(From _Hutchinson's Magazine_ and _The Century Magazine_)
1921, 1922
I have written before of Ben Cohen, with his eternal poring and humming
over the scores of great masters; of the timber-yard at Canning Town,
for ever changing and for ever the same, devouring forests with the
eternal wind-like rush of saws, slide of gigantic planes; practical and
chill; wrapped in river-fogs, and yet exotic with the dust of cedar,
camphor, paregoric.
In those days Ben Cohen was wont to read music as other boys read their
penny-dreadfuls, avidly, with the imagined sounds like great waves for
ever a-rush through his soul.
In the very beginning it was any music, just music. Then for a while
Wagner held him. Any Wagnerian concert, any mixed entertainment which
included Wagner--it seemed as though he sniffed them upon the
breeze--and he would tramp for miles, wait for hours; biting cold,
sleet, snow, mud, rain, all alike disregarded by that persistence which
the very poor must bring to the pursuit of pleasure, the capture of
cheap seats.
Once ensconced, regardless of hard, narrow seats, heights, crowds, his
passion of adoration and excitement took him, shook him, tore him so
that it was wonder his frail body did not split in two, render up the
soul coming forth as Lazarus from the sepulchre. It was indeed, if you
knew little Ben Cohen, him, _himself_, difficult to realise that his
body had anything more to do with him than the yellow-drab water-proof
which is a sort of uniform--a species of charity, covering a multitude
of sins of poverty, shabbiness, thread-bareness--had to do with the
real Jenny Bligh.
And yet, Ben Cohen's body was more completely his than one might have
imagined. Jenny could, and indeed did, slough off her disguise on
Sundays or rare summer days; but Ben and that self which was apart from
music--that wildly-beating heart, pulsing blood, flooding warmth,
grateful as the watchman's fire in the fog-sodden yard, that little
fire over which he used to hang, warming his stiffened hands--were,
after all, amazingly one.
The thing surprised him even more than it surprised any one else; above
all, when it refused to be separated from his holy of holies, crept,
danced, smiled its way through the most portentous scores--a thrilling
sense of Jenny Bligh, all crotchets and quavers, smiles and thrills,
quaint homeliness, sudden dignity.
By the time he first met Jenny he was clear of Wagner, had glanced a
little patronisingly at Beethoven, turned aside and enwrapped himself
in the sombre splendour of Bach, right away from the world; then,
harking back, with a fresh vision, a sudden sense of the inevitable,
had anchored himself in the solemn, wide-stretching harbourage of
Beethoven.
It was like a return from a long voyage, tearing round a world full of
beauty and interest, and yet, at the same time, full of pettiness,
fuss, annoyance: a home-coming beyond words. There was a sense of
eternity, a harmony which drew everything to itself, smoothing out the
pattern of life, the present life and the life to come, so crumpled
that, up to this time, he had had no real idea of the meaning of it.
All at once everything was immensely right, with Jenny as an essential
and inevitable part of the rightness. He felt this so strongly that he
never stopped to wonder if other people felt it as plainly as he did.
Apart from all this, he was bound by the inarticulateness of his class.
His Jewish blood lent him a wider and more picturesque vocabulary than
most, and yet it stopped at any discussion of his feelings.
We have an idea that what we call the "common people" are more
communicative on such subjects than we are; but this is not so. They
talk of their physical ailments and sensations, but they are deeply shy
upon the subject of their feelings. Ben's mother would discuss the
state of her inside, the deaths of her relations and friends; his own
birth, down to the smallest detail. But she would never have dreamt of
telling her son that she loved him, desired his love, hungered for his
coming, grieved at his going.
Ben himself put none of his feeling for Beethoven into words, above all
to his mother; she would not have understood him if he had. He said
nothing of Jenny, either, save as a girl he'd met, a girl he was going
to bring home to tea; but she understood that without any words; that
was courting, part of the business of human nature; much like the
preparation of meals.
It was odd, coming to think of it--might have been ridiculous, save
that ridicule was the sort of thing which could find no possible
lodgment with Ben--that his determination to devote his whole musical
life to Beethoven, to interpret him as no Englishman had ever done
before, should have been synonymous with his sacred, heady, and yet
absolute determination to marry Jenny Bligh.
Jenny worked in the jam-factory, and there was something of the aroma
of ripe fruit about her: ripe strawberries, raspberries, plums,
damsons. She was plumpish and fresh: very red lips and very bright
eyes, reddish-brown, the colour of blackberry leaves in autumn, with
hair to match. Her little figure was neat; her small hands, with their
square-tipped fingers, deft and quick in their movements; there was
something at once rounded and clear-cut about everything she did.
A sea-faring admirer used to say that she was "a bit short in the beam,
but a daisy fur carryin' sail"; and that was the idea she gave: so
well-balanced, so trim, going off to work in her wide white apron on
those rare mornings when she shook off the yellow mackintosh.
Ben saw her like that for the first time crossing the Lee just below
the timber-yard with its cranes like black notes zigzagging out over
the river, which had for once discarded its fog. It was a day of bright
blue sky, immense, rounded, silvery clouds, fresh and clean; with a
wind which caught up the white apron and billowed it out for the sheer
fun of the thing: showing trim ankles, the turn of a plump calf, such
as Ben Cohen had never even thought of before, the realisation of which
was like wine: freshly tasted, red, fruity, running through his veins,
mounting to his head. He had known that women had legs; his mother, the
laundress, suffered from hers--complainingly, devoted woman as she
was--swollen with much standing, and "them there dratted veins": stocky
legs, with loose folds of stocking.
As to thinking any more of a woman's legs than of the legs of a table,
the idea had never even occurred to him. But there you are! It is the
unexpected that happens: the sort of thing which we could never have
imagined ourselves as doing, thinking, feeling. The temptations we have
recognised, struggled against, are nothing; but there comes a sort of
wild, whistling wind from nowhere--much the same as that wind about
jenny's skirts, white apron--and our life is like a kaleidoscope,
suddenly shaken up and showing a completely fresh pattern.
Who could have thought it--who?--that Ben Cohen, dreamer, idealist,
passionate, pure, the devotee of art, would have fallen in love with
Jenny Bligh's legs--or, rather, a pair of ankles, and a little more at
that side where the wind caught her skirt--before he had so much as a
glimpse of her face?
Just over the bridge she stopped to speak with another girl who worked
in his own counting-house. As Ben hurried up to pass them before they
separated, really see her, this other girl recognised him, flung him a
friendly "Hullo!" and was answered in the same fashion.
As he moved on he heard her--was meant to hear, knew that he was meant
to hear, from the pitch of the voice--"Clever ain't no word fur it!
There ain't no tune as----"
The end of the sentence was lost; but he knew the sort of thing, knew
it by heart, had spent his time running away from it. Now, however, he
was grateful: more grateful still when he met Miss Ankles again, and
she herself, regarding Florry Hines' eulogy as a sort of introduction,
smiled, moved on a step, and herself tossed a "Hullo" over one
shoulder.
Ben's thin olive-tinted face was flushed as he drew forward to her side
with his odd stoop, his way of ducking his head and raising his eyes,
dark and glowing. He took jenny's dinner-basket, and she noticed his
hands, large and well-shaped, with long fingers, widened at the tips.
Florry had said that he was a "Sheeny," but there was nothing of the
Jew about him apart from his colouring, his brilliant dark eyes; unless
it were a sort of inner glow, an ardour, curbed by his almost childlike
shyness, lack of self-confidence in everything apart from his music:
that something, at once finer and more cruelly persistent, vital, than
is to be found in the purely Anglo-Saxon race.
Though Jenny liked what she called "a pretty tune," she knew nothing
whatever of music, understood less. And yet, almost from that first
moment, she understood Ben Cohen, realising him as lover and child:
understood him better, maybe, then than she did later on: losing her
sureness for a while, shaken and bewildered; everything blurred by her
own immensity of love, longing; of fearing that she did not
understand--feeling out of it.
But that was not for sometime to come: in the meanwhile she was like a
dear little bantam hen with one chick; while Ben himself was content to
shelter under her wing, until it grew upon him that, loving her as he
did, loving his mother--realising what it meant to be a mother, in
thinking of jenny herself with a child--his child--in her arms--it was
"up to" him to prove himself for their sakes, to make them proud of him
and his music, without the faintest idea of how proud they were
already, lift the whole weight of care from their shoulders.
The worst of it was, he told them nothing whatever about it. The better
sort of men are given to these crablike ways of appearing to move away
from what they intend to move towards. It simply seemed as though he
were forgetting them a little--then, more and more; elbowing them aside
to clear the way for his beloved music.
He was no longer deprecating, appealing, leaning upon them: each woman
thought of him as "her child," and when his love made a man of him,
they realised the hurt, nothing more.
He overdid it, too, as genius does overdo things; was brusque, entirely
immersed in his great scheme. Sometimes he even laughed to himself over
this. "They don't know what I'm up to!" he would declare to himself,
with a sense of triumph.
He had never even thought of his music in the money sense before, but
as his love and ambition for the two women grew upon him, he was like a
child with a new toy. He would not only make a great name, he would
make an immense fortune: his mind blinked, dazzled at the very thought.
He moved with a new pride, and also--alas!--a new remoteness.
His health had broken when he was about seventeen--his bent shoulders
still showed that old drag upon the chest--and he was away in a
sanatorium for a year. When he came back he was cured. It was young
Saere, the junior partner in the timber business, who had sent him
away; and it was he who, when Ben returned, paid for lessons for him,
so that he learnt to play as well as read music.
From that time onward he had always stuck to the firm, working in the
tally sheds; paid, out of his earnings, for the use of a room and a
piano for practising upon so many hours each week, completely happy and
contented.
He had never even thought of leaving the business until he realised his
immense love for Jenny, and, through her, for his mother; the necessity
for doing something big. What did sacrifice matter? What did it matter
being poor, hungry, shabby?--What did anything matter just for a while?
There was so little he wanted; meals were a nuisance; his eyes were so
dazzled by the brilliance of the future, set upon a far horizon, that
he forgot the path of the present, still beneath his feet.
If his mother had not set food before him he would scarcely have
thought of it. But, all the same, he ate it, and money had to be earned
by some one or other.
His mother had never let him know the actual pinch of poverty; she wore
that shoe upon her own foot. He had no more idea than a child of the
cost of mere daily necessities; and during the last few years, between
his work and hers, they had been comfortable enough.
"We can hang on for a bit," he said, when he spoke of leaving the
wood-yard; and she answered, almost with triumph, that she had "hung
on" well enough before he'd earned "aught but a licking."
At first she was proud of reshouldering the entire burden; it made him
more entirely hers. He could not do without her; even with Jenny he
could not do without her. But she had not been a young woman when Ben
was born; she was old now, and tired, with that sort of tiredness which
accumulates, heaps up, and which no single night's rest can ever cure;
the tiredness which is ready, more than ready, for a narrower
bed--eternal sleep.
"--Hold on until after the concert?"
"Sorry fur meself if I couldn't."
The concert! That was the goal. There was a public hall at Clapton
where Ben had chanced on some really good music--just one night of it,
and quite by chance--and this, to his mind, ennobled the Claptonites;
there was the place in which to start the revolutionising of the
musical world. Besides--and here he thought himself very canny, by no
means a Jew for nothing--there were fine old houses at Clapton, and
where there were such houses there must be rich people.
When the date was actually arranged, he practised for the best part of
the day. While he was at home he read music; he lived in a maze of
music. He never thought of advertising, collecting his public; he even
avoided his old friends, his patrons at the timber-yard, overcome by
agonies of shyness at the very thought of so much as mentioning his
concert. Quite simply, in a way he did not even attempt to explain to
himself, he felt that the world of London would scent it from afar off.
As to paid _claques_, presentation-tickets, patrons, advance agents,
all the booming and flattery, the jam of the powder for an English
audience, he had no idea of the existence of such things. Beethoven was
wonderful, and he had found out wonderful things about him: that was
enough.
When the Angel Gabriel blew the last trump, there would be no need to
invite the dead to rise. Neither was there any need to invite the
really elect to his concert. Not to hear him, Ben Cohen, but to hear
Beethoven as he ought to be heard; that's how he felt.
During those weeks of preparation for the concert, his mother worked
desperately hard to keep their home together without his earnings,
while Jenny helped. At first that had been enough for her, too: to
help. But later--
Throughout those long evenings when, already tired from her work in the
factory, she had stood sorting, sprinkling, folding, ironing, the two
women got to a state where they scarcely dared to look at each other:
just a passing glance, a hardish stare, but no _looking into_.
If he had but once said, "I can't bear you to work so hard for me,"
everything would have been different, the fatigue wiped out. But he
didn't; he didn't even know they were working for him, working beyond
the limit of an ordinary working-woman's working-day, hard enough, in
all conscience.
"Men can't not be expected to notice things the way we do." That's what
they told themselves--they did not say even this much to each other.
But far, far away, out of sight, out of all actual knowledge, was the
fear which neither of them would have dared to realise, a vague horror,
a sort of ghost....
"He don't care--he's changed."
And, indeed, this is how it appeared. All through that time he wore an
odd look of excitement, triumph, pleasure, which lifted him away from
himself. There was a sort of lilt in his very step; his eyes shone, his
cheeks were flushed. When he cleared a pile of freshly-ironed, starched
things from the end of a table, so as to spread out a score upon it,
laid them on the floor where the cat padded them over with dirty feet,
and his mother railed at him, as she still did rail--on any subject
apart from this of not caring--he glanced up at her with bright, amused
eyes, his finger still following the black-and-white tangle of notes,
looked at Jenny, and laughed--actually laughed.
"You great oaf!" cried Mrs. Cohen, and could have killed him. Up at
four o'clock next morning, rewashing, starching, ironing, she retched
with sick fatigue and something more--that sense of giddiness, of being
hit on the head which had oppressed her of late. It was as though that
laugh of Ben's had stuck like a bone in her chest, so sharp that she
could scarcely draw breath; driven all the blood to her head.
And yet it had been full of nothing but triumph, a sort of tender
triumph, almost childish delight. He was going to do wonders--
wonders!--open a new world to them! He was so dazzled by his
own work, dreams, by all he had in store for them, that he did not even
see them, themselves, worn with toil, realise the meaning of it, the
reason for it. In any case he would have laughed, because they had no
idea how near it was to an end.
That concert! It would be like nothing so much as opening a door into a
new world, where they need never so much as soil a finger: floating
around, dressed in silk, feeding from off the finest china, sleeping
upon down.
Man-like, his eyes were fixed upon the future. No two women had ever
been loved as they were loved. All this work, this washing and ironing,
it resembled nothing more than the opening scene in an opera: a sort of
prelude, for the sake of contrast. They would see--O-o-oh, yes, they
would see!