The Best British Short Stories of 1922 Part 40

"Your mother." As she spoke Ben remembered, for the first time, actively remembered, for of course it was his mother that he meant when he thought of home.

"She wasn't there, Jenny! She wasn't there!"

"She was very busy, 'adn't not finished 'er work." Something beyond Jenny's will stiffened within her. So he had only just realised it! She tried not to remember, but she could not help it--the flushed face, the gla.s.sy eyes: the whole look of a woman beaten, with her back against a wall; condemning Ben by her very silence, desperate courage.

"Work?"

"Yes, work." Jenny snapped it: hating herself for it, drawing him closer, and yet unable to help it. "Why----" began Ben, and then stopped--horrified. At last he realised it: perhaps it ran to him through Jenny's arm; perhaps it was just that he was down on earth again, humble, ductile, seeing other people's lives as they were, not as he meant to make them.

"Ter-night--workin'"

"All night; one the saeme as another."

"But why----" he began again; stopped dead, loosed his own arm and caught hers. "All this while workin' like that! She works too hard.

Jenny, look here: she works too hard. And I--this d.a.m.ned music! Look here, Jenny, it's got to stop! I'll never play a note again; she shall never do a hard stroke of work again; never, never--not so long as I'm here to work for her. All my life--ever since I can remember--washing and ironing, like--like--the very devil!"

He pulled the girl along with him. "That was what I was thinking all the time: to make a fortune so that you'd both have everything you wanted, a big house, servants, motors, silk dresses----And all the time letting you both work yourselves to death! But this is the end; no more of that. To be happy--that's all that matters--sort of everyday happiness.

"No more of that beastly washing, ironing--it's the end of that, anyhow. When I'm back at the timber-yard----"

He was like a child again, planning; they almost ran down the street.

"No more o' that d.a.m.ned washin' and ironin'--no more work----"

True! How true! The street door opened straight into the little kitchen. She was not in bed, for the light was still burning; they could see it at either side of the blind, shrunk crooked with steam.

There was one step down into the kitchen; but for all that, the door would not open when they raised the latch and pushed it, stuck against something.

"Some of those beastly old clothes!" Ben shoved it, hailing his mother.

"Mother! Mother, you've got something stuck against the door." Odd that she did not come to his help, quick as she always was.

After all, it gave way too suddenly for him to altogether realise the oddness; and he stumbled forward right across the kitchen, seeing nothing until he turned and faced Jenny still standing upon the step, staring downward, with an ashy-white face, wide eyes fixed upon old Mrs. Cohen, who lay there at her feet, resting--incomprehensibly resting.

They need not have been so emphatic about it all--"No more beastly washing, no more work"--for the whole thing was out of their hands once and for all.

She had fallen across the doorway, a flat-iron still in her hand--the weapon with which she had fought the world, kept the wolf from that same door--all the strain gone out of her face, a little twisted to the left side, and oddly smiling. One child's pinafore was still unironed; the rest were folded, finished.

They raised her between them, laid her upon her bed. It was Jenny who washed her, wrapped her in clean linen--no one else should touch her; Ben who sat by her, with hardly a break, until the day that she was buried, wiped out with self-reproach, grief; desolate as any child, sodden with tears.

He collected all his music into a pile, the day before the funeral, gave it to Jenny to put under the copper--a burnt-offering.

"If it hadn't been for that, she might be here now. I don't want ever to see it again--ever to hear a note of it!" That was what he said.

Jenny went back to the house with him after the funeral: she was going to give him his tea, and then return to her own room. In a week they were to be married, and she would be with him for good, looking after him. That evening, before she left, she would set his breakfast, cut his lunch ready for the morrow. By Sat.u.r.day week they would be settled down to their regular life together. She would not think about his music; pushed it away at the back of her mind--over and done with--would not even allow herself the disloyalty of being glad. And yet was glad, deeply glad, relieved, despite her pride in it, in him: as though it were something unknown, alien, dangerous, like things forbidden.

Two men were waiting at the door of the narrow slip of a house: the tall, thin one with his overcoat still b.u.t.toned up to his chin, and another fat and shining, with a top-hat, black frock-coat, and white spats.

"About that concert----" said the first man.

"We were thinking that if we could persuade you to play----" put in the other.

"There was no one there," interrupted Ben roughly. His shoulders were bent, his head dropped forward on his chest, poking sideways, his eyes sullen as a child's.

"I was there," put in the first man, "and I must say, impressed----"

"Very deeply impressed," added the other; but once again Ben brushed him aside.

"You were there--at my concert!" Jenny, standing a little back--for they were all three crowded upon the tiny door-step--saw him glance up at the speaker with something luminous shining through the darkness of his face. "At my concert----! And you liked it? You liked it?"

"'Like' is scarcely the word."

"We feel that if you could be persuaded to give another concert," put in the stout man, blandly, "and would allow----"

"I shall never play again--never--never!" cried Ben, harshly; but this time the other went on imperturbably: "--allow us to make all arrangements, take all responsibility: boom you; see to the advertising and all that--we thought if we were to let practically all the seats for the first concert go in complimentary tickets; get a few good names on the committee--perhaps a princess or something of that sort as a patroness--a strong claque"

"Of course, playing Beethoven--playing him as you played him the other night. Grand-magnificent!" put in the first man realising the weariness, the drop to blank indifference in the musician's face. "The 'Hammerclavier' for instance----"

It was magical.--"Oh, yes, yes--that--that!" Ben's eyes widened, his face glowed. He hummed a bar or so. "Was there ever anything like it?

My G.o.d! was there ever anything like it!"

Jenny, who had the key, squeezed past them at this, and ran through the kitchen to the scullery, where she filled the kettle and put it upon the gas-ring to boil; looked round her for a moment, with quick, darting eyes--like a small wild animal at bay in a strange place--then drew a bucketful of water, turned up her sleeves, the skirt of her new black frock, tied on an old hessian ap.r.o.n of Mrs. Cohen's, with a savage jerk of the strings, and dropping upon her knees, started to scrub the floor, the rough stone floor.

"Men!--trapsin' in an' out, muckin' up a place!"

She could hear the murmur of men's voices in the kitchen, and through it that "trapsin'" of other men struggling with a long coffin on the steep narrow stairs.

On and on it went--the agonised remembrance of all that banging, trampling; the swish of her own scrubbing-brush; the voices round the table where old Mrs. Cohen had stood ironing for hours and hours upon end.

Then the door into the scullery was opened. For a moment or so she kept her head obstinately lowered, determined that she _would_ not look up.

Then, feeling her own unkindness, she raised it and smiled upon Ben, who stood there, flushed, glowing, and yet too shame-faced to speak--smiled involuntarily, as one must smile at a child.

"Well?"

"That--that--music stuff--I suppose it's burnt?" he began, fidgeting from one foot to another, his head bent, ducking sideways, his shoulder to his ear.

Her glance enwrapped him--smiling, loving, bitter-sweet. Things were not going to be as she had thought; none of that going out regularly to work, coming home to tea like other men; none of that safe sameness of life. At the back of her calm was a fierce battle; then she rose to her feet, wiped her hands upon her ap.r.o.n, stooped to the lowest shelf of the cupboard, and drew out a pile of music.

"There you are, my dear. I didn't not burn it, a'cause Well, I suppose as I sorter knowed all the time as you'd be wantin' it."

Children! Well, one knew where one was with children--real children.

But men, that was a different pair of shoes altogether--something you could never be sure of--unless you remembered, always remembered, to treat them as though they were grown-up, think of them as children.

"Now you taeke that an' get along back to yer friends an' yer playin', and let me get on with my work. It'll be dark an' tea-time on us afore ever I've time ter so much as turn round."

"That woman," said the fat, shining man, as they moved away down the street, greasy with river-mist.--"Hang it all! where in the world are we to get a taxi?--Common-place little thing; a bit of a drag on him, I should think."

"Don't you believe it, my friend--that's the sort to give 'em--some'un who will sort of dry-nurse 'em--feed em--mind 'em. That's the wife for a genius. The only sort of wife--mark my word for it."