Anna of the Five Towns | Page 5

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 year, but no visitor had crossed their doorsteps except the minister, once, and such poor defaulters as came, full of excuse and obsequious conciliation, to pay rent overdue.
'Business, I suppose?' she said, and prayed that he might not be intending to make a mere call of ceremony.
'Yes, business,' he answered lightly. 'But you will be in?'
'I am