VIIOLD LUNTThe glass is full, and now my glass is run:And now I live, and now my life is done.OLDLunt was a dirty old man who wore a cracked bowler hat rammed down on his head, a frock-coat green with age, trousers that hung in loops and folds about his lean shanks, and boots held together with leather laces and bits of string. He had one room at the corner of the mews, and he lived God knows how. Ann always said that he would stand on the doorstep of a butcher’s shop and sniff like a dog, and stay there until they flung him a scrap of meat. On a Saturday night he was to be seen prowling about the shops, feeling the rabbits and fowls, and then shuffling away as though his appetite had been satisfied through his fingers. He never shaved, but clipped his beard close. The skin hung so loose on his jaws that shaving would have been perilous. His eyes were gray, watery, and red-rimmed, and he had ears like red rosettes.He used to watch for René to come out, and then wait by his own door to see if the car left the yard. If it did not, then he would come shambling alongand stand at the gate of the yard. And if René were working on his car he would edge nearer and nearer until he could peer into the engine. Often he would stand quite silent, and go away without a word. Occasionally he would talk and mumble.“I remember when there warn’t no railways, and my brother Philip drove his horses from Glossop to Sheffle. They used to say there wouldn’t be no engines. But there was engines. Then they said there wouldn’t be no engines on the road. But there is engines on the road. And things grow worse and worse for poetry.”With variations, that was his customary address.About once a month he would sidle up to René and beg for the loan of one shilling, and ten days or a fortnight later he would return a penny or twopence.“Interest, interest. Times bad. I must ask you to extend the loan.”Sometimes he would give the coppers wrapped up in old ballads telling of murders and hangings, shipwrecks, battles, national events, some in print, some in writing, all dirty. In this way René became possessed of an ode to the Albert Memorial:Proud monument, thou Christmas cake in stone!The thing thou meanest never yet has grownIn English soil, a virtue not contentTo be its own reward, a virtue bentOn cheating life of man and man of life.We English have rejoicèd in the strifeOf being, till that virtue chilled our bloodAnd had us hypnotized and nipped in budOur aspiration. We of Shakespeare’s lineHad in our living made our life divineTill, as we grew accustomed to look at you,We worshiped man transformed into a statue.This poem was written on the inside of a grocer’s bag, and when it was handed to René it contained threepence. It was signed Jethro Lunt, and dated April 4, 1887.One day Old Lunt extended his usual observations, and ended by asking morosely:“Did you—did you read my poems?”“Why, yes,” answered René, “all of them.”“Have you really now? No one has read my poems for thirty years. It’s only the old ballads I sell now, and them not often. The newspapers do all the murders and hangings. Till the halfpenny newspapers came in, I could sell a murder or two in certain streets. I had one about Charley Peace:Charles Peace, he played the violin.Music excited him to sinLike drink with other men.Maybe you never heard that?”“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, hummingand 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 ofThe 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 calledLuciferon 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 hisproud 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 diameterand 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 thewindow, 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 laidThe Rise and Fall of British Industrybeneath 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.
The glass is full, and now my glass is run:And now I live, and now my life is done.
The glass is full, and now my glass is run:
And now I live, and now my life is done.
OLDLunt was a dirty old man who wore a cracked bowler hat rammed down on his head, a frock-coat green with age, trousers that hung in loops and folds about his lean shanks, and boots held together with leather laces and bits of string. He had one room at the corner of the mews, and he lived God knows how. Ann always said that he would stand on the doorstep of a butcher’s shop and sniff like a dog, and stay there until they flung him a scrap of meat. On a Saturday night he was to be seen prowling about the shops, feeling the rabbits and fowls, and then shuffling away as though his appetite had been satisfied through his fingers. He never shaved, but clipped his beard close. The skin hung so loose on his jaws that shaving would have been perilous. His eyes were gray, watery, and red-rimmed, and he had ears like red rosettes.
He used to watch for René to come out, and then wait by his own door to see if the car left the yard. If it did not, then he would come shambling alongand stand at the gate of the yard. And if René were working on his car he would edge nearer and nearer until he could peer into the engine. Often he would stand quite silent, and go away without a word. Occasionally he would talk and mumble.
“I remember when there warn’t no railways, and my brother Philip drove his horses from Glossop to Sheffle. They used to say there wouldn’t be no engines. But there was engines. Then they said there wouldn’t be no engines on the road. But there is engines on the road. And things grow worse and worse for poetry.”
With variations, that was his customary address.
About once a month he would sidle up to René and beg for the loan of one shilling, and ten days or a fortnight later he would return a penny or twopence.
“Interest, interest. Times bad. I must ask you to extend the loan.”
Sometimes he would give the coppers wrapped up in old ballads telling of murders and hangings, shipwrecks, battles, national events, some in print, some in writing, all dirty. In this way René became possessed of an ode to the Albert Memorial:
Proud monument, thou Christmas cake in stone!The thing thou meanest never yet has grownIn English soil, a virtue not contentTo be its own reward, a virtue bentOn cheating life of man and man of life.We English have rejoicèd in the strifeOf being, till that virtue chilled our bloodAnd had us hypnotized and nipped in budOur aspiration. We of Shakespeare’s lineHad in our living made our life divineTill, as we grew accustomed to look at you,We worshiped man transformed into a statue.
Proud monument, thou Christmas cake in stone!
The thing thou meanest never yet has grown
In English soil, a virtue not content
To be its own reward, a virtue bent
On cheating life of man and man of life.
We English have rejoicèd in the strife
Of being, till that virtue chilled our blood
And had us hypnotized and nipped in bud
Our aspiration. We of Shakespeare’s line
Had in our living made our life divine
Till, as we grew accustomed to look at you,
We worshiped man transformed into a statue.
This poem was written on the inside of a grocer’s bag, and when it was handed to René it contained threepence. It was signed Jethro Lunt, and dated April 4, 1887.
One day Old Lunt extended his usual observations, and ended by asking morosely:
“Did you—did you read my poems?”
“Why, yes,” answered René, “all of them.”
“Have you really now? No one has read my poems for thirty years. It’s only the old ballads I sell now, and them not often. The newspapers do all the murders and hangings. Till the halfpenny newspapers came in, I could sell a murder or two in certain streets. I had one about Charley Peace:
Charles Peace, he played the violin.Music excited him to sinLike drink with other men.
Charles Peace, he played the violin.
Music excited him to sin
Like drink with other men.
Maybe you never heard that?”
“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, hummingand 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 ofThe 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 calledLuciferon 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 hisproud 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 thewindow, 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 laidThe Rise and Fall of British Industrybeneath 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.