The last place in which she had worked was a coffee-house, hours from seven in the morning till eleven at night, and for which she had received five shillings a week and her food. Then she had fallen sick, and since emerging from the hospital had been unable to find anything to do. She wasn’t feeling up to much, and the last two nights had been spent in the street.
Between them they stowed away a prodigious amount of food, this man and woman, and it was not till I had duplicated and triplicated their original orders that they showed signs of easing down.
Once she reached across and felt the texture of my coat and shirt, and remarked upon the good clothes the Yanks wore. My rags good clothes! It put me to the blush; but, on inspecting them more closely and on examining the clothes worn by the man and woman, I began to feel quite well-dressed and respectable.
‘What do you expect to do in the end?’ I asked them. ‘You know you’re growing older every day.’
‘Work’ouse,’ said he.
‘Gawd blimey if I do,’ said she. ‘There’s no ‘ope for me, I know, but I’ll die on the streets. No work’ouse for me, thank you.’
‘No, indeed,’ she sniffed in the silence that fell.
‘After you have been out all night in the streets,’ I asked, ‘what do you do in the morning for something to eat?’
‘Try to get a penny, if you ‘aven’t one saved over,’ the man explained. ‘Then go to a coffee-‘ouse an’ get a mug o’ tea.’
‘But I don’t see how that is to feed you,’ I objected.
The pair smiled knowingly.
‘You drink your tea in little sips,’ he went on, ‘making it last its longest. An’ you look sharp, an’ there’s some as leaves a bit be’ind ‘em.’
‘It’s s’prisin’, the food wot some people leaves,’ the woman broke in.
‘The thing,’ said the man judicially, as the trick dawned upon me, ‘is to get ‘old o’ the penny.’
As we started to leave, Miss Haythorne gathered up a couple of crusts from the neighboring tables and thrust them somewhere into her rags.
‘Cawn’t wyste ‘em, you know,’ said she, to which the docker nodded, tucking away a couple of crusts himself.
At three in the morning I strolled up the Embankment. It was a gala night for the homeless, for the police were elsewhere; and each bench was jammed with sleeping occupants. There were as many women as men, and the great majority of them, male and female, were old. Occasionally a boy was to be seen. On one bench I noticed a family, a man sitting upright with a sleeping babe in his arms, his wife asleep, her head on his shoulder, and in her lap the head of a sleeping youngster. The man’s eyes were wide open. He was staring out over the water and thinking, which is not a good thing for a shelterless man with a family to do. It would not be a pleasant thing to speculate upon his thoughts; but this I know, and all London knows, that the cases of out-of-works killing their wives and babies is not an uncommon happening.
One cannot walk along the Thames Embankment, in the small hours of morning, from the Houses of Parliament, past Cleopatra’s Needle, to Waterloo Bridge, without being reminded of the sufferings, seven and twenty centuries old, recited by the author of ‘Job’:
There are that remove the landmarks; they violently take away flocks and feed them.
They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow’s ox for a pledge.
They turn the needy out of the way; the poor of the earth hide themselves together.
Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to their work, seeking diligently for meat; the wilderness yieldeth them food for their children.
They cut their provender in the field, and they glean the vintage of the wicked.
They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no covering in the cold.
They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock for want of a shelter.
There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge of the poor.
So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an hungered they carry the sheaves.- Job xxiv. 2-10.
Seven and twenty centuries agone! And it is all as true and apposite to-day in the innermost centre of this Christian civilization whereof Edward VII is king.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
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.