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;
Thousand, thousand saints attending,
Swell the triumph of his train.
Halleluiah!
God appears on the earth to reign.
“Yea, Amen! let all adore thee,
High on Thy eternal throne;
Savior, take the power and glory!
Claim the kingdom for Thine own.
Halleluiah!
Everlasting God come down!”
And at this hour I am right glad, because my memory recalls that
wonderful congregational singing; even as I write the words, I hear it.
It was not Emotionalism. No, indeed! It was a good habit of the soul.
The next morning I took an early train to the cathedral city of Ripon,
and every street I passed through on my way to the North-Western Station
was full of mills. You could not escape the rattle of their machinery,
nor the plunging of the greasy piston rods at every window. It was not
yet eight o’clock, but the station was crowded with men carrying samples
of every kind of wool or cotton. They were neighbors, and often friends,
but they took no notice of each other. They were on business, and their
hands were full of bundles. So full that I saw several men who could not
manage their railway ticket, and let the conductor take it from their
teeth.
Now when I travel, I like to talk with my company, but as I looked
around, I could not persuade myself that any of these business-saturated
men would condescend to converse with an inquisitive woman. However, a
little further on, a very complete clergyman came into my compartment.
He looked at me inquiringly, and I felt sure he was speculating about
my social position. So I hastened to put him at ease, by some inquiries
about the Annis family.
“O dear me!” he replied. “So you remember the old Squire Antony! How
Time does fly! The Annis people still love and obey Squire Antony. I
suppose he is the only person they do love and obey. How long is it
since you were here?”
“Over fifty years. I saw the great Reform Bill passed, just before I
left Annis in 1833.”
“You mean the first part of it?”
“Well, then, sir, had it more than one part?”
“I should say so. It seemed to need a deal of altering and repairing.
The Bill you saw pass was Grey’s bill. It cleaned up the Lords and
Commons, and landed gentlemen of England. Thirty-five years later, Derby
and Disraeli’s Reform Bill gave the Franchise to the great middle class,
mechanics and artizan classes, and this very year Gladstone extended the
Bill to take in more than two millions of agricultural and day laborers.
It has made a deal of difference with all classes.”
“I think it is quite a coincidence that I should be here at the finish
of this long struggle. I have seen the beginning and the end of it.
Really quite a coincidence,” and I laughed a little foolish laugh,
for the clergyman did not laugh with me. On the contrary he said
thoughtfully: “Coincidences come from higher intelligences than
ourselves. We cannot control them, but they are generally fortunate.”
“Higher intelligences than ourselves?” I asked. “Yes. This world is both
the workfield and the battlefield of those sent to minister unto souls
who are to be heirs of salvation, and who perhaps, in their turn,
become comforting and helpful spirits to the children of men. Yes. A
coincidence is generally a fortunate circumstance. Someone higher than
ourselves, has to do with it. Are you an American?”
“I have lived in America for half-a-century.”
“In what part of America?”
“In many parts, north and south and west. My life has been full of
changes.”
“Change is good fortune. Yes, it is. To change is to live, and to have
changed often, is to have had a perfect life.”
“Do you think the weavers of Annis much improved by all the changes that
steam and machinery have brought to them?”
“No. Machinery confers neither moral nor physical perfection, and steam
and iron and electricity do not in any way affect the moral nature. Men
lived and died before these things were known. They could do so again.”
Here the guard came and unlocked our carriage, and my companion gathered
his magazines and newspapers together and the train began to slow up.
He turned to me with a smile and said, “Good-by, friend. Go on having
changes, and fear not.”
“But if I _do_ fear?”
“Look up, and say:
“O Thou who changest not! Abide with me!”
With these words he went away forever. I had not even asked his name,
nor had he asked mine. We were just two wayfarers passing each other
on life’s highway. He had brought me a message, and then departed. But
there are other worlds beyond this. We had perhaps been introduced for
this future. For I do believe that no one touches our life here, who has
not some business or right to do so. For our lives before this life and
our lives yet to be are all one, separated only by the little sleep we
call death.
I reached Ripon just at nightfall, and the quiet of the cathedral city,
its closed houses, and peaceful atmosphere, did not please me. After the
stress and rush of the West Riding, I thought the place must be asleep.
On the third morning I asked myself, “What are you doing here? What
has the past to give you? To-day is perhaps yours--Yesterday is as
unattainable as To-morrow.” Then the thought of New York stirred me, and
I hastened and took the fastest train for Liverpool, and in eight days I
had crossed the sea, and was in New York and happily and busily at work
again.
But I did not dismiss Annis from my memory and when the first mutterings
of the present war was heard, I remembered Squire Antony, and his charge
to the weavers of Annis--“It may so happen,” he said, “that in the
course of years, some nation, that has lost the grip of all its good
senses, will try to invade England. It isn’t likely, but it might be
so. Then I say to each of you, and every man of you, without one hour’s
delay, do as I have often heard you sing, and say you would do:--
“ ‘Off with your Labor Cap! rush to the van!
The sword for your tool, and the height of your plan
To turn yoursen into a fighting man_!
Would they do so?
As I repeated the squire’s order, I fell naturally into the Yorkshire
form of speech and it warmed my heart and set it beating high and fast.
Would the ‘Yorkshires’ still honor the charge Squire Annis had given
them? Oh, how could I doubt it! England had been in some war or other,
nearly ever since the squire’s charge, and the ‘Yorkshires’ had always
been soon and solid in rushing to her help. It was not likely that in
this tremendous struggle, they would either be too slow, or too cold.
Not they! Not they! They were early at the van, and doubly welcome; and
they are helping at this hour to fight a good fight for all humanity;
and learning the while, how to become of the highest type of manhood
that can be fashioned in this world. Not by alphabets and books, but by
the crucial living experiences that spring only from the courses of
Life and Death--divine monitions, high hopes and plans, that enlarge the
judgment, and the sympathies, the heart and the intellect, and that with
such swift and mysterious perfection, as can only be imparted while the
mortal stands on the very verge of Immortality.
Very soon, now, they will come home bringing a perfect peace with them,
_then!_ how good will be their quiet, simple lives, and their daily
labor, and their Paper Cap!
THE END