James Hilton: Collected Novels by James Hilton Read Free Book Online Page B

house—the house which, like the locality, was called Stoneclough. It showed wanly in the moonlight against the background of moorland and foreground of treetops. The moon was flattering to it, softening its heavy Victorian stolidity, concealing the grim under-shadow that Browdley’s smoke had contributed in the course of half a century of west winds. This was the house the Channings had lived in, the Channings of Stoneclough. A succession of Channings had traveled the five miles between Stoneclough and the Browdley mill on foot, on horseback, by pony carriage and landau, by bicycle and motorcycle and car, according to taste and period; and the same succession had added to the house a hodgepodge of excrescences and outbuildings that had nothing in common save evidence of the prevalent Channing trait throughout several generations; one of them might construct a billiard room, another remodel the stables, yet another add terraces to the garden or a bow window to the drawing room—but whatever was done at all was done conscientiously, always with the best materials, and with a rooted assumption of permanence in the scheme of things.
    George saw Stoneclough as a symbol of that assumption, and—because the house was now empty and derelict—as a hint that such permanence would have received its virtual deathblow in 1914, even apart from the special fate of the Channings. Only the gardens had any surviving life, the shrubs growing together till they made an almost unbroken thicket around the house, the fences down so that any straggler from the clough could enter the once-sacred precincts out of curiosity or to gather fuel for a picnic fire. All the windows were broken or boarded up; everything lootable from the interior had long ago been looted. Yet the fabric of the house still stood, too massive to have suffered, and in moonlight and from a distance almost beautiful. George wondered, not for the first time, what could be done with such a property. No one would buy it; no one who could afford repairs and taxes would want to live there or anywhere near Browdley, for that matter. Once or twice he had thought of suggesting that the Council take it over for conversion into a municipal rest home, sanatorium, or something of the kind—but then he had cautioned himself not to give his opponents the chance for another jibe—that he had made Browdley buy his wife’s birthplace.
    He did not walk up to the house, but turned back where the road began its last steep ascent; here, for a space of a few acres, were the older relics—the original Channing Mill, the broken walls of cottages that had not been lived in for a hundred years. George never saw them without reflecting on the iniquity of that early industrial age—eight-year-old children slaving at machines for fourteen hours out of the twenty-four, sunlight falling on the treetops in the clough as later on rubber forests of the Congo and the Amazon. Thus had the first Channings flourished; and it might be nemesis, of a kind, that had given their grand house to the bats and the rats. But its quality showed even in ruin; it was a substantial ruin.
    By four o’clock George was back in Browdley, tired and a little footsore. As he turned into Market Street and fished in his pocket for the door key there came a voice from the pavement near his house. “’Ow do, George. Nice night—but I’d rather be in bed all the same.”
    “Aye,” answered George mechanically. Then, recognizing the policeman on his beat, a friendly fellow always ready with a joke and (at election times) with a vote, George pulled himself together and made the necessary response. “How do, Tom.”
    “Fine, thanks—bar a touch of rheumatics…I was at the stone layin’. It’s bin a grand day for ye, and I wouldn’t say ye don’t deserve it.”
    “Thanks, Tom.”
    “Ye’ve worked for it hard enough. I can remember when ye used to swear ye’d have those Mill Street houses pulled down, and folks’d