Off-Stage Sounds

There is a fine moment at the close of Mr. Paul Osborne's recent play, A Bell for Adano. Major Joppolo, deprived of his command, is leaving the town he has befriended. More dispiriting than the sense of his personal humiliation is the knowledge that all he had achieved is now jeopardized. Sadly he moves toward the door, and just as he reaches it stops short. For a great sonorous bell has begun to ring, the bell longed for by the townspeople and got for them at last with so much difficulty by him—symbol, half-ironic, half-triumphant, of his life in Adano and of all that he has tried to do there.