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:
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.