Harold Brighouse

“ 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. ”

“ It seemed that, on the night of the Conversazione, he had had his hour, and
“men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all.”
It did not come to Sam as the shattering of his world—only the death of Anne could have done that—but certainly as a stunning blow. It was the first time that he had come intimately close to death and he missed death’s beauty and its peace. He saw too well its ugliness and the detail of a burial. It hurt, not because Tom Branstone had had but little joy in life, but because he died too soon to see the glory of his son. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Anne’s sacrifice had failed. It wasn’t, perhaps, the right sacrifice: it was, at any rate, the immortal commonplace, the sacrifice of the older generation to the younger, of the mother to the son, of age to youth. Spectacular, heroic as it was, it was yet in the scheme of things, and it is the sacrifice of youth to youth which can surprise by unexpectedness.
For some it is a sacrifice to cease talking even when they are convinced that talk is futile. If Effie was one of these, she made that little sacrifice at once. ”

“ Why did smart business men exist if not to exploit purchasers?
All this was highly comforting, but to confess the need for comfort was to admit to disquiet, and he found that it was one thing to argue in this strain with his conscience, and another to boast to Anne of his achievement. Women don’t understand business, and he had an uneasy feeling that the ethics of the transaction would not satisfy Anne. He decided that he had better not tell her, that he must resist his impulse of surprising her with the gift of a seal-skin coat, and remained a capitalist under the rose. ”

“ Anne’s lip tightened when she saw that Ada did not change the flimsy shoes and that her hat eclipsed their flimsiness. A “baby” hat, of imitation lace, from which her face peeped out like a drooping, sapless flower. “Yes,” thought Anne. “Men being men, that hat is clever. It’s a trap for fools and it caught my fool. Ada Struggles, you’re dangerous.”
They took the front seat on the tram and aloud she said, using purposely her roughest accent: “It’s queer to think of our Sam marrying a lady. ”

“ They sought to link love with property, and to control the uncontrollable. They make laws round love, which is like enclosing an eagle in a cobweb; and we suffer for their laws. We keep the law and suffer; break it and we suffer.
She knew that she would suffer, but she would bring beauty to Sam. He hadn’t capitulated to her talk, and she thought that he had no chance in Manchester. Perhaps her Sam was with her in his dreams, but each dawn brought him to accustomed ugliness, and habit clogged his days with mud. ”

“ But falling out of love is desperately easy.
“As a walled town,” says Touchstone, “is worthier than a village, so is the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a bachelor,” and Sam was married. He could lay that flattering unction to his soul, could hold his head higher, because he was a ratepayer and bore responsibilities, and went home at night to a house with a garden. He did all that, and it was empty honour because success in marriage, as in all else, is not to be had ready-made, but depends upon the will to make adjustments. ”

“ When she set her heart on marriage, she hadn’t, perhaps, looked further than the ring, the ceremony and the honourable state of being Mrs. Branstone.
She plunged to shops and spending money, Sam to business and making it; and some, at any rate, of the now thwarted love he had been storing for his son passed to the business. Somewhere at the back of his mind he knew his business was not lovable; that it was pitch; that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled. But neither can one deal successfully in pitch without arriving at faith in the virtues of pitch. ”

“ Branstone was Prime Minister that night.
It was one o’clock before the young policeman felt at liberty to resume his beat, and Sam left the enchanted river for his little hotel in Norfolk Street. Ada had her back to him and apparently she slept. Actually she was wide awake; she was wondering whether it had happened to any other woman to be treated so abominably on her honeymoon.
She brushed her hair nest morning with a notable viciousness. Hair has uses beyond those of mere adornment. It is an admirable veil through which one can watch without being seen to watch. ”

“ Effie, I’m not much of a cove and I’ve flattered myself that sincerity departed from me when I cut my wisdom teeth. I tried to live up to that belief and it’s only half come off. I’ve tried to make a raree-show of life, to sit outside and watch the puppets play, and life’s won. Life’s got me down, and I’m inside now. I’m where you’ve put me, and a good place too: I’m near the radiator and it warms the cockles of my heart. ”

“ Sam, indeed, was less unhappy than Effie because he had sunk into one of those leaden, numbed moods of his which he knew of old as the stage preliminary to his brightest inspirations, and he could wait resignedly if not happily for the inspiration to emerge.
Decidedly, he thought, he needed inspiration, He had to discover Ada, to search for her reality, and, having found it, to drag it out and set it in the forefront of her being. A big task: one whose success he must not jeopardize again by rushing at her prematurely without distinct plan. ”

“ Peter and Anne went opposite ways in their search to know whether this marriage was the right thing for their children’s happiness. Peter ignored the bread and butter problem, or took it for granted: and his was the higher wisdom. He knew that Sam was not made of the stuff that starves for bread; not in his body but in his soul was Sam likely to be pinched.
Anne took the earthlier view that happiness resulted from home comforts. Ada, as she knew, was no shining beauty, and the better for that. Beauty is skin-deep. ”

“ It was illusion, and a wilder perversion of the truth than the ordinary self-deceiver can attain; but illusion is the breath of life, and she had fed on her deception till, like a drug-taker, she could not live without it. She had blazoned it abroad in a hundred drawing-rooms. If there were low-voiced colloquies of this or that affair, if it was hinted that men were faithless ever, Ada would grow superior and boast the flawless rectitude of Sam. ”

“ Still, she hadn’t charred, and there was in fact nothing which needed charring, nothing but a cleanliness which positively irritated her. She itched to be doing something and there was manifestly nothing to do except to enjoy herself. And if Anne Branstone was not doing a job, she liked, at any rate, to know that her next job was around the corner. She began, for the first time in her life, to feel a friendliness towards dirt. In the midst of this sprawling insolence of triumphant cleanliness, she hankered for a little humanizing soot. ”

“ Sam reached Manchester very early in the morning, and spent the rest of his broken night in a lugubrious hotel near the station. Manchester hotels rarely make for gaiety, but it is wonderful what even a short night will do in the way of altering a point of view.
He expected to be depressed at the very air of Manchester, and, instead, he sniffed at it as Mr. Minnifie had once relished the odours of Greenheys, with an exile’s greed. He knew that he ought to feel a loathing of the office, but found that he opened the letters with more than his usual zest. ”

“ They seemed to look back from their equable security to a wild infancy of their emotion, a fumbling, frenzied, awkward age of love. Of course they looked back happily, from a place where things were happy and serene to one where things were happy and impetuous.
The Dale was full of wonder, with a wonder which now belonged unerringly to fact and had mellowed in reality.
For Anne, it was a pretty place, but “lonesome,” and, amazingly to them, she chafed to leave it. Anne did not suffer holidays gladly. ”

“ Emphatically, here was a play which seized its audience, gripped them, tickled them, beslavered them, throttled them, did with them what it liked and when it liked; all to their immense and vociferous delight. He tried to keep his aloofness, to see how it was done, to tear the heart out of this mystery. Here was something which the public wanted; he had only to diagnose it, and the Open Sesame to fortune was his.
He couldn’t do it. Detachment slipped from him, never to return till the curtain fell. He wasn’t a superman, immune from other men’s emotions. ”

“ Women are wicked, but men are only weak; so that, though Miss Entwistle faced Sam at dinner from the next table, it was some days before she could spare her attention from the back of the greater sinner and transfer it to the face of the lesser. She could stare to her heart’s content; it did not matter to Sam, who had only eyes for Effie: and the stare of Miss Entwistle was very persistent indeed. ”

“ Madge seconded him.
“He needs to be,” said Anne dryly. “He’s a window-cleaner.”
“I’m steady by nature, Mrs. Branstone, as well as trade. I don’t drink. Somehow one glass of ale is enough to make me whimsical, so I take none at all. I know I’m being bowdacious in my love, but I’m moved to plead with you. We’d not be standing in Sam’s way. We’d live that quiet and snug you’d never know we’re in the town at all.” Anne looked at him with a faint trace of appreciation drenched in her profound contempt. ”