So Well Remembered by James Hilton Read Free Book Online Page A

me he should
have used the formula ‘STATE what you know’—not ‘WHAT do you know?’ I
shall therefore revise your rating and give you full marks for that
particular question—which, I think, will just enable you to reach the
minimum standard for the examination… My congratulations… I hope you will
find time to work for the final examination next year…”
    “Oh yes, sir—yes, INDEED, sir!”
    But George hadn’t found time, after all, because the year ahead was the
one during which he had met and married Livia.
    And what did he know of Livia, for that matter?
* * * * *
    Browdley streets were deserted as he closed the door of the
newspaper
office behind him. From Market Street he turned into Shawgate, which is
Browdley’s chief business thoroughfare; he walked on past all the shops, then
through the suburban fringe of the town—‘the best part of Browdley’,
people sometimes called it. But the best part of Browdley isn’t, and never
was, so good. The town consists mainly of four-roomed bathroomless houses
built in long parallel rows, dormitories of miners and cotton operatives who
(in George’s words to Lord Winslow) had piled up money like muck for a few
local families. George had not added that his wife belonged to one of those
families, even when the mention of Channing and Felsby’s mill would have
given him a cue. For Livia was a Channing—one of the Channings of
Stoneclough… and suddenly he decided that, since he was trying to kill time
by walking, he would walk to Stoneclough. It was even appropriate that he
should take there his problem, his distress, and that brooding sub-current of
anger.
    Presently his walk quickened and his head lifted as if to meet a
challenge; and in this new mood he reached the top of a small rise from which
Browdley could be seen more magically at night than ever in the daytime; for
at night, especially under a moon, the observer might be unaware that those
glinting windows were factories and not palaces, and that the shimmer beneath
them was no fabled stream, but a stagnant, stinking canal. Yet to George, who
had known all this since childhood, there were still fables and palaces in
Browdley, palaces he would build and fables he would never surrender; and as
he walked to Stoneclough that night and looked back on the roofs of the town,
he had a renewal of faith that certain things were on his side.
    The trouble with Livia, he told himself for the fiftieth time, was that
there was no REASON in so many things that she did; or WAS there a reason
this time—the reason he had been reluctant to face?
    He climbed steadily along the upland road; it was past one in the morning
when he came within sight of Stoneclough. The foothills of the Pennines begin
there; there is a river also, the same one that flows dirty and sluggish
through Browdley, but clean and swift in its fall from the moorland, where it
cuts a steep fissure called a ‘clough’, and in so doing gives the place a
name and provides Browdley citizens with a near-by excursion and
picnic-ground. The first cotton mills, driven from a water-wheel, were set up
in such places towards the end of the eighteenth century, and one of them
belonged to a certain John Channing of whom little is known save that he died
rich in the year of Waterloo. The shell of the old greystone mill that made
his fortune still stands astride the tumbling stream; but the rows of hovels
in which the workpeople lived have long since disappeared, though there are
traces of them on neighbouring slopes, where sheep huddle in rain against
weed- grown fireplaces.
    Gone too is the first Channing house that adjoined the mill; it was
demolished about the time of Queen Victoria’s accession, when the Channing
family, by then not only rich but numerous, built a new and much more
pretentious house on higher ground where the clough meets the moorland. About
this time also it became clear that steam would oust