Argosy (UK), January 1955 — page 107: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

TWELVE BELLS 105 Soon his wife wanted to lay breakfast for the morning and turned him out of his place. “ And shift they dratted bells out of my way,” she said. George looked round for somewhere to put them. His was not a tidy household, and horizontal surfaces were cluttered with darning, bottles of orange juice, spanners, celluloid dolls, bits of a wireless set. ‘There was a row of hooks along the top of the dresser with cups hanging from them. He cleared them and suspended the bells in careful order. The cups were part of a blue-and-white service his mother-in- law had given them for a wedding present, so his wife opened _her mouth, but when she saw his agonized efforts not to let the bells make a sound, she closed it again, and merely put the cups in a cupboard where no one could knock them over. George relit a half-smoked cigarette while she finished laying the table, and then they went to bed. When he woke, it was completely dark and silent. Even the cockerels, whose premature dawn was about four in the morning, had not yet started up. He raised his head and peered at the luminous face of his alarm-clock; it said a quarter to three. He was a heavy and solid sleeper and he could not think what had woken him. He lay down again and shut his eyes, and then suddenly he realized what it was. His bells were ringing. The sound came faintly through the beams and plaster from the kitchen below. They rang with a kind of muted insistence, separately but at random, every second or less; their ringing had neither tune nor pattern, but it turned him cold. He lay there, chilled and sweating, and listened. Nothing on earth would have got him out of bed and downstairs. His wife slept peacefully and he did not wake her. He said to himself, “I’m dreaming, that’s all. ’Tis the draught,” he told himself. ‘‘ Or the shelf’s loose. Or mice.” He stayed rigid in the pitch darkness, straining his ears, and the ringing grew fainter and fainter and at last shivered into silence. He went on listening, but it had stopped; there was only the tick of his clock, and then the noise of the first cockerel, distant over the fields. After some time he convinced himself he’d been dreaming; and soon after that he slept. When he went to work in the morning he walked still in mid- winter darkness, with fading stars in a cold sky and cat-ice on the mud of the lane. But it was not the same kind of dark; by then he was persuaded it had been imagination, a sort of half- waking nightmare. At breakfast by companionable lamplight, comicloooks.comn