The Bells That Nobody Heard

by SEAN O’FAOLAIN

THE bells are simple bells, a bare octave. If the bell-ringer wants to play “The Londonderry Air” he cannot ring the lop note which is outside the octave but must drop down to its counterpart inside the octave; and if he is playing “Come Back to Erin,” in which there are many half-notes, he has to ring the nearest note below or above each. The effect is a bit confusing. But they are old bells and sweet bells and visitors from all over the world have come to hear them, and the townsfolk are proud and fond of them. After all, you cannot help feeling a bond with bells that ring every quarterhour of your life down the wind; or that, every so often, send “Abide with Me” or “Will Ye No Come Back Again” down out of the sky to where you sit at your desk, or unroll cotton on a counter, humming the tunes in unison with them. And you can’t ignore bells that loll their boom through the silent night in stately indifference to you or your thoughts. As the local poet has it — not very clearly I am afraid, but we can gather his meaning: —

The little man who rings the carillon is very old now. As he says himself, “I seen ‘em come and I seen ‘em go.” He says, “I rang seven wars out.” Though when he started to list them for me he could only count two big ones and four small ones — the Crimean, the Matabele, the Boer, and the Soudan. But then he said — and his broad, gentle smile, that rarely leaves his face, grew more broad and more benevolent still; “What’s a war here or there to a man who buried wan queen and four kings? Yes, it’s a fact! I seen live monarchs on the throne of England. Victoria. Old Edward. Old George. Young Edward. And young George again.”He says, ”I seen the British army in these streets, and the British navy down in that harbor.” (From the belfry parapet you have a magnificent view out to the haze of the sea.) “I seen the American navy there. I seen boats of all nations there. I seen Cork burning from this belfry. I seen the British army leave Ireland.”

And you can tell from the way his smile widens and saddens that he is one of the old school.

“I’ll play you any tune you like,”he says. “Except on Sundays. 1 only play hymns on Sundays. But there’s one tune I won’t play you. I won’t play ‘God Save the King’!”

He explains why. The bells rang “God Save the King" when Victoria died, and when Edward died, and when George the Fifth died. But by then the old order had gone out of Ireland and as the bellringer pulled the ropes in his loft, which is big and bare and high as a barn and lit by a great arched window composed of hundreds of small panes, the kids in the lane outside began to crash stones through the window.

“Ninety-seven panes of glass they broke on me,” he says. “The bishop said I must never play that tune again.” He looked at me and smiled his benevolent smile, and I thought that his forbidden tune was the apple in his Garden, and I wondered whether there had been no Eve.

2

I MET her aunt, a nice old gossip around the corner who kept one of those tiny shops that sell papers and tobacco to the men, sweets and tops and marbles to the kids, and odds and ends of groceries to their mothers. Eve’s name, I gathered, was Jenny Phipps: fair-haired, blue-eyed, over for a holiday from Sheffield. The bell-ringer used pump her up with his old talk about kings and wars, up in the loft, or strolling around the graveyard. He used even let her pull the bell-ropes. “He was gone about her,” laughed the gossip. She had three passions: the American movies, the English princesses, and getting her own way. She was about twelve years old. All the bell-ringer could say to her the first time she made her lunatic proposition to him was:

“No fear! Is it after me ninety-seven panes of glass? Oho, no, Jenny. Not me!”

“Cowardy, cowardy custard,” she taunted.

“You go and ask the bishop,”he defended himself.

“You’re always boasting how you rang ’um for ould King Edward.” Her English accent pronouncing Irish words always enchanted the bellringer; as the jade well knew. “And now you won’t ring ‘um for his grand-daughter! His own granddaughter get tin’ married and you not to ring the bells? You ought to sink through the ground with shame. ”

“Ninety-seven panes o’ glass,” said the bellringer mournfully.

“But sure nobody’ll know who or what you’re ringin’ ‘um for?”

That was where the bell-ringer slipped.

“Well, I suppose I could ring you a chime all right. I’ll ring you a chime.”

That satisfied her until she found him ringing chimes for days before the wedding of the princess. He came down one afternoon from a prolonged bout of chimes and found her silting on the wooden steps leading to the loft, sobbing to herself. How was he to know she had turned on the tap as soon as she heard him coming?

“What’s wrong at all, Jenny?” he asked, in dismay,

“You’re ringin’ the chimes every bloomin’ day,” she gulped. “You should have kept ‘um for the wedding the way you promised.”

“But I have to practice ‘em,” he said.

She gave him a dirty look and at the sight of it he shriveled.

“You’re ringin’ ‘um because you don’t want anyone to know wot they’re for. You’ll have to ring ‘God Save the King,’ and no more nonsense about it,” she ordered, and looked up through her tousled mop to see how he would take it.

“But I’d lose me job, Jenny. It’s out of the question. It’s im-posss-ible.”

Wailing and bawling she dashed down the stairs and for the next day and the next day she refused as much as to look at him.

Unfortunately for the bell-ringer he was by this time just as excited about the marriage of the princess as Jenny Phipps was. He read the newspapers, he saw the photographs, he listened to the radio. He talked and talked about the night King Edward “passed away,” and how the Opera House was closed, and the flags were at half-mast, and he rang “God Save the King” every day for a week. Never before had he felt so marooned, an old spar thrown on the beach and forgotten.

“Her ladyship,” he smiled to the aunt, “appears to be a bit cross with me.”

“She’s very bitther of you, then. She says you’re no man. But pay no heed to her, sure the child have no sense.”

The bell-ringer smiled his forlorn smile and went off to comfort himself with “Abide with Me.” His fingertips then touched, in turn, the ropes which, with a simple pull, would send out over the roofs in the valley the notes of “God ... save ... our ... gra ... cions ... ”

On the marriage day he listened to every broadcast. He heard the bells of Westminster. He heard ihe shouting of the people. Several times he heard the forbidden anthem. Jenny Phipps listened, too, and lots of the neighbors crowded into the little shop to listen with them. In between-times Jenny sal on the steps of the belfry or mooned among the lichen-mottled stones in the graveyard.

Once she crossed his path. She said, “You’re not goin’ to play it ?”

He smiled his regretful smile, and she wept again. He bought her toffees. She rejected them scornfully. At dusk they were in the little shop again drinking in the cheering of the mobs outside the palace, and all the time the bell-ringer smiled and Jenny wept for joy. When it was over and they were outside on the pavement, with the distant hum of the town coming up again from the valley, she said: —

“They’re gone off now, and he’ll be kissin’ her all night, and not wan mangy tune out of yer bloody bells. As long as ever I live, cut me throat in three places, so help me God this night, I’ll never, never, never speak a single word to you again!”

“Jenny,” he leaned down to her, and whispered. “Stay awake tonight.”

“ When ? ” she asked.

“One o’clock,” he whispered. “But not wan word to a living soul.”

She clambered up his chest and kissed him all over like a dog.

Of course Jenny was sound asleep by one o’clock.

The whole town was sound asleep. When the bellringer stole up the wooden stairs not even a mouse scampered across the wooden floor. But first he climbed up to the parapet and looked over the moist roofs, and the moon was low over the distant lochs of the harbor. Not a murmur, He returned to the loft. The creaking of the great bell that rings the hours told him that the ratchets were engaging: the usual two minutes’ warning. He gripped the ropes and waited for the solitary boom and lingering echo to die away. Then he played it.

In that vacant hour the bells sound a thousand times more loud. He felt that the very dead below in the graveyard must hear him. It took about forty seconds. He heard the last vibration die, and stood listening. Not a sign. He clambered up to the parapet again, and with the sweat cooling on his forehead, he looked over the moon-pale roofs. Not a sign. And never after did he get any sign from anywhere that anybody had heard. Yet, some people must have heard: sick people, people lying awake and thinking, late strollers, lovers who had loved too late and lovers who had strayed too long. They would probably have talked about it the next morning as something they dreamed or imagined. By now he probably feels unsure himself, smiling his wide smile as he considers the matter, whether he ever rang the bells at all.

So, when I met him a couple of days after I had collected all this I said, challengingly: —

“You told me you never played ‘God Save the King.’ Didn’t you play it in the middle of the night?”

He smiled. “That’s a story they put out about me.”

“Are you sure now?”

“I’m as sure,” said the bell-ringer, “as I’m sure of anything.”

But the trouble is that, as I looked at him, I couldn’t be sure that he is ever sure of very much.