Anna of the Five Towns | Page 5

the
circumstances the Park made a very creditable appearance he only
reflected the best local opinion. The town was proud of its achievement,
and it had the right to be; for, though this narrow pleasaunce was in
itself unlovely, it symbolised the first faint renascence of the longing
for beauty in a district long given up to unredeemed ugliness.
At length, Mynors having encountered many acquaintances, they got
past the bandstand and stood on the highest terrace, which was almost
deserted. Beneath them, in front, stretched a maze of roofs, dominated
by the gold angel of the Town Hall spire. Bursley, the ancient home of
the potter, has an antiquity of a thousand years. It lies towards the north
end of an extensive valley, which must have been one of the fairest
spots in Alfred's England, but which is now defaced by the activities of
a quarter of a million of people. Five contiguous towns--Turnhill,
Bursley, Hanbridge, Knype, and Longshaw--united by a single winding
thoroughfare some eight miles in length, have inundated the valley like
a succession of great lakes. Of these five Bursley is the mother, but
Hanbridge is the largest. They are mean and forbidding of
aspect--sombre, hard-featured, uncouth; and the vaporous poison of
their ovens and chimneys has soiled and shrivelled the surrounding
country till there is no village lane within a league but what offers a
gaunt and ludicrous travesty of rural charms. Nothing could be more
prosaic than the huddled, red-brown streets; nothing more seemingly
remote from romance. Yet be it said that romance is even here--the
romance which, for those who have an eye to perceive it, ever dwells
amid the seats of industrial manufacture, softening the coarseness,

transfiguring the squalor, of these mighty alchemic operations. Look
down into the valley from this terrace-height where love is kindling,
embrace the whole smoke-girt amphitheatre in a glance, and it may be
that you will suddenly comprehend the secret and superb significance
of the vast Doing which goes forward below. Because they seldom
think, the townsmen take shame when indicted for having disfigured
half a county in order to live. They have not understood that this
disfigurement is merely an episode in the unending warfare of man and
nature, and calls for no contrition. Here, indeed, is nature repaid for
some of her notorious cruelties. She imperiously bids man sustain and
reproduce himself, and this is one of the places where in the very act of
obedience he wounds and maltreats her. Out beyond the municipal
confines, where the subsidiary industries of coal and iron prosper amid
a wreck of verdure, the struggle is grim, appalling, heroic--so ruthless
is his havoc of her, so indomitable her ceaseless recuperation. On the
one side is a wresting from nature's own bowels of the means to waste
her; on the other, an undismayed, enduring fortitude. The grass grows;
though it is not green, it grows. In the very heart of the valley, hedged
about with furnaces, a farm still stands, and at harvest-time the sooty
sheaves are gathered in.
The band stopped playing. A whole population was idle in the Park,
and it seemed, in the fierce calm of the sunlight, that of all the
strenuous weekday vitality of the district only a murmurous hush
remained. But everywhere on the horizon, and nearer, furnaces cast
their heavy smoke across the borders of the sky: the Doing was never
suspended.
'Mr. Mynors,' said Agnes, still holding his hand, when they had been
silent a moment, 'when do those furnaces go out?'
'They don't go out,' he answered, 'unless there is a strike. It costs
hundreds and hundreds of pounds to light them again.'
'Does it?' she said vaguely. 'Father says it's the smoke that stops my
gilliflowers from growing.'
Mynors turned to Anna. 'Your father seems the picture of health. I saw

him out this morning at a quarter to seven, as brisk as a boy. What a
constitution!'
'Yes,' Anna replied, 'he is always up at six.'
'But you aren't, I suppose?'
'Yes, I too.'
'And me too,' Agnes interjected.
'And how does Bursley compare with Hanbridge?' Mynors continued.
Anna paused before replying.
'I like it better,' she said. 'At first--last year-- I thought I shouldn't.'
'By the way, your father used to preach in Hanbridge circuit--'
'That was years ago,' she said quickly.
'But why won't he preach here? I dare say you know that we are rather
short of local preachers-- good ones, that is.'
'I can't say why father doesn't preach now:' Anna flushed as she spoke.
'You had better ask him that.'
'Well, I will do,' he laughed. 'I am coming to see him soon--perhaps one
night next week.'
Anna looked at Henry Mynors as he uttered the astonishing words. The
Tellwrights had been in Bursley a