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

water-power in the
cotton industry, and with this in their shrewd minds the Channings took
another plunge; live miles away, on meadows near what was then the small
village of Browdley, and in partnership with another mill-owner named Felsby,
they built one of the first large steam-driven mills in Lancashire. Other
speculators obligingly built Mill Street for the new workers to live in, and
the same process, repeated during succeeding decades with other mills and
other streets, made Browdley what it is and what it shouldn’t be—as
George said (and then waited for the cheer) in his popular lecture ‘Browdley
Past and Present’, delivered fairly frequently to local literary,
antiquarian, and similar societies. Yes, there was one question at any rate
to which he could return a convincing answer—“What do you know of
Browdley?”—and that answer might well be: “More than anyone else in the
world.”
    Suddenly George saw the house—the house which, like the locality,
was called Stoneclough. It showed wanly in the moonlight against the
background of moorland and foreground of tree-tops. The moon was flattering
to it, softening its heavy Victorian stolidity, concealing the grim
undershadow 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 travelled the five
miles between Stoneclough and the Browdley mill on foot, on horseback, by
pony carriage and landau, by bicycle and motor-cycle and car, according to
taste and period; and the same succession had added to the house a
hodge-podge 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 death-blow 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 loot-able 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 tree- tops in the clough as later on rubber forests of the
Congo and the Amazon. Thus had the first Channings flourished;