Iris Murdoch - The Bell

The idea of the market-garden had arisen naturally enough. There was good land surrounding the Court, and the working of it would be the proper and primary activity of the inhabitants of the house. The garden could be begun on a small scale, and grow with the membership of the community. Other types of work could possibly be introduced later. At present it was impossible to foresee the pattern things would take, and undesirable to attempt to plan more than a little way ahead. The nucleus of the community had been Michael himself and Peter Topglass. Peter was an old friend of Michael’s from College days, a naturalist, and a man of quiet and undemonstrative piety. Between two jobs he had come to give Michael a hand with his new undertaking. He had settled down at once, doing more than his share of the hard work, and introducing his paraphernalia of bird and animal study into the garden. To Michael’s great pleasure he decided, for a while at least, to stay. The next arrivals were the Straffords, whose marriage had been on the point of breaking up. Sent along by the Abbess, they dug themselves in with determination. Catherine had come next and her brother later. Catherine had been for a long time an adherent of the Abbey, and more lately a prospective novice; and the Abbess had judged it profitable, both for the community and for the girl herself, that she should make her entrance to the Abbey by way of the Court. The arrival of Patchway had been unforeseen but as it turned out extremely fortunate. He was a local farm labourer who had appeared soon after Michael had installed himself, and announced that he was going to “do the garden”. Michael was not sure at first whether Patchway was not under a misapprehension about Michael’s return to the Court. Patchway’s father, it appeared, had been a gardener at the Court as a boy, in former and far other days. However, undismayed and perhaps unsurprised by explanations, Patchway had determinedly stayed on, working like a carthorse and seeming to have at his disposal an invaluable pool of casual female labour from the village. He even made occasional appearances at Mass. Mother Clare had laughed over Michael’s account of him and declared that he was perhaps in the true sense of the word a “godsend”, and must be allowed to stay. The latest and most important acquisition to the community was James Tayper Pace.

James was the younger son of an old military family. His higher education took place upon the hunting field, and he subsequently became known as an accomplished yachtsman, and served with distinction in the Guards during the war. He had had from childhood a strong and simple Anglican faith. The custom whereby in certain families religious faith survived as part of the life of a country gentleman, deeply connected with all the rituals of existence, was for James no empty form. It was fruitful of a deep and unquestioning spiritual life which led him at a more mature age, without any sudden crisis or any emotional rejection of his earlier pursuits, to devote himself more wholeheartedly to the call of religion. He began to train as a missionary, but various encounters and further experience led him to decide that his task lay at home. He went to live in the East End of London where he eventually ran a highly successful settlement and a number of boys’clubs. This excellent venture came to an end when he had a serious breakdown in health owing to overwork. His doctor advised him, and his bishop urged him, to find occupation in the country, preferably in the open air; and it was shortly after this that the Abbess, whose information service had brought her news of James’s situation, beckoned him to Imber.

Michael took an immediate and strong liking to James. Indeed some ingenuity would have been required to dislike him, he was a character of such transparent gentleness. Michael was also, and more uneasily, aware in himself of a certain clannish affinity with James, something nostalgic, crystallizing at a moral level distinctly below that at which he aimed at present to live, and tending to exclude the others. His converse with James was easy and laconic, and Michael did his best not to find it pleasing for the wrong reasons. James himself was however touched by no such atavistic memories and his simple and open behaviour soon disposed of Michael’s problem. The arrival of James also raised for Michael, as none of the previous arrivals had done, the question of leadership at Imber. When James had come the community immediately took shape as a corporate body. Previously it had been a collection of individuals over whom Michael naturally exercised such authority as was necessary in virtue of his peculiar situation and his priority upon the scene. Michael at once recognized in James a man who was in almost all relevant qualities his superior, and he would have been very happy to be second to such a first. James however was surprisingly supported by the Abbess in a refusal, which his plea of ill-health made conclusive, to allow Michael to retire from his position of unofficial leader; and Michael, with some uneasiness, accepted his role.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed. Michael had not particularly cherished these hopes; yet he was sorry to find himself so immediately placed in the position of one who by force of personality holds a difficult team together. Michael had always held the view that the good man is without power. He held to this view passionately although at times he scarcely knew what it meant, and could connect it with his daily actions only tenuously or not at all. It was in this sense that he understood, when he understood it, his call to the priesthood. For a creature such as himself the service of God must mean a loss of personality such as could perhaps come about through the named office of a servant or the surrender of will in an unquestioning obedience. Yet these ideals were still for him, while strongly beckoning, remote and hard to interpret. He was aware that, paradoxically, one of the most good people that he knew was also one of the most powerful: the Abbess. He lacked still the insight which would show him in what way exactly her exercise of power differed from his own. He felt himself compelled to remain in a region where power was evil, and where he could not honourably find the means to strip himself of it completely. His lot was rather the struggle from within, the day-to-day attempt to be impersonal and just, the continual mistakes and examinations of conscience. Perhaps this was after all his road; it was certainly a road. But he was irked by a sense of the incomplete and ill-defined nature of his role. Thoughts of the priesthood returned to him more and more frequently.

Not that the Imber community, as it so far existed in embryo, was exceptionally problematic. On the surface it was peaceful and reasonably efficient. Yet there were certain stresses of which Michael was continually conscious, he hoped without irritation. James and Margaret Strafford worked too hard, Mark Strafford not hard enough. The tension between Mark and his wife, though muted, remained. Mark Strafford was sarcastic, nervous, and inclined to make much of difficulties. Michael, who did not agree”with Kant that feelings of affection cannot be demanded of us as a duty, did his best to like Mark, so far without conspicuous success. The bearded and ostentatiously virile appearance of his colleague was a constant annoyance. James Tayper Pace, without meaning to be so, was inevitably a second centre of authority, and Michael noticed a tendency in both the Straf-fords to take their orders from James, without consulting him. James, who believed that authority should melt in brotherly love, as would have been the case in a community composed of persons like himself, was careless of such matters. This led to some confusion. Peter Topglass did not improve things by being blindly, and sometimes aggressively, loyal to Michael. There was a faint appearance of two parties.