The Bell - Iris Murdoch [115]
He stood a while in the silent room looking at the bars of the grille and at the blank shut door of the panel behind them. Then he closed the panel on his side. How well she knew his heart. But her exhortations seemed to him a marvel rather than a practical inspiration. He was too tarnished an instrument to do the work that needed doing. Love. He shook his head. Perhaps only those who had given up the world had the right to use that word.
CHAPTER 20
The wind was blowing. Large piles of bulbous golden cloud passed quickly along the sky, obscuring and revealing the sun at short intervals. It was the sort of day which is gay in March but tiring in September. Dora was struggling with a white ribbon.
A sleepless night together with anxieties about the, it now seemed to her, colossal enterprise on which she had so rashly embarked had reduced Dora to a distracted state. The way in which, as she put it to herself, Toby had jumped upon her in the barn would at any other time have delighted her. The memory of his passionate childish kisses, still clear in her mind, moved her to tenderness, and she realized that she had not been unaware of the charms of that hard adolescent body and fresh uncertain face. But the excitement of Toby's brief embrace was swallowed up in her larger concern about the bell. She felt herself to be a priestess, dedicated now to a rite which made mere personal relations unimportant.
The scuffle in the barn had ended abruptly at the intervention of the bell. Neither of them could make out, having been absorbed in their activities of the moment before, how loud the sound had been. They decided it was probably not very loud, a mere murmur, and not to be compared with the full voice of the bell. All the same, a murmur from such a source was noise enough, and they waited anxiously in the silence that followed for any sound from the direction of the Court. As none came, they set to work at once on the next part of the operation which was carried out with a speed and efficiency which did Toby great credit. His only regret, which he expressed to Dora, was that she could have no idea how difficult what they had just successfully done had been. The bell now hung suspended by the second hawser a few feet from the ground. The hawser passed over the beam, out of the barn door, and its ringed end, pierced by a crowbar, was secured in the fork of a beech tree. The two conspirators had disguised the scene as best they could with twigs and creepers, and prepared to return to their beds. As they went, together this time, along the concrete road towards the Court Dora had taken Toby's hand in hers. Parting at the edge of the wood they faced each other in the moonlight. Trembling with nervous exultation, Toby took Dora by the shoulders and turned her until the moon shone upon her face. Amazed and delighted by her consenting passivity he contemplated her, and then took her in his arms, twisting her violently to receive his kiss and almost falling with her to the ground.
After these romantic adventures the next day had dawned somewhat soberly for Dora. Paul, who had searched for her in vain, and got his hand full of prickles from a gorse bush in the process, was not pleased with her when he returned to find her in bed; nor was he pleased when, after a brief sleep, they awoke at morning. He knew his wife's tastes well enough to suspect that she was not normally given to solitary communion with nature, especially at night, and he made no secret of finding her story of a moonlight ramble unconvincing. Nor did he hesitate to mention names in framing an alternative theory. Browbeaten before breakfast, Dora was in tears, genuinely sorry for Paul's distress, feeling herself for once unjustly accused, but unable to explain. More upsetting still, Paul then insisted on spending the morning