Читать книгу Rubble and Roseleaves and Things of That Kind - Frank William Boreham - Страница 6

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A fearful and wonderful contrivance is a front-door bell. The wire attached to my front-door bell is the line of communication between me and the universe. The universe knows it—and so do I. The front-door bell is the one thing about a private dwelling that is public property. If a stranger walked in at the front gate and began to push or pull at anything else, I should instantly send for the police; but if, with all the confidence of proprietorship, he walks straight to the front-door bell, and begins to push or pull at it, I regard the position as perfectly normal. No man living may enter my gate in order to inspect the roses, to admire the view or to stroke the cat. But any one has a perfect right to walk boldly up the path and ring the front-door bell. A man may do what he will with his own; and the bell is his. It is more his than mine. It is perfectly true that I ordered the bell to be put there, and that I paid for it; but it is also true that I am the only person on the planet to whom it is of no use at all. A visitor from Mars, seeing the bellhangers working to my order, might be pardoned for supposing that I was gratifying in this way my insatiable passion for music. Not at all. In giving the order for the bell, I was actuated by no selfish motive. The bell at my front door is not my bell. It is everybody's bell—everybody's, that is to say, but mine.

That is why such a thrill runs through the house when the bell rings. It is one of the sensations of the commonplace. A ring at the front-door bell is a bolt from the blue, a call from the vast, a message from out of the infinite. It presents to the imagination such a boundless range of possibilities. There are fifteen hundred million people on the planet, and this may be any one of them. It may be a hawker with the inevitable cake of soap—a cake of soap that he, poor man, appears to need so much more than I do. It may be the telegraph-boy with some startlingly pleasant or poignantly painful message. It may be the very man I want to see or the very man I don't. Or, then again, it may be 'only Sam.' Everybody knows the accents of ineffable disdain in which it is announced that the ringer of the bell is simply a member of the family circle. It may be anybody; that is the point. When the front-door bell rings, you are prepared for anything. You feel, as you await the announcement, that you have suddenly dipped your hand into the lucky-bag of the universe, and you are in a flutter of curiosity as to what you are about to draw. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor; rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; why is the girl so long in returning from the door? Smiles, frowns, laughter tears; they may any of them come with the ringing of the front-door bell. When the bell rings, you are eating your dinner, or reading the paper, or romping with the children, or chatting easily beside the fire. The atmosphere is perfectly tranquil; all the wheels are running smoothly; life is without a thrill. The bell rings; all eyes are lifted; each member of the household glances inquiringly at all the others; is anybody expecting anybody? We vaguely feel, when the bell rings, that life is about to enter upon a fresh phase. Whether the change will be for weal or for woe, for better or for worse, we cannot tell. We only know that things are not likely to be quite the same again. Somebody will come in, or somebody will be called out, or something fresh will have to be done. The cards of life are all shuffled and dealt afresh at the ringing of the front-door bell.

But it was not of my own bell that I set out to write. My own bell is not my own bell; why, then, should I write of it? I prefer to write of the bells that do belong to me. The next-door bell is my bell; and the bell of the house beyond that; and so on to the end of space. For, if it is humiliating to reflect that the bell at my own door is not mine, it is extremely gratifying to be reminded that, beyond my door, there are millions and millions of bells that I can proudly call my own. I am not generally considered musical; but I spend a good deal of my time in bell-ringing. And I propose to describe one or two instruments on which, at some time or other, I have performed.