Bella

Bella is an attendant at the Pale Horse and a participant in its séances, where she carries out the ritual’s physical actions. Her role draws together two contrasting impressions: at supper she appears almost unremarkable, while in the converted barn she becomes an active practitioner whose faith in witchcraft is genuine.

Identity and Appearance

At supper in the panelled hall, Bella waits on the guests in a black stuff dress. The narrator compares her appearance to a figure from an Italian primitive painting; that impression reflects his own view of her, not a claim about her abilities. Her plain service at the table makes her seem part of the ordinary household scene, a contrast the ritual will sharply unsettle.

Bella says little during the meal. Sybil Stamfordis, by contrast, wears a long peacock-coloured dress with gold and adopts a distant, elevated manner, while Thyrza Grey supplies brisk conversation about local happenings. Bella’s relative silence and practical work leave her outside the display of occult personality that Sybil performs at supper.

Role in the Séance

The séance takes place in a converted barn with no entrance from the house. At night, its indirect, cold light, central divan, brazier, and copper basin make the familiar room feel transformed. Bella enters the ritual space alongside Thyrza Grey and takes the narrator’s hand: Thyrza holds one of his hands and Bella the other, completing a chain between the three. The contrast between Bella’s cold, boneless hand and Thyrza’s dry, hard one makes her physical presence an immediate part of the ceremony’s effect.

Bella then leaves and returns carrying a live white cockerel that struggles to get free. She kneels by the brazier and copper bowl, draws signs in white chalk around them, and places the bird with its beak on the curved line. It remains motionless there. As she adds further signs, she chants in a low, guttural voice and sways; the narrator reads her conduct as a mounting, ecstatic intensity. These are not just decorative details: Bella supplies the ritual’s bodily action, its marked space, and its living animal.

Belief and Relationship to Thyrza Grey

Thyrza Grey explains that ritual can affect the human spirit, comparing its social force to the unexplained hysteria of crowds. Bella’s actions give that claim a visible form: repeated signs, chanting, posture, and the arrangement of people and objects set the séance apart from ordinary life. The ceremony’s theatrical appearance does not, however, mean that Bella herself is merely pretending.

When the investigation later considers who is involved, the narrator distinguishes Bella’s belief from Thyrza Grey’s control of events. He judges that Bella sincerely believes in witchcraft and rejoices in her own powers. He makes a parallel distinction about Sybil Stamfordis, whose mediumship he also considers genuine, but says that she enters a trance and believes what Thyrza Grey tells her. Bella is therefore presented as a believer in her own capacity, while Thyrza Grey occupies the position of authority within the group.

Narrative Significance

Bella’s place in the séances helps sustain the tension between occult appearance and practical deception. The Pale Horse’s elaborate setting and rites draw attention toward supernatural claims, while the investigation concludes that the organization’s occult apparatus is a stalking horse. Yet that conclusion does not reduce every participant to a knowing conspirator: Bella’s sincere belief is specifically set apart from the scheme’s calculated use of occult display.

The contrast between Bella serving an ordinary supper and later kneeling over chalked signs captures how the same household can contain both domestic routine and ritual spectacle. Her actions help make the ceremony persuasive as an experience, even as the investigators separate the human and psychological force of ritual from the truth of its supernatural claims.