space in which to
turn around. Five dollars would have purchased everything in sight.
The floor was bare, while the walls and ceiling were literally
covered with blood marks and splotches. Each mark represented a
violent death--of an insect, for the place swarmed with vermin, a
plague with which no person could cope single-handed.
The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was
dying in hospital. Yet he had impressed his personality on his
miserable surroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what
sort of man he was. On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi,
Engels, Dan Burns, and other labour leaders, while on the table lay
one of Walter Besant's novels. He knew his Shakespeare, I was told,
and had read history, sociology, and economics. And he was self-
educated.
On the table, amidst a wonderful disarray, lay a sheet of paper on
which was scrawled: Mr. Cullen, please return the large white jug
and corkscrew I lent you--articles loaned, during the first stages
of his sickness, by a woman neighbour, and demanded back in
anticipation of his death. A large white jug and a corkscrew are
far too valuable to a creature of the Abyss to permit another
creature to die in peace. To the last, Dan Cullen's soul must be
harrowed by the sordidness out of which it strove vainly to rise.
It is a brief little story, the story of Dan Cullen, but there is
much to read between the lines. He was born lowly, in a city and
land where the lines of caste are tightly drawn. All his days he
toiled hard with his body; and because he had opened the books, and
been caught up by the fires of the spirit, and could "write a letter
like a lawyer," he had been selected by his fellows to toil hard for
them with his brain. He became a leader of the fruit-porters,
represented the dockers on the London Trades Council, and wrote
trenchant articles for the labour journals.
He did not cringe to other men, even though they were his economic
masters, and controlled the means whereby he lived, and he spoke his
mind freely, and fought the good fight. In the "Great Dock Strike"
he was guilty of taking a leading part. And that was the end of Dan
Cullen. From that day he was a marked man, and every day, for ten
years and more, he was "paid off" for what he had done.
A docker is a casual labourer. Work ebbs and flows, and he works or
does not work according to the amount of goods on hand to be moved.
Dan Cullen was discriminated against. While he was not absolutely
turned away (which would have caused trouble, and which would
certainly have been more merciful), he was called in by the foreman
to do not more than two or three days' work per week. This is what
is called being "disciplined," or "drilled." It means being
starved. There is no politer word. Ten years of it broke his
heart, and broken-hearted men cannot live.
He took to his bed in his terrible den, which grew more terrible
with his helplessness. He was without kith or kin, a lonely old
man, embittered and pessimistic, fighting vermin the while and
looking at Garibaldi, Engels, and Dan Burns gazing down at him from
the blood-bespattered walls. No one came to see him in that crowded
municipal barracks (he had made friends with none of them), and he
was left to rot.
But from the far reaches of the East End came a cobbler and his son,
his sole friends. They cleansed his room, brought fresh linen from
home, and took from off his limbs the sheets, greyish-black with
dirt. And they brought to him one of the Queen's Bounty nurses from
Aldgate.
She washed his face, shook up his conch, and talked with him. It
was interesting to talk with him--until he learned her name. Oh,
yes, Blank was her name, she replied innocently, and Sir George
Blank was her brother. Sir George Blank, eh? thundered old Dan
Cullen on his death-bed; Sir George Blank, solicitor to the docks at
Cardiff, who, more than any other man, had broken up the Dockers'
Union of Cardiff, and was knighted? And she was his sister?
Thereupon Dan Cullen sat up on his crazy couch and pronounced
anathema upon her and all her breed; and she fled, to return no
more, strongly impressed with the ungratefulness of the poor.
Dan Cullen's feet became swollen with dropsy. He sat up all day on
the side of the bed (to keep the water out of his body), no mat on
the floor, a thin blanket on his legs, and an old coat around his
shoulders. A missionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth
fourpence (I saw them), and proceeded to offer up fifty prayers or
so for the good of Dan Cullen's soul. But Dan Cullen was the sort
of man that wanted his soul left alone. He did not care to have
Tom, Dick, or Harry, on the strength of fourpenny slippers,
tampering with it. He asked the missionary kindly to open the
window, so that he might toss the slippers out. And the missionary
went away, to return no more, likewise impressed with the
ungratefulness of the poor.
The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unaneled and unsung,
went privily to the head office of the big fruit brokers for whom
Dan Cullen had worked as a casual labourer for thirty years. Their
system was such that the work was almost entirely done by casual
hands. The cobbler told them the man's desperate plight, old,
broken, dying, without help or money, reminded them that he had
worked for them thirty years, and asked them to do something for
him.
"Oh," said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to
refer to the books, "you see, we make it a rule never to help
casuals, and we can do nothing."
Nor did they do anything, not even sign a letter asking for Dan
Cullen's admission to a hospital. And it is not so easy to get into
a hospital in London Town. At Hampstead, if he passed the doctors,
at least four months would elapse before he could get in, there were
so many on the books ahead of him. The cobbler finally got him into
the Whitechapel Infirmary, where he visited him frequently. Here he
found that Dan Cullen had succumbed to the prevalent feeling, that,
being hopeless, they were hurrying him out of the way. A fair and
logical conclusion, one must agree, for an old and broken man to
arrive at, who has been resolutely "disciplined" and "drilled" for
ten years. When they sweated him for Bright's disease to remove the
fat from the kidneys, Dan Cullen contended that the sweating was
hastening his death; while Bright's disease, being a wasting away of
the kidneys, there was therefore no fat to remove, and the doctor's
excuse was a palpable lie. Whereupon the doctor became wroth, and
did not come near him for nine days.
Then his bed was tilted up so that his feet and legs were elevated.
At once dropsy appeared in the body, and Dan Cullen contended that
the thing was done in order to run the water down into his body from
his legs and kill him more quickly. He demanded his discharge,
though they told him he would die on the stairs, and dragged
himself, more dead than alive, to the cobbler's shop. At the moment
of writing this, he is dying at the Temperance Hospital, into which
place his staunch friend, the cobbler, moved heaven and earth to
have him admitted.
Poor Dan Cullen! A Jude the Obscure, who reached out after
knowledge; who toiled with his body in the day and studied in the
watches of the night; who dreamed his dream and struck valiantly for
the Cause; a patriot, a lover of human freedom, and a fighter
unafraid; and in the end, not gigantic enough to beat down the
conditions which baffled and stifled him, a cynic and a pessimist,
gasping his final agony on a pauper's couch in a charity ward,--"For
a man to die who might have been wise and was not, this I call a
tragedy."
