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, 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.