CHAPTER XIV—A RECALL
AFTER this event I never saw Squire Antony Annis any more. Within a week, I had left the place, and I was not there again until the year A. D. 1884, a period of fifty-one years. Yet the lovely village was clear enough in my memory. I approached it by one of the railroads boring their way through the hills and valleys surrounding the place, and as I did so, I recalled vividly its pretty primitive cottages—each one set in its own garden of herbs and flowers. I could hear the clattering of the looms in the loom sheds attached to most of these dwellings. I could see the handsome women with their large, rosy families, and the burly men standing in groups discussing some recent sermon, or horse race, or walking with their sweethearts; and perhaps singing “The Lily of the Valley,” or “There is a Land of Pure Delight!” I could hear or see the children laughing or quarreling, or busy with their bobbins at the spinning wheel, and I could even follow every note of the melody the old church chimes were flinging into the clear, sweet atmosphere above me.
In reality, I had no hopes of seeing or hearing any of these things again, and the nearer I approached Annis Railroad Station, the more surely I was aware that my expectation of disappointment was a certain presage. I found the once lovely village a large town, noisy and dirty and full of red mills. There were whole streets of them, their lofty walls pierced with more windows than there are days in a year, and their enormously high chimneys shutting out the horizon as with a wall. The street that had once overlooked the clear fast-running river was jammed with mills, the river had become foul and black with the refuse of dyeing materials and other necessities of mill labor.
The village had totally disappeared. In whatever direction I looked there was nothing but high brick mills, with enormously lofty chimneys lifted up into the smoky atmosphere. However, as my visit was in the winter, I had many opportunities of seeing these hundreds and thousands of mill windows lit up in the early mornings and in the twilight of the autumn evenings. It was a marvelous and unforget-able sight. Nothing could make commonplace this sudden, silent, swift appearance of light from the myriad of windows, up the hills, and down the hills, through the valleys, and following the river, and lighting up the wolds, every morning and every evening, just for the interval of dawning and twilight. As a spectacle it is indescribable; there is no human vocabulary has a word worthy of it.
The operatives were as much changed as the place. All traces of that feudal loyalty which had existed between Squire Annis and his weavers, had gone forever, with home and hand-labor, and individual bargaining. The power-loom weaver was even then the most independent of all workers. And men, women and children were well educated, for among the first bills passed by Parliament after the Reform Bill was one founding National schools over the length and breadth of England; and the third generation since was then entering them. “Now that you have given the people the vote,” said Lord Brougham, “you must educate them. The men who say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to England’s national problems must be able to read all about them.” So National Schools followed The Bill, and I found in Annis a large Public Library, young men’s Debating Societies, and courses of lectures, literary and scientific.
On the following Sunday night, I went to the Methodist chapel. The old one had disappeared, but a large handsome building stood on its site. The moment I entered it, I was met by the cheerful Methodist welcome and because I was a stranger I was taken to the Preacher’s pew. Someone was playing a voluntary, on an exceptionally fine organ, and in the midst of a pathetic minor passage—which made me feel as if I had just lost Eden over again—there was a movement, and with transfigured faces the whole congregation rose to its feet and began to sing. The voluntary had slipped into the grand psalm tune called “Olivet” and a thousand men and women, a thousand West Riding voices, married the grand old Psalm tune to words equally grand—
“Lo! He comes with clouds descending,
Once for favored sinners slain;