"No. I never heard that."
"No. I thought you wouldn't have. You'd hardly be born then. Hard it
is to remember that there are some so young they might almost have
been born into another world."
He fumbled about in the tails of his coat, humming and crooning to
himself, and presently he produced a litter of papers and held them
out diffidently, and so shyly that he turned his head away as René put
out his hand for them.
"There's forty years' work there," he said. "Forty years. I was
thirty-five when I began it, thirty-five, and hopeful, and I finished
it five years ago. I wanted to know if you think there's any chance of
its being published in a book. I'd like to leave a book behind me.
I've been forgotten. I'd like someone to be reminded of me. I've been
mortally afraid of the young ones till you. There's something lucky
about your face, something that shines in it. There was many faces
like yours in my young days, but there was no golden statue in the
Gardens then, and this must have been meadows down to the river side."
He pressed his lips together and mumbled. René asked him if he could
do with a shilling, but he refused, seemed so hurt that he shriveled
and went away.
René kept the manuscript and read it during his off hours on the
stands. It began nobly on foolscap, in a bold, spiky hand, and ended
pitifully on old envelopes and leaves torn out of penny account books
or yellowing sheets from ancient volumes. Thirty lines were written on
the back of the title page of a copy of _The City of Dreadful Night_.
It was some time before he could find his way through the manuscript.
The sheets were not numbered, and they were in no sort of order.
Slowly he pieced the poem together, and perceived that it was an epic
in ten cantos, blank verse varied with odes. It was called _Lucifer on
Earth, or the Rise and Fall of British Industry_, and it was many days
before its first reader could make anything out of its confusion. The
Gods change: it is difficult to make anything in this century of the
God of 1860. Clearly Jethro Lunt hated that God. In fierce rhetoric he
denounced His claim to omnipotence, but where exactly his grievance
lay, it was impossible to discover. Lucifer in the poem struggled out
of Hell, and, catching the Almighty in a moment of boredom, unseated
Him and sent Him down to the Infernal Regions for a space to see how
He would do there, and afterward, in his spleen, commanded Him to
dwell on earth. So God arrived one day in a village in Derbyshire,
and, acting upon the commercial principles always employed in his
dealings with man, got the inhabitants to apply the mental processes
till then only used in the practice of religion, to their everyday
life. Then the community became possessed of a horrid energy, set love
of gain above love of life, and soon the old, quiet society of squire,
farmer, and laborer was broken up, mills were built in the village,
their great stacks belched forth smoke over the hills so that the
heather was dirty to lie upon; the women left their homes to work in
the mills, and children were taken to help them. And wherever God
went, the same thing happened.
Meanwhile Lucifer was enraged to find that he was not worshiped as he
had hoped. The churches also had gone into business. In Hell he had
taken some pleasure in the sins of the flesh, but these had now become
so mean, so grubby, and so stealthy that his proud spirit was revolted
by them, and he said that if men liked to fritter away their substance
in such trumpery they might do so for all he cared, and to occupy
himself, he began to investigate the divine power which sustained
Heaven and Earth. Then he perceived that God had usurped this power
and abused it. He set himself to master it, and when he had done so,
waited until men's love of gain had brought them to an intolerable
strain so that they must release the spirit in themselves or perish.
Then he went down upon the earth and engaged God in mortal combat so
that they both perished, and man was left alone to work out his own
salvation, for to such desperate issue had God brought them in His
mischief. Upon the earth there were singers born of sorrowful women
left in anguish by the evils of war and peace, not knowing which was
the worse. Slowly their songs came to the ears of men, and then in
fierce conflict they wrought upon God's perdition until they had made
it shine in the likeness of beauty.
That, so far as René could make out, was the outline of Old Lunt's
poem. Interspersed were odes in condemnation of Queen Victoria, the
Duke of Wellington, Lord Tennyson, Gladstone, Sir Edward Burne-Jones,
Augustus Harris, Bulwer Lytton, and Thackeray; in praise of
Beaconsfield, George Meredith, Charles Darwin, Cobden, Bradlaugh,
General Booth, and Charles Stewart Parnell.
No critic of verse, René was unable to judge of the work's poetic
merit, though he had a shrewd idea that it was small. Historically, it
was very valuable to him. The picture was horrible, of an England
dotted with communities screwed up in their own vileness, of an energy
turned in upon itself, desperately striving to satisfy a demand itself
had created. The tension must have been terrific, and the most pitiful
part of the poem was its revelation of the author's gradual yielding
to it, the slow ruin of his hopes, the growing repulsion from a world
in which he refused to live except upon his own terms. It was possible
to mark the exact moment of his plunge into despair, for two-thirds of
the way through he suddenly dropped from verse (growing more and more
halting) into prose:
"Art is a world of beauty where there is a logic not of this world,
but until I have seen beauty here how can I hope to reach it? I must
have wings, and if my soul can find neither love nor friendship, how
can it ever be fledged for flight? Hatred? That would be something. I
cannot hate mediocrity. I can only let it wither me."
And he let himself be withered, though in that agony there were
moments when the words poured melodiously from his brain.
The last sheet was terrible. It contained only a brief description of
his room, the grubby ceiling, the sacks on which he lay, the peeling
paper on the walls, the cracked window stuffed with rags.
"I lick my lips," he wrote in a savage scrawl. "Bitter!" Then he had
made a blot thus:
[Image: A black circle approximately 5 mm in diameter]
and against it he had written: "My world."
Twice after René had read the manuscript did Old Lunt appear in the
yard, but he crept away as soon as there seemed any danger of his
being accosted. And then he did not come again.
A busy time followed, and he was forgotten except that, to please him,
René had ordered a typewritten copy of the poem to be made--that being
the nearest possible approach to the book of his desire. This copy
came home at last. Ann was asked to bind it, and did so neatly with
the green cloth she had for flower stalks. Then, a night or two later,
it was taken to Kilner, for him to decorate the cover. He had been
told of it, tried to read it, but could not. However, he designed a
decoration for the cover and printed the title and the author's name
in bold letters, and beneath each he placed a blot. That part of the
manuscript appealed to him more than all the rest.
"That," he said, "is what the world is to all your comfortable people,
behind the charm and excitement with which they cover and disguise it.
The only difference between them and your old man is that he fought to
get some light on it and lost. I would rather be he than they. He does
take his world with him; theirs they leave behind, caught in the
meshes of their factitious morals and conventions."
"But," said René, "isn't he leaving his world all written out?"
"No, the tale of how he sank beneath its weight. It is true enough,
anyhow, to have stirred you into a desire to give him pleasure. He has
roused you exactly as I have been trying to do these last months."
"That's true. I do keep trying to get light on that little black
world, but I say to myself that after all the sun's light is quite
enough."
"It's enough for beasts and trees. It isn't enough for men unless they
will consent to live like beasts, at the mercy of their instincts, in
competition with the beasts, and have a very nasty time of it. No. No.
The light your friend was after is the light of the imagination. Let
your light so shine. He had never had it, never more than the will to
have it. Probably he drank or took to some other form of vice to
console himself in his more difficult moments. You'll never know.
Probably we all know that is worth knowing. Young men often make blots
like that because life is such an infernal long time in beginning; but
for an old man--well, it looks like a sober conclusion, as though he
really had faced a fact, and had the sense of humor to go on living in
spite of it. There!"
He had finished the cover.
"I hope he'll like it."
René took it that same evening to Old Lunt's room. It was behind a
stable and harness room used by a grocer as a store. Its one window
looked out on a blank wall of yellow brick. For the rest the room was
exactly as the old man had described it; not a stick of furniture in
it; sacks thrown in a corner, and on these Old Lunt was lying with his
legs crossed, his hand under his head, smiling up into the dim light.
The setting sun struck the yellow wall outside the window, and the
upper part of the room was filled with an apricot-colored glow. Dust
danced in the light. The room was filled with an acrid sweetish smell.
Manuscript in hand, René stepped forward.
"Good evening, sir," he said, "I thought you----"
He stopped, for he knew that the old man was dead. He had known it
before he began to speak, but the sound of his voice brought home to
him the mockery of words. Raising the cold right hand, he laid _The
Rise and Fall of British Industry_ beneath it.
The light died down. The glow sank into the gloom. He crept away, told
the woman next door that Lunt was dead, and she said she would go at
once to the crowner's office.