The Bell Read Online Free PDF Page B

once.
    â€˜Let me help you,’ said a tall sunburnt man who was sitting opposite. He hoisted the big case easily on to the rack, and Dora threw Paul’s hat up after it. The man smiled in a friendly way. They sat down. Everyone in this carriage was thinner.
    Dora closed her eyes and remembered her fear. She was returning, and deliberately, into the power of someone whose conception of her life excluded or condemned her deepest urges and who now had good reason to judge her wicked. That was marriage, thought Dora; to be enclosed in the aims of another. That she had any power over Paul never occurred to her. It remained that her marriage to Paul was a fact, and one of the few facts that remained in her disordered existence quite certain. She felt near to tears and tried to think of something else.
    The train was thundering through Maidenhead. Dora wished she had got her book out of her suitcase before the train started. She felt too shy to disturb her neighbour by doing so now. Anyway, the book was at the bottom of the case and the whisky bottles on the top, so the situation was best left alone. She began to study the other people in the carriage. Some nondescript grey ladies, an elderly man, and opposite to her, two younger men. Or rather, a man and a boy. The boy, who was sitting by the window, must be about eighteen, and the man, who was the one who had helped her with her luggage, about forty. These two appeared to be travelling together. They were a good-looking pair. The man was large and broad-shouldered, but a little gaunt and drawn in the face underneath his sunburn. He had an open friendly expression and a wide forehead crossed by rows of regular lines. He had plenty of curly dark brown hair, going grey in places. His heavily veined hands were lightly clasped on his knee, and his gaze shifted easily along the row of passengers opposite, appraising each without embarrassment. He had the sort of face which can look full of amiability without smiling, and the sort of eyes which can meet the eyes of a stranger and even linger, without seeming aggressive, or seductive, or even curious. In spite of the heat of the day he was dressed in heavy country tweeds. He wiped his perspiring forehead with a clean handkerchief. Dora struggled out of her coat and thrust a hand surreptitiously into her blouse to feel the perspiration collecting between her breasts. She transferred her attention to the boy.
    The boy sat in an attitude of very slightly self-conscious grace, one long leg stretched out and almost touching Dora’s. He wore dark grey flannels and a white open-necked shirt. He had thrown his jacket into the rack above. His sleeves were rolled up and his bare arm lay in the sun along the dusty ledge of the window. He was less weather-beaten than his companion but the recent sunshine had burnt his two cheeks to a dusky red. He had an extremely round head with dark brown eyes, and his dry hair, of a dull chestnut colour, which he kept a little long, fell in a shell-like curve and ended in a clean line about his neck. He was very slim and wore the wide-eyed insolent look of the happy person.
    Dora recognized that look out of her own past as she contemplated the boy, confident, unmarked, and glowing with health, his riches still in store. Youth is a marvellous garment. How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity, when, as in her own case, one ceases to be une jeune fille un peu folle , and becomes merely a woman, worst of all, a wife. The very young have their troubles, but they have at least a part to play, the part of being very young.
    The pair opposite were talking, and Dora listened idly to their conversation.
    â€˜Must keep at your books, of course,’ said the man.