Anna of the Five Towns quotes

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.

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.

To him the circuit was a “going concern,” and he kept it in motion, serving the Lord in committee and over statements of account.

The minister by his pleading might bring sinners to the penitent form, but it was Ephraim Tellwright who reduced the cost per head of souls saved, and so widened the frontiers of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Three years after the death of his first wife it was rumoured that he would marry again, and that his choice had fallen on a young orphan girl, thirty years his junior, who “assisted” at the stationer’s shop where he bought his daily newspaper.

Though no friend ever crossed his doorstep, he had dozens of acquaintances of the footpath. He was not, however, a facile talker, and he seldom gave an opinion; nor were his remarks often noticeably shrewd.

He existed within himself, unrevealed.

To the crowd, of course, he was a marvellous legend, and moving always in the glory of that legend he received their wondering awe—an awe tinged with contempt for his lack of ostentation and public splendour.

“At last,” said her father grimly, when she opened the door.

In two words he had resumed his terrible sway over her.

Agnes looked timidly from one to the other and slipped past them into the house.

There’s not many in this district as ’as gotten that to their names, Anna—no, nor half that—let ’em be who they will.”

Anna had sensations such as a child might have who has received a traction-engine to play with in a back yard.

“What am I to do with it?” she asked plaintively.

“My compliments to your father.”

His final glance said half cynically, half in pity: “You are naive and unspoilt now, but these eyes will see yours harden like the rest. Wretched victim of gold, you are only one in a procession, after all.”

Outside, Anna thought that everyone had been very agreeable to her. Her complacency increased at a bound. She no longer felt ashamed of her shabby cotton dress.

Yes, to Anna, Mynors was perfect that night; the reality of him exceeded her dreamy meditations. Fearful on the brink of an ecstatic bliss, she could scarcely believe that from the enticements of a thousand women this paragon had been preserved for her.

Like most of us, she lacked the high courage to grasp happiness boldly and without apprehension; she had not learnt that nothing is too good to be true.

Mynors’ prayer was a cogent appeal for the success of the Revival. He knew what he wanted, and confidently asked for it, approaching God with humility but with self-respect. The prayer was punctuated by Amens from various parts of the room.

I have played the cornet, and I will play it again. I would play it on my head if by so doing I could bring sinners to Christ. I have been called a mountebank. I am one. I glory in it.

I am God’s mountebank, doing God’s precious business in my own way.

But God’s precious business cannot be carried on, even by a mountebank, without money, and there will be a collection towards the expenses of the Revival. During the collection we will sing ‘Rock of Ages,’ and you shall hear my cornet again.

With a devastating grunt Mr. Tellwright walked speechless out of the room. The girls cleared the table, exchanging sympathy with a single mute glance. Anna’s one satisfaction was that, even if she had remembered the message, she could not possibly have delivered it.

Ephraim Tellwright stayed in the front parlour till half-past ten o’clock, unseen but felt, like an angry god behind a cloud.

The consciousness that he was there, unappeased and dangerous, remained uppermost in the minds of the two girls during the morning. At half-past ten he opened the door.

and there were Willie Price and his father, commercial hares hunted by hounds of creditors, hares that turned in plaintive appeal to those greedy jaws for mercy. And yet, she, a hound, envied at that moment the hares.

Blessed are the meek, blessed are the failures, blessed are the stupid, for they, unknown to themselves, have a grace which is denied to the haughty, the successful, and the wise.

The very repulsiveness of old Titus, his underhand methods, his insincerities, only served to increase her sympathy for the pair. How could Titus help being himself any more than Henry Mynors could help being himself?

Already, she knew, the names of herself and Mynors were everywhere coupled, and she could not even enter a shop without being made aware, more or less delicately, that she was an object of piquant curiosity.

A woman is profoundly interesting to women at two periods only⁠—before she is betrothed and before she becomes the mother of her firstborn.

Anna was in the first period; her life did not comprise the second.

If no other relic of an immemorial past is to be seen in these modernised sordid streets, there is at least the living legacy of that extraordinary kinship between workman and work, that instinctive mastery of clay which the past has bestowed upon the present.

The horse is less to the Arab than clay is to the Bursley man.

He exists in it and by it; it fills his lungs and blanches his cheek; it keeps him alive and it kills him. His fingers close round it as round the hand of a friend. He knows all its tricks and aptitudes;

He pointed to the oven near by, in whose dark interior the forms of men, naked to the waist, could dimly be seen struggling with the weight of saggars full of ware.

It seemed like some release of martyrs, this unpacking of the immense oven, which, after being flooded with a sea of flame for fifty-four hours, had cooled for two days, and was yet hotter than the Equator.

The inertness and pallor of the saggars seemed to be the physical result of their fiery trial, and one wondered that they should have survived the trial. Mynors went into the place adjoining the oven and brought back a plate out of an open saggar;

No stage of the manufacture was incredible by itself, but the result was incredible.

It was the result that appealed to the imagination, authenticating the adage that fools and children should never see anything till it is done.

Anna pondered over the organising power, the forethought, the wide vision, and the sheer ingenuity and cleverness which were implied by the contents of this warehouse. “What brains!” she thought, of Mynors; “what quantities of all sorts of things he must know!”

“Yes,” she said; “I expect so. Well, I must go, at once; I’m afraid it’s very late now. Thank you for showing me round, and explaining, and—I’m frightfully stupid and ignorant. Goodbye.”

Vapid and trite phrases: what unimaginable messages the hearer heard in you!

Anna held out her hand, and he seized it almost convulsively, his incendiary eyes fastened on her face.

Willie was crushed at a blow, and obliged to retreat. He smiled painfully. “Come, Mr. Tellwright. Don’t talk like that. All we want is time.”

“Time is money,” said Tellwright, “and if us give you time us give you money. ’Stead o’ that, it’s you as mun give us money. That’s right reason.”

Willie laughed with difficulty. “See here, Mr. Tellwright. To cut a long story short, it’s like this. You ask for twenty-five pounds. I’ve got in my pocket a bill of exchange drawn by us on Mr.

With bitterness Anna reflected that she owed her holiday to the merest accident—for if the remittance had arrived a little earlier or a little later, or in the form of a cheque, she could not have utilised it.

It was an incredible day, the following Saturday, a warm and benign day of earliest autumn.

The Suttons, in a hired cab, called for Anna at half-past eight, on the way to the main line station at Shawport. Anna’s tin box was flung on to the roof of the cab amid the trunks and portmanteaux already there.

“I had my tea at Crewe,” Anna was about to say, but refrained, in due course drinking the cup prepared by Agnes. She felt passionately sorry for Agnes, too young to feel the shadow which overhung her future.

Anna would marry into freedom, but Agnes would remain the serf.

Would Agnes marry? Could she? Would her father allow it? Anna had noticed that in families the youngest, petted in childhood, was often sacrificed in maturity.

“You like Henry, don’t you, father?” Anna said. It was a failure in the desired tact, for Ephraim had never been known to admit that he liked anyone or anything.

Such natures are capable of nothing more positive than toleration.

“He’s a hardheaded chap, and he knows the value o’ money. Ay! that he does; he knows which side his bread’s buttered on.” A sinister emphasis marked the last sentence.

Anna’s feverish imagination reconstituted the scene in the slip-house: she saw it as something grand, accusing, and unanswerable; and she could not dismiss a feeling of acute remorse that she should have been engaged in pleasure at that very hour of death.

Surely some instinct should have warned her that the hare which she had helped to hunt was at its last gasp!

Mr. Sargent, the newly-appointed second minister, was in the pulpit—a little, earnest bachelor, who emphasised every sentence with a continual tremor of the voice. “Brethren,” he said, after the second hymn—and his tones vibrated with a singular effect through the half-empty building:

They could go back into the past and find other cases where a swift impulse had shattered the edifice of a lifetime. They knew that the history of families and of communities is crowded with disillusion. They had discovered that character is changeless, irrepressible, incurable.

They were aware of the astonishing fact, which takes at least thirty years to learn, that a Sunday-school superintendent is a man.

And the suicide of Titus Price, when they had realised it, served but to confirm their most secret and honest estimate of humanity, that estimate which they never confided to a soul.

He glanced up at her, his face wet, yet apparently not shamed by the tears. She could not meet his gaze without herself crying, and so she turned her head. “I was only thinking,” he stammered, “only thinking—what an angel you are.”

Only the meek, the timid, the silent, can, in moments of deep feeling, use this language of hyperbole without seeming ridiculous.

He was her great child, and she knew that he worshipped her. Oh, ineffable power, that out of misfortune canst create divine happiness!

She went to bed resigned; sad, but not gloomy. It was not for nothing that during all her life she had been accustomed to infelicity.

Experience had taught her this: to be the mistress of herself.

She knew that she could face any fact—even the fact of her dispassionate frigidity under Mynors’ caresses. It was on the firm, almost rapturous resolve to succour Willie Price, if need be, that she fell asleep.

“I can’t eat; it’ll choke me.”

“Let it choke you,” she said. “You’ve got to swallow it.”

Child of a hundred sorrows, he must be treated as a child. As soon as Willie was gone she took off her hat and jacket, and lit a lamp; there was no gas in the kitchen.

“Let it choke you,” she said. “You’ve got to swallow it.”

Child of a hundred sorrows, he must be treated as a child.

As soon as Willie was gone she took off her hat and jacket, and lit a lamp; there was no gas in the kitchen.