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 couch, 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 unannaled 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.”