Harold Brighouse

“ MAGGIE. Show me your hands, Willie.
WILLIE. They're dirty. (He holds them out hesitatingly.)
MAGGIE. Yes, they're dirty, but they're clever. They can shape the leather like no other man's that ever came into the shop. Who taught you, Willie? (She retains his hands.)
WILLIE. Why, Miss Maggie, I learnt my trade here.
MAGGIE. Hobson's never taught you to make boots the way you do.
WILLIE. I've had no other teacher.
MAGGIE (dropping his hands.) And needed none. You're a natural born genius at making boots. It's a pity you're a natural fool at all else. ”

“ I haven't been a man. I've been a miracle.
ELSIE. You always were.
JACK. I've only done my human best before to-day. To-day I've been a superman, a thing inspired, protected guarded by a greater mastery than I have ever known. It wasn't football as it is in life. It's been the football of my dreams.
EDMUND. It makes you talk.
JACK. I'm still intoxicated with the glamour of that game.
EDMUND. Yes, Metherell, success is sweet. But somebody is suffering for this.
ELSIE. Who?
EDMUND. If Birchester have won, Blackton have lost.
ELSIE. For an outsider, you take it seriously. ”

“ It's a better way than listening to dry-as-dust debates and tramping endless miles through the division lobbies. I'm getting at the people. I'm carrying the fiery sword of revolutionary Socialism through the length and breadth of the land. I'm the harbinger of the new age. Wherever I go I leave behind me an awakened people, stirred from their lethargy and indolent acceptance of things as they are, fired with new hopes of the coming dispensation, eager to throw off the yoke and strike their blow for freedom, justice, and the social revolution. ”

“ She was all calculation now, while Sam forgot to calculate, and walked with Ada on his arm along the main drive of Heaton Park.
Romance kept step with him and put a radiant veil between his sober senses and this witching hour: through glamour he beheld his Ada, and saw that she was good. He soared to high ambition, either to die or to possess the nymph, and now, that heady hour, to put all to the test amongst the rhododendron bushes behind the Hall.
There, by a patch of ancient turf, he halted her, and found a seat near the pool where water-lilies thrive: a lovers’ nook, love haunted. ”

“ ROSIE. You can't marry me!
CHARLIE. Oh, don't think worse of me than you must. It's not another woman. It never was and it never can be. I shall never love any one but you.
ROSIE. Then why, why?
CHARLIE. My life's too full.
ROSIE (wonderingly) . Your life?
CHARLIE. Yes. How shall I put it? (Crossing to soja l.) A Catholic priest doesn't marry lest marriage distract him from his wrestle with the devil. I too am going to wrestle with a devils the devil of industrialism. I've things to do in the world, a battle to fight which can only be fought in the strength of loneliness. ”

“ MARTIN. Oh, you needn't scruple. Life's no use to a weaver in Barlow's factory, and my work is finished now.
GUY (to Ruth) . Give it him back.
RUTH. You'll fight together if I do.
GUY. Do as I tell you, Ruth.
(Ruth holds out the pistol to Martin, who doesn't take it.)
MARTIN. I warn you this is murder.
GUY. You shouldn't carry firearms if you're not competent to use them.
MARTIN. The murder is of you. This is my night, Guy Barlow. You've had the power to starve and sweat the weavers of the valley, but the tide has turned at last. ”

“ We grow in happiness. We shall have outgrown Marbeck soon. We shall have grown a sturdy happiness that can withstand the towns. It might withstand Manchester and I think it will. To love, to work, to look for other people’s strength and not for other people’s weaknesses: that is to be happy, Sam. And happiness counts more than all. It roots and then it spreads. It spreads. Infection isn’t only of disease, infection is of happiness and youth. There’s too much age, too many men and women in the world who have forgotten love. We have to build, and build on happiness. ”

“ Dorothy Verners sitting her horse as if she had been cradled on it, straight, tall Dorothy whose beauty was so different from Phoebe’s soft prettiness. Dorothy had beauty like a birthright. She came of generations of women whose first duty was to be admirable, who had, as it were, experimented long ago with beauty and had fixed its lines for their successors. Where Phoebe suggested a hasty improvisation of comeliness, where, in her, comeliness was unexpected and almost an impertinence, in Dorothy it was authentic and assured. ”

“ JABEZ (contemptuously) . You fool.
CHARLIE. I quite agree. (Rises and paces up and down.) Yes, fool, fool, fool. Fool as much as if I'd sought the philosopher's stone or the elixir of life. I did seek the elixir of life, and I will go on seeking it—life for those helpless hundreds driven by the need to live to certain death. Let me go on. Let me hope; but do not ask me to assist in getting orders for our deadly production. Every contract you sign your name to is the death-warrant of a workman. (Sitting on arm of sofa.)
JOHN (imploringly) . Charlie! ”

“ MAGGIE. You're talking a lot to Vickey and Alice, father. Where do I come in?
HOBSON. You? (Turning on her, astonished.)
MAGGIE. If you're dealing husbands round, don't I get one?
HOBSON. Well, that's a good one! (Laughs.) You with a husband! (Down in front of desk.)
MAGGIE. Why not?
HOBSON. Why not? I thought you'd sense enough to know. But if you want the brutal truth, you're past the marrying age. You're a proper old maid, Maggie, if ever there was one.
MAGGIE. I'm thirty.
HOBSON (facing her) . Aye, thirty and shelved. Well, all the women can't get husbands. ”

“ The world was hideous, Marbeck an illusion, Effie a fool. No: Effie was right. One could not run away from facts and hide one’s head amongst the hills, and say there were no facts. She had not brought him there to obscure facts, but to reveal them.
It remained to face them, to return to Manchester with new knowledge and new courage. It needed courage to turn his back on Marbeck, to go away from happiness to Ada.
He stamped upon that thought, as on a snake. It was disloyalty to Effie who had sacrificed to him and shown him all the beauty of her sacrifice. ”

“ If when you said you couldn't lose the memory of me you spoke the truth, you'll spare him, Martin. You won't go down amongst those men and lead them to the factory. I tried my best to carry out our plan. You told me that he wouldn't marry me, but I made him do it. And afterwards I tried. I did try, Martin. Only Guy's my husband and I love him now. I've learnt to love him till my love's the greatest thing in all the world. Don't kill him, Martin.
MARTIN. It will not be killing, Ruth. It won't be murder if a bullet finds its way in Guy Barlow's heart. Not murder, but an accident. ”

“ Bantison had pressed Reuben into manufacturing: he had discovered, almost at once, his enthusiasm for steam: he had surrendered himself with the imaginative glamor of the pioneer and if the road was stony, if once he had strayed down the by-path whose name was Phoebe, he had, at the end of it, Dorothy, that bright objective. Edward had none of these. Edward came from Oxford, with his spruce ambition to cut a figure at the bar, and was confronted with the menacing immensity of the great factory, full-grown in naked ugliness. ”

“ CHARLIE, Yes, the gutter where you poke in slime for sixpences, afraid to look up at God's blue sky or about you at your fellow-men lest some one else should pick up a sixpence while your head's turned. Oh, you conform right enough. You do nothing else. You conform to Success and Respectability, and they're the stronghold of the Devil.
JABEZ (recovering his temper, sitting down at desk and rubbing his hands genially, looking at John, laughing.) Sit down, Charlie. ”

“ It's a poor sort of woman who'll stay lazy when she sees her best chance slipping from her. A Salford life's too near the bone to lose things through the fear of speaking out.
WILLIE. I'm your best chance?
MAGGIE. You are that, Will.
WILLIE. Well, by gum! (Rises.) I never thought of this.
MAGGIE. Think of it now.
WILLIE. I am doing. Only the blow's a bit too sudden to think very clear. I've a great respect for you, Miss Maggie. You're a shapely body, and you're a masterpiece at selling in the shop, but when it comes to marrying, I'm bound to tell you that I'm none in love with you. ”