Dan Cullen, Docker.
Life scarce can tread majestically Foul court and fever-stricken alley.
-THOMAS ASHE.
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 a bed-bug, with which vermin the building swarmed, 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 a man he was.On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi, Engels, Dan Burns, and other labor 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 neighbor, 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 labor 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 laborer.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.
