The Bell and the Bell-Ringer

Reference

CoE-0006

Category

parable

Version

1.0

In a valley town the bell was rung four times a day by a man who lived beside the tower.

He was not skilled. Anyone could have done it. He pulled the rope at dawn, at midday, at the end of the working afternoon, and at dusk, and he had done so for thirty-one years, and he was paid a small amount from the town’s funds, which had been questioned at every budget meeting for as long as anyone could remember.

He was not always exactly on time. He was usually within a few minutes. In winter, when he was slow on the stairs, he could be as much as a quarter of an hour late at dawn, and the mill downstream had complained about this in writing on two occasions.

A mechanism was purchased. It was not expensive and it kept the time exactly. It was installed in the spring, and the man was thanked, and his small payment was ended, and the town’s budget was that year in surplus for the first time in six years.

The bell rang exactly at dawn.

Some time later — perhaps two years, the accounts of it differ — a woman on the high lane noticed that she had not seen the old widow from the end house in a while, and went to check, and found what she found. It had been some days.

The man who had rung the bell had walked the high lane four times a day. This had not been part of the ringing. It was simply the way from his door to the tower, and back, and out again, and back, and in the course of it he had passed eleven houses, and had come to know which shutters opened when, and which did not, and whose chimney was cold on a cold morning.

He had never described this as part of his work, because it had not occurred to him that it was work. When the mechanism was proposed he had said only that he did not mind, and that his knees were bad, and that it was probably sensible.

There were other things.

The mill had complained about the dawn bell, but the mill had also, on three occasions, sent a boy up to ask him to hold the midday ring for twenty minutes while a repair was finished, and he had held it, and the whole valley had eaten late without anyone needing to be told why.

Children had been sent to him when they were in the way. He had let them pull the rope. Several of them, grown, could still remember the weight of it going up.

When the river had risen in the year of the bad autumn, he had rung the bell continuously, at a time when no bell was due, and people had come out of their houses because a bell rung at the wrong time means something, and there is no way to specify that in advance.

The mechanism rang at the correct times. It had no capacity to ring at an incorrect one.

None of this was discovered at once, and none of it was discovered as a single argument. It came out over years, in small remarks at gatherings, in the way people do not so much conclude a thing as find that they have been assuming it for a while.

There was a proposal, eventually, to employ someone to walk the high lane. It was discussed seriously. The difficulty was in describing the post. Walking the lane four times a day and looking at shutters is not a job that can be written down without sounding either trivial or intrusive, and the person appointed to it would have known they were being watched for, which is a different thing from being seen.

The proposal was not adopted. A rota was suggested instead, and operated for a while, and lapsed, as rotas do.

The mechanism is still there. It has been repaired twice. It keeps excellent time, and the mill has never complained again, and on the anniversary of the flood some of the older people still look up when the bell rings at the hour, as though it might not stop.