There is a tide

by J. C. Snaith

XI

AS luck would have it, Bus 56 came at last to a stop opposite a cinema in Camberwell Green. The posters outside were featuring the fratricidal conflict in which great-uncle Nel had borne a part. Indeed, there was a certain quaint old-timer who had a poster all to himself immediately under the booking office window who was General Sherman’s colleague to the very life. At the sight of this warrior something thrilled in Mame. She was not superstitious and she always made a point of believing as little as possible of what one had no means of proving; but that picture went some way to convince her that at this moment the occult was putting one over on her.

Promptly she got off the bus and made for the booking office. But a notice under the window said it was not open until two o’clock and that the show did not begin until half an hour later. As yet it was barely one o’clock, so there was nothing for it but to kill the time.

Mame took a walk up Denmark Hill. It was not a very inspiring altitude. Nor did a glass of milk and a bath bun at a dairyman’s near the tram terminus at East Dulwich station do much to raise her spirits. Never had she felt so intensely that she was nearing a crisis.

Back again at Camberwell Green she entered the cinema just as the orchestra was tuning up. It was an orchestra of two, a fiddle and a piano, and it seemed to add to her depression. Out of deference to the film, which was entitled “Scenes from the Great Civil War,” the fiddle and the piano discoursed those melodies with which Mame’s childhood had been most familiar.

They began with “Suwanee River” and kindred themes of de ole plantation and went on to “John Brown’s Body” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Mame soon wished that she had stayed outside. With all respect to great-uncle Nel she was not in a mood to enjoy this réchauffé of her youth. For she could not forget that her youth had been hard and unhappy.

In the first place she had never known a mother’s love. At her birth her father had been left a widower. But when Mame, an only child, was five years old, he married a hard-natured, unsympathetic woman. Good had come, indirectly, of the stepmother’s rule. It had not made for joy; but those years had fanned a secret flame in Mame’s ambitious heart. Resentment took the form of a passion for self-improvement. With the help of the village schoolmarm, kindly Miss Jenkins, she studied so hard in the hours when minds less nimble were asleep, that on her eighteenth birthday she was able to fill a vacant stool in the Independent office. And on that red-letter day, life for Mame Durrance began.

The opening scenes of the film brought back the past vividly. A hundred details, half-forgotten, reminded her of the farm four miles from Cowbarn, where she had been brought up. She saw again, in the types thrown on the screen, the dour, lean, Middle Western farmer, her father. The sight of him was an intolerably painful memory. An embittered, unsuccessful man, who in his later days had often drunk more whiskey than was good for him, in Mame’s recollection, he had never been happy in his work or in his home. He had been years in his grave, yet time, the healer, did not allow his daughter to feel affection for him. Still perhaps she had a little pity. He was one of life’s miss-fires. Groping along from year to year in the old rut, without vision, without initiative, a weak man rather than a bad one, his sins mainly were the sins of omission. And the worst of them, in the eyes of his child who had paid for it, was that he had not been man enough to stand up to the selfish vixen he had taken for his second wife.

It was no use pretending that the film’s poignant reminders of her childhood were pleasant. The discomfort, the toil, the loneliness, all came back to her. How had it been possible for a creature like herself, with only a half-educated village dame to help her, to get away from it all? That was the question now in her mind. And the emotion aroused by these familiar scenes had little enough to do with the heroic figure of her real mother’s Uncle Nel, although the fine type to which he belonged was also there. Uppermost in Mame were disgust and pity. But she had escaped. By some miracle she had escaped. And no matter what happened to her now, she knew that she could never go back to the drudgery and the boredom of the place whence she came.

Memories of the past grew too painful to bear. Mame did not wait for the battle pieces. Even great-uncle Nel’s General Sherman, who had a picture all to himself, and the soldierly groups, in any one of whom might be the rare old man she remembered so clearly, had not the power to stay the panic rising in her heart. It was weak, this sense of tumult; it was foolish and worse than foolish, it was cowardly; but quite suddenly Mame cast all thought from her of great-uncle Nel. She got up and fled from the cinema.