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6

It was a little after ten o'clock. Various things had happened--
nothing, however, of any particular importance; only the usual
round of parish jobs that filled up Dorothy's afternoon and
evening. Now, as she had arranged earlier in the day, she was at
Mr Warburton's house, and was trying to hold her own in one of
those meandering arguments in which he delighted to entangle her.

They were talking--but indeed, Mr Warburton never failed to
manoeuvre the conversation towards this subject--about the question
of religious belief.

'My dear Dorothy,' he was saying argumentatively, as he walked up
and down with one hand in his coat pocket and the other manipulating
a Brazilian cigar. 'My dear Dorothy, you don't seriously mean to
tell me that at your age--twenty-seven, I believe--and with your
intelligence, you will retain your religious beliefs more or less
in toto?'

'Of course I do. You know I do.'

'Oh, come, now! The whole bag of tricks? All that nonsense that
you learned at your mother's knee--surely you're not going to
pretend to me that you still believe in it? But of course you
don't! You can't! You're afraid to own up, that's all it is. No
need to worry about that here, you know. The Rural Dean's wife
isn't listening, and _I_ won't give the show away.'

'I don't know what you mean by "all that NONSENSE",' began Dorothy,
sitting up straighter in her chair, a little offended.

'Well, let's take an instance. Something particularly hard to
swallow--Hell, for instance. Do you believe in Hell? When I say
BELIEVE, mind you, I'm not asking whether you believe it in some
milk and water metaphorical way like these Modernist bishops young
Victor Stone gets so excited about. I mean do you believe in it
literally? Do you believe in Hell as you believe in Australia?'

'Yes, of course I do,' said Dorothy, and she endeavoured to explain
to him that the existence of Hell is much more real and permanent
than the existence of Australia.

'Hm,' said Mr Warburton, unimpressed. 'Very sound in its way, of
course. But what always makes me so suspicious of you religious
people is that you're so deucedly cold-blooded about your beliefs.
It shows a very poor imagination, to say the least of it. Here am
I an infidel and blasphemer and neck deep in at least six out of
the Seven Deadly, and obviously doomed to eternal torment. There's
no knowing that in an hour's time I mayn't be roasting in the
hottest part of Hell. And yet you can sit there talking to me as
calmly as though I'd nothing the matter with me. Now, if I'd
merely got cancer or leprosy or some other bodily ailment, you'd be
quite distressed about it--at least, I like to flatter myself that
you would. Whereas, when I'm going to sizzle on the grid
throughout eternity, you seem positively unconcerned about it.'

'I never said YOU were going to Hell,' said Dorothy somewhat
uncomfortably, and wishing that the conversation would take a
different turn. For the truth was, though she was not going to
tell him so, that the point Mr Warburton had raised was one with
which she herself had had certain difficulties. She did indeed
believe in Hell, but she had never been able to persuade herself
that anyone actually WENT there. She believed that Hell existed,
but that it was empty. Uncertain of the orthodoxy of this belief,
she preferred to keep it to herself. 'It's never certain that
ANYONE is going to Hell,' she said more firmly, feeling that here
at least she was on sure ground.

'What!' said Mr Warburton, halting in mock surprise. 'Surely you
don't mean to say that there's hope for me yet?'

'Of course there is. It's only those horrid Predestination people
who pretend that you go to Hell whether you repent or not. You
don't think the Church of England are Calvinists, do you?'

'I suppose there's always the chance of getting off on a plea of
Invincible Ignorance,' said Mr Warburton reflectively; and then,
more confidently: 'Do you know, Dorothy, I've a sort of feeling
that even now, after knowing me two years, you've still half an
idea you can make a convert of me. A lost sheep--brand plucked
from the burning, and all that. I believe you still hope against
hope that one of these days my eyes will be opened and you'll meet
me at Holy Communion at seven o'clock on some damned cold winter
morning. Don't you?'

'Well--' said Dorothy, again uncomfortably. She did, in fact,
entertain some such hope about Mr Warburton, though he was not
exactly a promising case for conversion. It was not in her nature
to see a fellow being in a state of unbelief without making some
effort to reclaim him. What hours she had spent, at different
times, earnestly debating with vague village atheists who could not
produce a single intelligible reason for their unbelief! 'Yes,'
she admitted finally, not particularly wanting to make the
admission, but not wanting to prevaricate.

Mr Warburton laughed delightedly.

'You've a hopeful nature,' he said. 'But you aren't afraid, by any
chance, that I might convert YOU? "The dog it was that died", you
may remember.'

At this Dorothy merely smiled. 'Don't let him see he's shocking
you'--that was always her maxim when she was talking to Mr
Warburton. They had been arguing in this manner, without coming to
any kind of conclusion, for the past hour, and might have gone on
for the rest of the night if Dorothy had been willing to stay; for
Mr Warburton delighted in teasing her about her religious beliefs.
He had that fatal cleverness that so often goes with unbelief, and
in their arguments, though Dorothy was always RIGHT, she was not
always victorious. They were sitting, or rather Dorothy was
sitting and Mr Warburton was standing, in a large agreeable room,
giving on a moonlit lawn, that Mr Warburton called his 'studio'--
not that there was any sign of work ever having been done in it.
To Dorothy's great disappointment, the celebrated Mr Bewley had not
turned up. (As a matter of fact, neither Mr Bewley, nor his wife,
nor his novel entitled Fishpools and Concubines, actually existed.
Mr Warburton had invented all three of them on the spur of the
moment, as a pretext for inviting Dorothy to his house, well
knowing that she would never come unchaperoned.) Dorothy had felt
rather uneasy on finding that Mr Warburton was alone. It had
occurred to her, indeed she had felt perfectly certain, that it
would be wiser to go home at once; but she had stayed, chiefly
because she was horribly tired and the leather armchair into which
Mr Warburton had thrust her the moment she entered the house was
too comfortable to leave. Now, however, her conscience was
pricking her. It DIDN'T DO to stay too late at his house--people
would talk if they heard of it. Besides, there was a multitude of
jobs that she ought to be doing and that she had neglected in order
to come here. She was so little used to idleness that even an hour
spent in mere talking seemed to her vaguely sinful.

She made an effort, and straightened herself in the too-comfortable
chair. 'I think, if you don't mind, it's really time I was getting
home,' she said.

'Talking of Invincible Ignorance,' went on Mr Warburton, taking no
notice of Dorothy's remark, 'I forget whether I ever told you that
once when I was standing outside the World's End pub in Chelsea,
waiting for a taxi, a damned ugly little Salvation Army lassie came
up to me and said--without any kind of introduction, you know--
"What will you say at the Judgement Seat?" I said, "I am reserving
my defence." Rather neat, I think, don't you?'

Dorothy did not answer. Her conscience had given her another and
harder jab--she had remembered those wretched, unmade jackboots,
and the fact that at least one of them had got to be made tonight.
She was, however, unbearably tired. She had had an exhausting
afternoon, starting off with ten miles or so bicycling to and fro
in the sun, delivering the parish magazine, and continuing with the
Mothers' Union tea in the hot little wooden-walled room behind the
parish hall. The Mothers met every Wednesday afternoon to have tea
and do some charitable sewing while Dorothy read aloud to them.
(At present she was reading Gene Stratton Porter's A Girl of the
Limberlost.) It was nearly always upon Dorothy that jobs of that
kind devolved, because the phalanx of devoted women (the church
fowls, they are called) who do the dirty work of most parishes had
dwindled at Knype Hill to four or five at most. The only helper on
whom Dorothy could count at all regularly was Miss Foote, a tall,
rabbit-faced, dithering virgin of thirty-five, who meant well but
made a mess of everything and was in a perpetual state of flurry.
Mr Warburton used to say that she reminded him of a comet--'a
ridiculous blunt-nosed creature rushing round on an eccentric orbit
and always a little behind time'. You could trust Miss Foote with
the church decorations, but not with the Mothers or the Sunday
School, because, though a regular churchgoer, her orthodoxy was
suspect. She had confided to Dorothy that she could worship God
best under the blue dome of the sky. After tea Dorothy had dashed
up to the church to put fresh flowers on the altar, and then she
had typed out her father's sermon--her typewriter was a rickety
pre-Boer War 'invisible', on which you couldn't average eight
hundred words an hour--and after supper she had weeded the pea rows
until the light failed and her back seemed to be breaking. With
one thing and another, she was even more tired than usual.

'I really MUST be getting home,' she repeated more firmly. 'I'm
sure it's getting fearfully late.'

'Home?' said Mr Warburton. 'Nonsense! The evening's hardly begun.'

He was walking up and down the room again, with his hands in his
coat pockets, having thrown away his cigar. The spectre of the
unmade jackboots stalked back into Dorothy's mind. She would, she
suddenly decided, make two jackboots tonight instead of only one,
as a penance for the hour she had wasted. She was just beginning
to make a mental sketch of the way she would cut out the pieces of
brown paper for the insteps, when she noticed that Mr Warburton had
halted behind her chair.

'What time is it, do you know?' she said.

'I dare say it might be half past ten. But people like you and me
don't talk of such vulgar subjects as the time.'

'If it's half past ten, then I really must be going,' said Dorothy.
I've got a whole lot of work to do before I go to bed.'

'Work! At this time of night? Impossible!'

'Yes, I have. I've got to make a pair of jackboots.'

'You've got to make a pair of WHAT?' said Mr Warburton.

'Of jackboots. For the play the schoolchildren are acting. We
make them out of glue and brown paper.'

'Glue and brown paper! Good God!' murmured Mr Warburton. He went
on, chiefly to cover the fact that he was drawing nearer to
Dorothy's chair: 'What a life you lead! Messing about with glue
and brown paper in the middle of the night! I must say, there are
times when I feel just a little glad that I'm not a clergyman's
daughter.'

'I think--' began Dorothy.

But at the same moment Mr Warburton, invisible behind her chair,
had lowered his hands and taken her gently by the shoulders.
Dorothy immediately wriggled herself in an effort to get free of
him; but Mr Warburton pressed her back into her place.

'Keep still,' he said peaceably.

'Let me go!' exclaimed Dorothy.

Mr Warburton ran his right hand caressingly down her upper arm.
There was something very revealing, very characteristic in the way
he did it; it was the lingering, appraising touch of a man to whom
a woman's body is valuable precisely in the same way as though it
were something to eat.

'You really have extraordinary nice arms,' he said. 'How on earth
have you managed to remain unmarried all these years?'

'Let me go at once!' repeated Dorothy, beginning to struggle again.

'But I don't particularly want to let you go,' objected Mr
Warburton.

'PLEASE don't stroke my arm like that! I don't like it!'

'What a curious child you are! Why don't you like it?'

'I tell you I don't like it!'

'Now don't go and turn round,' said Mr Warburton mildly. 'You
don't seem to realize how tactful it was on my part to approach you
from behind your back. If you turn round you'll see that I'm old
enough to be your father, and hideously bald into the bargain. But
if you'll only keep still and not look at me you can imagine I'm
Ivor Novello.'

Dorothy caught sight of the hand that was caressing her--a large,
pink, very masculine hand, with thick fingers and a fleece of gold
hairs upon the back. She turned very pale; the expression of her
face altered from mere annoyance to aversion and dread. She made a
violent effort, wrenched herself free, and stood up, facing him.

'I DO wish you wouldn't do that!' she said, half in anger and half
in distress.

'What is the matter with you?' said Mr Warburton.

He had stood upright, in his normal pose, entirely unconcerned, and
he looked at her with a touch of curiosity. Her face had changed.
It was not only that she had turned pale; there was a withdrawn,
half-frightened look in her eyes--almost as though, for the moment,
she were looking at him with the eyes of a stranger. He perceived
that he had wounded her in some way which he did not understand,
and which perhaps she did not want him to understand.

'What is the matter with you?' he repeated.

'WHY must you do that every time you meet me?'

'"Every time I meet you" is an exaggeration,' said Mr Warburton.
'It's really very seldom that I get the opportunity. But if you
really and truly don't like it--'

'Of course I don't like it! You know I don't like it!'

'Well, well! Then let's say no more about it,' said Mr Warburton
generously. 'Sit down, and we'll change the subject.'

He was totally devoid of shame. It was perhaps his most outstanding
characteristic. Having attempted to seduce her, and failed, he was
quite willing to go on with the conversation as though nothing
whatever had happened.

'I'm going home at once,' said Dorothy. 'I can't stay here any
longer.'

'Oh nonsense! Sit down and forget about it. We'll talk of moral
theology, or cathedral architecture, or the Girl Guides' cooking
classes, or anything you choose. Think how bored I shall be all
alone if you go home at this hour.'

But Dorothy persisted, and there was an argument. Even if it had
not been his intention to make love to her--and whatever he might
promise he would certainly begin again in a few minutes if she did
not go--Mr Warburton would have pressed her to stay, for, like all
thoroughly idle people, he had a horror of going to bed and no
conception of the value of time. He would, if you let him, keep
you talking till three or four in the morning. Even when Dorothy
finally escaped, he walked beside her down the moonlit drive, still
talking voluminously and with such perfect good humour that she
found it impossible to be angry with him any longer.

'I'm leaving first thing tomorrow,' he told her as they reached the
gate. 'I'm going to take the car to town and pick up the kids--the
BASTARDS, you know--and we're leaving for France the next day. I'm
not certain where we shall go after that; eastern Europe, perhaps.
Prague, Vienna, Bucharest.'

'How nice,' said Dorothy.

Mr Warburton, with an adroitness surprising in so large and stout a
man, had manoeuvred himself between Dorothy and the gate.

'I shall be away six months or more,' he said. 'And of course I
needn't ask, before so long a parting, whether you want to kiss me
good-bye?'

Before she knew what he was doing he had put his arm about her and
drawn her against him. She drew back--too late; he kissed her on
the cheek--would have kissed her on the mouth if she had not turned
her head away in time. She struggled in his arms, violently and
for a moment helplessly.

'Oh, let me go!' she cried. 'DO let me go!'

'I believe I pointed out before,' said Mr Warburton, holding her
easily against him, 'that I don't want to let you go.'

'But we're standing right in front of Mrs Semprill's window!
She'll see us absolutely for certain!'

'Oh, good God! So she will!' said Mr Warburton. 'I was forgetting.'

Impressed by this argument, as he would not have been by any other,
he let Dorothy go. She promptly put the gate between Mr Warburton
and herself. He, meanwhile, was scrutinizing Mrs Semprill's
windows.

'I can't see a light anywhere,' he said finally. 'With any luck
the blasted hag hasn't seen us.'

'Good-bye,' said Dorothy briefly. 'This time I really MUST go.
Remember me to the children.'

With this she made off as fast as she could go without actually
running, to get out of his reach before he should attempt to kiss
her again.

Even as she did so a sound checked her for an instant--the
unmistakable bang of a window shutting, somewhere in Mrs Semprill's
house. Could Mrs Semprill have been watching them after all? But
(reflected Dorothy) of COURSE she had been watching them! What
else could you expect? You could hardly imagine Mrs Semprill
missing such a scene as that. And if she HAD been watching them,
undoubtedly the story would be all over the town tomorrow morning,
and it would lose nothing in the telling. But this thought,
sinister though it was, did no more than flight momentarily through
Dorothy's mind as she hurried down the road.

When she was well out of sight of Mr Warburton's house she stopped,
took out her handkerchief and scrubbed the place on her cheek where
he had kissed her. She scrubbed it vigorously enough to bring the
blood into her cheek. It was not until she had quite rubbed out
the imaginary stain which his lips had left there that she walked
on again.

What he had done had upset her. Even now her heart was knocking
and fluttering uncomfortably. I can't BEAR that kind of thing! she
repeated to herself several times over. And unfortunately this was
no more than the literal truth; she really could not bear it. To
be kissed or fondled by a man--to feel heavy male arms about her
and thick male lips bearing down upon her own--was terrifying and
repulsive to her. Even in memory or imagination it made her wince.
It was her especial secret, the especial, incurable disability that
she carried through life.

If only they would leave you ALONE! she thought as she walked
onwards a little more slowly. That was how she put it to herself
habitually--'If only they would leave you ALONE!' For it was not
that in other ways she disliked men. On the contrary, she liked
them better than women. Part of Mr Warburton's hold over her was
in the fact that he was a man and had the careless good humour and
the intellectual largeness that women so seldom have. But why
couldn't they leave you ALONE? Why did they always have to kiss
you and maul you about? They were dreadful when they kissed you--
dreadful and a little disgusting, like some large, furry beast that
rubs itself against you, all too friendly and yet liable to turn
dangerous at any moment. And beyond their kissing and mauling
there lay always the suggestion of those other, monstrous things
('ALL THAT' was her name for them) of which she could hardly even
bear to think.

Of course, she had had her share, and rather more than her share,
of casual attention from men. She was just pretty enough, and just
plain enough, to be the kind of girl that men habitually pester.
For when a man wants a little casual amusement, he usually picks
out a girl who is not TOO pretty. Pretty girls (so he reasons) are
spoilt and therefore capricious; but plain girls are easy game.
And even if you are a clergyman's daughter, even if you live in a
town like Knype Hill and spend almost your entire life in parish
work, you don't altogether escape pursuit. Dorothy was all too
used to it--all too used to the fattish middle-aged men, with their
fishily hopeful eyes, who slowed down their cars when you passed
them on the road, or who manoeuvred an introduction and then began
pinching your elbow about ten minutes afterwards. Men of all
descriptions. Even a clergyman, on one occasion--a bishop's
chaplain, he was. . . .

But the trouble was that it was not better, but oh! infinitely
worse when they were the right kind of man and the advances they
made you were honourable. Her mind slipped backwards five years,
to Francis Moon, curate in those days at St Wedekind's in
Millborough. Dear Francis! How gladly would she have married him
if only it had not been for ALL THAT! Over and over again he had
asked her to marry him, and of course she had had to say No; and,
equally of course, he had never known why. Impossible to tell him
why. And then he had gone away, and only a year later had died so
irrelevantly of pneumonia. She whispered a prayer for his soul,
momentarily forgetting that her father did not really approve of
prayers for the dead, and then, with an effort, pushed the memory
aside. Ah, better not to think of it again! It hurt her in her
breast to think of it.

She could never marry, she had decided long ago upon that. Even
when she was a child she had known it. Nothing would ever overcome
her horror of ALL THAT--at the very thought of it something within
her seemed to shrink and freeze. And of course, in a sense she did
not want to overcome it. For, like all abnormal people, she was
not fully aware that she was abnormal.

And yet, though her sexual coldness seemed to her natural and
inevitable, she knew well enough how it was that it had begun. She
could remember, as clearly as though it were yesterday, certain
dreadful scenes between her father and her mother--scenes that she
had witnessed when she was no more than nine years old. They had
left a deep, secret wound in her mind. And then a little later she
had been frightened by some old steel engravings of nymphs pursued
by satyrs. To her childish mind there was something inexplicably,
horribly sinister in those horned, semi-human creatures that lurked
in thickets and behind large trees, ready to come bounding forth in
sudden swift pursuit. For a whole year of her childhood she had
actually been afraid to walk through woods alone, for fear of
satyrs. She had grown out of the fear, of course, but not out of
the feeling that was associated with it. The satyr had remained
with her as a symbol. Perhaps she would never grow out of it, that
special feeling of dread, of hopeless flight from something more
than rationally dreadful--the stamp of hooves in the lonely wood,
the lean, furry thighs of the satyr. It was a thing not to be
altered, not to be argued away. It is, moreover, a thing too
common nowadays, among educated women, to occasion any kind of
surprise.

Most of Dorothy's agitation had disappeared by the time she reached
the rectory. The thoughts of satyrs and Mr Warburton, of Francis
Moon and her foredoomed sterility, which had been going to and fro
in her mind, faded out of it and were replaced by the accusing
image of a jackboot. She remembered that she had the best part of
two hours' work to do before going to bed tonight. The house was
in darkness. She went round to the back and slipped in on tiptoe
by the scullery door, for fear of waking her father, who was
probably asleep already.

As she felt her way through the dark passage to the conservatory,
she suddenly decided that she had gone wrong in going to Mr
Warburton's house tonight. She would, she resolved, never go there
again, even when she was certain that somebody else would be there
as well. Moreover, she would do penance tomorrow for having gone
there tonight. Having lighted the lamp, before doing anything else
she found her 'memo list', which was already written out for
tomorrow, and pencilled a capital P against 'breakfast', P stood
for penance--no bacon again for breakfast tomorrow. Then she
lighted the oilstove under the glue-pot.

The light of the lamp fell yellow upon her sewing-machine and upon
the pile of half-finished clothes on the table, reminding her of
the yet greater pile of clothes that were not even begun; reminding
her, also, that she was dreadfully, overwhelmingly tired. She had
forgotten her tiredness at the moment when Mr Warburton laid his
hands on her shoulders, but now it had come back upon her with
double force. Moreover, there was a somehow exceptional quality
about her tiredness tonight. She felt, in an almost literal sense
of the words, washed out. As she stood beside the table she had a
sudden, very strange feeling as though her mind had been entirely
emptied, so that for several seconds she actually forgot what it
was that she had come into the conservatory to do.

Then she remembered--the jackboots, of course! Some contemptible
little demon whispered in her ear, 'Why not go straight to bed and
leave the jackboots till tomorrow?' She uttered a prayer for
strength, and pinched herself. Come on, Dorothy! No slacking
please! Luke ix, 62. Then, clearing some of the litter off the
table, she got out her scissors, a pencil, and four sheets of brown
paper, and sat down to cut out those troublesome insteps for the
jackboots while the glue was boiling.

When the grandfather clock in her father's study struck midnight
she was still at work. She had shaped both jackboots by this time,
and was reinforcing them by pasting narrow strips of paper all over
them--a long, messy job. Every bone in her body was aching, and
her eyes were sticky with sleep. Indeed, it was only rather dimly
that she remembered what she was doing. But she worked on,
mechanically pasting strip after strip of paper into place, and
pinching herself every two minutes to counteract the hypnotic sound
of the oilstove singing beneath the glue-pot.

CHAPTER 2

1

Out of a black, dreamless sleep, with the sense of being drawn
upwards through enormous and gradually lightening abysses, Dorothy
awoke to a species of consciousness.

Her eyes were still closed. By degrees, however, their lids became
less opaque to the light, and then flickered open of their own
accord. She was looking out upon a street--a shabby, lively street
of small shops and narrow-faced houses, with streams of men, trams,
and cars passing in either direction.

But as yet it could not properly be said that she was LOOKING. For
the things she saw were not apprehended as men, trams, and cars,
nor as anything in particular; they were not even apprehended as
things moving; not even as THINGS. She merely SAW, as an animal
sees, without speculation and almost without consciousness. The
noises of the street--the confused din of voices, the hooting of
horns and the scream of the trams grinding on their gritty rails--
flowed through her head provoking purely physical responses. She
had no words, nor any conception of the purpose of such things as
words, nor any consciousness of time or place, or of her own body
or even of her own existence.

Nevertheless, by degrees her perceptions became sharper. The
stream of moving things began to penetrate beyond her eyes and sort
themselves out into separate images in her brain. She began, still
wordlessly, to observe the shapes of things. A long-shaped thing
swam past, supported on four other, narrower long-shaped things,
and drawing after it a square-shaped thing balanced on two circles.
Dorothy watched it pass; and suddenly, as though spontaneously, a
word flashed into her mind. The word was 'horse'. It faded, but
returned presently in the more complex form: 'THAT IS A HORSE.'
Other words followed--'house', 'street', 'tram', 'car', 'bicycle'--
until in a few minutes she had found a name for almost everything
within sight. She discovered the words 'man' and 'woman', and,
speculating upon these words, discovered that she knew the
difference between living and inanimate things, and between human
beings and horses, and between men and women.

It was only now, after becoming aware of most of the things about
her, that she became aware of HERSELF. Hitherto she had been as it
were a pair of eyes with a receptive but purely impersonal brain
behind them. But now, with a curious little shock, she discovered
her separate and unique existence; she could FEEL herself existing;
it was as though something within her were exclaiming 'I am I!'
Also, in some way she knew that this 'I' had existed and been the
same from remote periods in the past, though it was a past of which
she had no remembrance.

But it was only for a moment that this discovery occupied her.
From the first there was a sense of incompleteness in it, of
something vaguely unsatisfactory. And it was this: the 'I am I'
which had seemed an answer had itself become a question. It was no
longer 'I am I', but 'WHO am I'?

WHO WAS SHE? She turned the question over in her mind, and found
that she had not the dimmest notion of who she was; except that,
watching the people and horses passing, she grasped that she was a
human being and not a horse. And that the question altered itself
and took this form: 'Am I a man or a woman?' Again neither
feeling nor memory gave any clue to the answer. But at that
moment, by accident possibly, her finger-tips brushed against her
body. She realized more clearly than before that her body existed,
and that it was her own--that it was, in fact, herself. She began
to explore it with her hands, and her hands encountered breasts.
She was a woman, therefore. Only women had breasts. In some way
she knew, without knowing how she knew, that all those women who
passed had breasts beneath their clothes, though she could not see
them.

She now grasped that in order to identify herself she must examine
her own body, beginning with her face; and for some moments she
actually attempted to look at her own face, before realizing that
this was impossible. She looked down, and saw a shabby black satin
dress, rather long, a pair of flesh-coloured artificial silk
stockings, laddered and dirty, and a pair of very shabby black
satin shoes with high heels. None of them was in the least
familiar to her. She examined her hands, and they were both
strange and unstrange. They were smallish hands, with hard palms,
and very dirty. After a moment she realized that it was their
dirtiness that made them strange to her. The hands themselves
seemed natural and appropriate, though she did not recognize them.

After hesitating a few moments longer, she turned to her left and
began to walk slowly along the pavement. A fragment of knowledge
had come to her, mysteriously, out of the blank past: the existence
of mirrors, their purpose, and the fact that there are often
mirrors in shop windows. After a moment she came to a cheap little
jeweller's shop in which a strip of mirror, set at an angle,
reflected the faces of people passing. Dorothy picked her
reflection out from among a dozen others, immediately realizing it
to be her own. Yet it could not be said that she had recognized
it; she had no memory of ever having seen it till this moment. It
showed her a woman's youngish face, thin, very blonde, with crow's-
feet round the eyes, and faintly smudged with dirt. A vulgar black
cloche hat was stuck carelessly on the head, concealing most of the
hair. The face was quite unfamiliar to her, and yet not strange.
She had not known till this moment what face to expect, but now
that she had seen it she realized that it was the face she might
have expected. It was appropriate. It corresponded to something
within her.

As she turned away from the jeweller's mirror, she caught sight of
the words 'Fry's Chocolate' on a shop window opposite, and
discovered that she understood the purpose of writing, and also,
after a momentary effort, that she was able to read. Her eyes
flitted across the street, taking in and deciphering odd scraps of
print; the names of shops, advertisements, newspaper posters. She
spelled out the letters of two red and white posters outside a
tobacconist's shop. One of them read, 'Fresh Rumours about
Rector's Daughter', and the other, 'Rector's Daughter. Now
believed in Paris'. Then she looked upwards, and saw in white
lettering on the corner of a house: 'New Kent Road'. The words
arrested her. She grasped that she was standing in the New Kent
Road, and--another fragment of her mysterious knowledge--the New
Kent Road was somewhere in London. So she was in London.

As she made this discovery a peculiar tremor ran through her. Her
mind was now fully awakened; she grasped, as she had not grasped
before, the strangeness of her situation, and it bewildered and
frightened her. What could it all MEAN? What was she doing here?
How had she got here? What had happened to her?

The answer was not long in coming. She thought--and it seemed to
her that she understood perfectly well what the words meant: 'Of
course! I've lost my memory!'

At this moment two youths and a girl who were trudging past, the
youths with clumsy sacking bundles on their backs, stopped and
looked curiously at Dorothy. They hesitated for a moment, then
walked on, but halted again by a lamp-post five yards away.
Dorothy saw them looking back at her and talking among themselves.
One of the youths was about twenty, narrow-chested, black-haired,
ruddy-cheeked, good-looking in a nosy cockney way, and dressed in
the wreck of a raffishly smart blue suit and a check cap. The
other was about twenty-six, squat, nimble, and powerful, with a
snub nose, a clear pink skin and huge lips as coarse as sausages,
exposing strong yellow teeth. He was frankly ragged, and he had a
mat of orange-coloured hair cropped short and growing low on his
head, which gave him a startling resemblance to an orang-outang.
The girl was a silly-looking, plump creature, dressed in clothes
very like Dorothy's own. Dorothy could hear some of what they were
saying:

'That tart looks ill,' said the girl.

The orange-headed one, who was singing 'Sonny Boy' in a good
baritone voice, stopped singing to answer. 'She ain't ill,' he
said. 'She's on the beach all right, though. Same as us.'

'She'd do jest nicely for Nobby, wouldn't she?' said the dark-
haired one.

'Oh, YOU!' exclaimed the girl with a shocked-amorous air, pretending
to smack the dark one over the head.

The youths had lowered their bundles and leaned them against the
lamp-post. All three of them now came rather hesitantly towards
Dorothy, the orange-headed one, whose name seemed to be Nobby,
leading the way as their ambassador. He moved with a gambolling,
apelike gait, and his grin was so frank and wide that it was
impossible not to smile back at him. He addressed Dorothy in a
friendly way.

'Hullo, kid!'

'Hullo!'

'You on the beach, kid?'

'On the beach?'

'Well, on the bum?'

'On the bum?'

'Christ! she's batty,' murmured the girl, twitching at the black-
haired one's arm as though to pull him away.

'Well, what I mean to say, kid--have you got any money?'

'I don't know.'

At this all three looked at one another in stupefaction. For a
moment they probably thought that Dorothy really WAS batty. But
simultaneously Dorothy, who had earlier discovered a small pocket
in the side of her dress, put her hand into it and felt the outline
of a large coin.

'I believe I've got a penny,' she said.

'A penny!' said the dark youth disgustedly, '--lot of good that is
to us!'

Dorothy drew it out. It was a half-crown. An astonishing change
came over the faces of the three others. Nobby's mouth split open
with delight, he gambolled several steps to and fro like some great
jubilant ape, and then, halting, took Dorothy confidentially by the
arm.

'That's the mulligatawny!' he said. 'We've struck it lucky--and
so've you, kid, believe me. You're going to bless the day you set
eyes on us lot. We're going to make your fortune for you, we are.
Now, see here, kid--are you on to go into cahoots with us three?'

'What?' said Dorothy.

'What I mean to say--how about you chumming in with Flo and Charlie
and me? Partners, see? Comrades all, shoulder to shoulder.
United we stand, divided we fall. We put up the brains, you put up
the money. How about it, kid? Are you on, or are you off?'

'Shut up, Nobby!' interrupted the girl. 'She don't understand a
word of what you're saying. Talk to her proper, can't you?'

'That'll do, Flo,' said Nobby equably. 'You keep it shut and leave
the talking to me. I got a way with the tarts, I have. Now, you
listen to me, kid--what might your name happen to be, kid?'

Dorothy was within an ace of saying 'I don't know,' but she was
sufficiently on the alert to stop herself in time. Choosing a
feminine name from the half-dozen that sprang immediately into her
mind, she answered, 'Ellen.'

'Ellen. That's the mulligatawny. No surnames when you're on the
bum. Well now, Ellen dear, you listen to me. Us three are going
down hopping, see--'

'Hopping?'

''Opping!' put in the dark youth impatiently, as though disgusted
by Dorothy's ignorance. His voice and manner were rather sullen,
and his accent much baser than Nobby's. 'Pickin' 'ops--dahn in
Kent! C'n understand that, can't yer?'

'Oh, HOPS! For beer?'

'That's the mulligatawny! Coming on fine, she is. Well, kid, 'z I
was saying, here's us three going down hopping, and got a job
promised us and all--Blessington's farm, Lower Molesworth. Only
we're just a bit in the mulligatawny, see? Because we ain't got a
brown between us, and we got to do it on the toby--thirty-five
miles it is--and got to tap for our tommy and skipper at night as
well. And that's a bit of a mulligatawny, with ladies in the
party. But now s'pose f'rinstance you was to come along with us,
see? We c'd take the twopenny tram far as Bromley, and that's
fifteen miles done, and we won't need skipper more'n one night on
the way. And you can chum in at our bin--four to a bin's the best
picking--and if Blessington's paying twopence a bushel you'll turn
your ten bob a week easy. What do you say to it, kid? Your two
and a tanner won't do you much good here in Smoke. But you go into
partnership with us, and you'll get your kip for a month and
something over--and WE'LL get a lift to Bromley and a bit of scran
as well.'

About a quarter of his speech was intelligible to Dorothy. She
asked rather at random:

'What is SCRAN?'

'Scran? Tommy--food. I can see YOU ain't been long on the beach,
kid.'

'Oh. . . . Well, you want me to come down hop-picking with you, is
that it?'

'That's it, Ellen my dear. Are you on, or are you off?'

'All right,' said Dorothy promptly. 'I'll come.'

She made this decision without any misgiving whatever. It is true
that if she had had time to think over her position, she would
probably have acted differently; in all probability she would have
gone to a police station and asked for assistance. That would have
been the sensible course to take. But Nobby and the others had
appeared just at the critical moment, and, helpless as she was, it
seemed quite natural to throw in her lot with the first human being
who presented himself. Moreover, for some reason which she did not
understand, it reassured her to hear that they were making for
Kent. Kent, it seemed to her, was the very place to which she
wanted to go. The others showed no further curiosity, and asked no
uncomfortable questions. Nobby simply said, 'O.K. That's the
mulligatawny!' and then gently took Dorothy's half-crown out of her
hand and slid it into his pocket--in case she should lose it, he
explained. The dark youth--apparently his name was Charlie--said
in his surly, disagreeable way:

'Come on, less get movin'! It's 'ar-parse two already. We don't
want to miss that there ---- tram. Where d'they start from,
Nobby?'

'The Elephant,' said Nobby: 'and we got to catch it before four
o'clock, because they don't give no free rides after four.'

'Come on, then, don't less waste no more time. Nice job we'll 'ave
of it if we got to 'ike it down to Bromley AND look for a place to
skipper in the ---- dark. C'm on, Flo.'

'Quick march!' said Nobby, swinging his bundle on to his shoulder.

They set out, without more words said, Dorothy, still bewildered
but feeling much better than she had felt half an hour ago, walked
beside Flo and Charlie, who talked to one another and took no
further notice of her. From the very first they seemed to hold
themselves a little aloof from Dorothy--willing enough to share her
half-crown, but with no friendly feelings towards her. Nobby
marched in front, stepping out briskly in spite of his burden, and
singing, with spirited imitations of military music, the well-known
military song of which the only recorded words seem to be:

'"----!" was all the band could play;
"----! ----!" And the same to you!'

2

This was the twenty-ninth of August. It was on the night of the
twenty-first that Dorothy had fallen asleep in the conservatory; so
that there had been an interregnum in her life of not quite eight
days.

The thing that had happened to her was commonplace enough--almost
every week one reads in the newspapers of a similar case. A man
disappears from home, is lost sight of for days or weeks, and
presently fetches up at a police station or in a hospital, with no
notion of who he is or where he has come from. As a rule it is
impossible to tell how he has spent the intervening time; he has
been wandering, presumably, in some hypnotic or somnambulistic
state in which he has nevertheless been able to pass for normal.
In Dorothy's case only one thing is certain, and that is that she
had been robbed at some time during her travels; for the clothes
she was wearing were not her own, and her gold cross was missing.

At the moment when Nobby accosted her, she was already on the road
to recovery; and if she had been properly cared for, her memory
might have come back to her within a few days or even hours. A
very small thing would have been enough to accomplish it; a chance
meeting with a friend, a photograph of her home, a few questions
skilfully put. But as it was, the slight mental stimulus that she
needed was never given. She was left in the peculiar state in
which she had first found herself--a state in which her mind was
potentially normal, but not quite strung up to the effort of
puzzling out her own identity.

For of course, once she had thrown in her lot with Nobby and the
others, all chance of reflection was gone. There was no time to
sit down and think the matter over--no time to come to grips with
her difficulty and reason her way to its solution. In the strange,
dirty sub-world into which she was instantly plunged, even five
minutes of consecutive thought would have been impossible. The
days passed in ceaseless nightmarish activity. Indeed, it was very
like a nightmare; a nightmare not of urgent terrors, but of hunger,
squalor, and fatigue, and of alternating heat and cold. Afterwards,
when she looked back upon that time, days and nights merged
themselves together so that she could never remember with perfect
certainty how many of them there had been. She only knew that for
some indefinite period she had been perpetually footsore and almost
perpetually hungry. Hunger and the soreness of her feet were her
clearest memories of that time; and also the cold of the nights, and
a peculiar, blowsy, witless feeling that came of sleeplessness and
constant exposure to the air.

After getting to Bromley they had 'drummed up' on a horrible,
paper-littered rubbish dump, reeking with the refuse of several
slaughter-houses, and then passed a shuddering night, with only
sacks for cover, in long wet grass on the edge of a recreation
ground. In the morning they had started out, on foot, for the
hopfields. Even at this early date Dorothy had discovered that the
tale Nobby had told her, about the promise of a job, was totally
untrue. He had invented it--he confessed this quite light-
heartedly--to induce her to come with them. Their only chance of
getting a job was to march down into the hop country and apply at
every farm till they found one where pickers were still needed.

They had perhaps thirty-five miles to go, as the crow flies, and
yet at the end of three days they had barely reached the fringe of
the hopfields. The need of getting food, of course, was what
slowed their progress. They could have marched the whole distance
in two days or even in a day if they had not been obliged to feed
themselves. As it was, they had hardly even time to think of
whether they were going in the direction of the hopfields or not;
it was food that dictated all their movements. Dorothy's half-
crown had melted within a few hours, and after that there was
nothing for it except to beg. But there came the difficulty. One
person can beg his food easily enough on the road, and even two can
manage it, but it is a very different matter when there are four
people together. In such circumstances one can only keep alive if
one hunts for food as persistently and single-mindedly as a wild
beast. Food--that was their sole preoccupation during those three
days--just food, and the endless difficulty of getting it.

From morning to night they were begging. They wandered enormous
distances, zigzagging right across the country, trailing from
village to village and from house to house, 'tapping' at every
butcher's and every baker's and every likely looking cottage, and
hanging hopefully round picnic parties, and waving--always vainly--
at passing cars, and accosting old gentlemen with the right kind of
face and pitching hard-up stories. Often they went five miles out
of their way to get a crust of bread or a handful of scraps of
bacon. All of them begged, Dorothy with the others; she had no
remembered past, no standards of comparison to make her ashamed of
it. And yet with all their efforts they would have gone empty-
bellied half the time if they had not stolen as well as begged.
At dusk and in the early mornings they pillaged the orchards and
the fields, stealing apples, damsons, pears, cobnuts, autumn
raspberries, and, above all, potatoes; Nobby counted it a sin to
pass a potato field without getting at least a pocketful. It was
Nobby who did most of the stealing, while the others kept guard.
He was a bold thief; it was his peculiar boast that he would steal
anything that was not tied down, and he would have landed them all
in prison if they had not restrained him sometimes. Once he even
laid hands on a goose, but the goose set up a fearful clamour, and
Charlie and Dorothy dragged Nobby off just as the owner came out of
doors to see what was the matter.

Each of those first days they walked between twenty and twenty-five
miles. They trailed across commons and through buried villages
with incredible names, and lost themselves in lanes that led
nowhere, and sprawled exhausted in dry ditches smelling of fennel
and tansies, and sneaked into private woods and 'drummed up' in
thickets where firewood and water were handy, and cooked strange,
squalid meals in the two two-pound snuff-tins that were their only
cooking pots. Sometimes, when their luck was in, they had
excellent stews of cadged bacon and stolen cauliflowers, sometimes
great insipid gorges of potatoes roasted in the ashes, sometimes
jam made of stolen autumn raspberries which they boiled in one of
the snuff-tins and devoured while it was still scalding hot. Tea
was the one thing they never ran short of. Even when there was no
food at all there was always tea, stewed, dark brown and reviving.
It is a thing that can be begged more easily than most. 'Please,
ma'am, could you spare me a pinch of tea?' is a plea that seldom
fails, even with the case-hardened Kentish housewives.

The days were burning hot, the white roads glared and the passing
cars sent stinging dust into their faces. Often families of hop-
pickers drove past, cheering, in lorries piled sky-high with
furniture, children, dogs, and birdcages. The nights were always
cold. There is hardly such a thing as a night in England when it
is really warm after midnight. Two large sacks were all the
bedding they had between them. Flo and Charlie had one sack,
Dorothy had the other, and Nobby slept on the bare ground. The
discomfort was almost as bad as the cold. If you lay on your back,
your head, with no pillow, lolled backwards so that your neck
seemed to be breaking; if you lay on your side, your hip-bone
pressing against the earth caused you torments. Even when, towards
the small hours, you managed to fall asleep by fits and starts, the
cold penetrated into your deepest dreams. Nobby was the only one
who could really stand it. He could sleep as peacefully in a nest
of sodden grass as in a bed, and his coarse, simian face, with
barely a dozen red-gold hairs glittering on the chin like snippings
of copper wire, never lost its warm, pink colour. He was one of
those red-haired people who seem to glow with an inner radiance
that warms not only themselves but the surrounding air.

All this strange, comfortless life Dorothy took utterly for
granted--only dimly aware, if at all, that the other, unremembered
life that lay behind her had been in some way different from this.
After only a couple of days she had ceased to wonder any longer
about her queer predicament. She accepted everything--accepted the
dirt and hunger and fatigue, the endless trailing to and fro, the
hot, dusty days and the sleepless, shivering nights. She was, in
any case, far too tired to think. By the afternoon of the second
day they were all desperately, overwhelmingly tired, except Nobby,
whom nothing could tire. Even the fact that soon after they set
out a nail began to work its way through the sole of his boot
hardly seemed to trouble him. There were periods of an hour at a
time when Dorothy seemed almost to be sleeping as she walked. She
had a burden to carry now, for as the two men were already loaded
and Flo steadfastly refused to carry anything, Dorothy had
volunteered to carry the sack that held the stolen potatoes. They
generally had ten pounds or so of potatoes in reserve. Dorothy
slung the sack over her shoulder as Nobby and Charlie did with
their bundles, but the string cut into her like a saw and the sack
bumped against her hip and chafed it so that finally it began to
bleed. Her wretched, flimsy shoes had begun to go to pieces from
the very beginning. On the second day the heel of her right shoe
came off and left her hobbling; but Nobby, expert in such matters,
advised her to tear the heel off the other shoe and walk
flatfooted. The result was a fiery pain down her shins when she
walked uphill, and a feeling as though the soles of her feet had
been hammered with an iron bar.

But Flo and Charlie were in a much worse case than she. They were
not so much exhausted as amazed and scandalized by the distances
they were expected to walk. Walking twenty miles in a day was a
thing they had never heard of till now. They were cockneys born
and bred, and though they had had several months of destitution in
London, neither of them had ever been on the road before. Charlie,
till fairly recently, had been in good employment, and Flo, too,
had had a good home until she had been seduced and turned out of
doors to live on the streets. They had fallen in with Nobby in
Trafalgar Square and agreed to come hop-picking with him, imagining
that it would be a bit of a lark. Of course, having been 'on the
beach' a comparatively short time, they looked down on Nobby and
Dorothy. They valued Nobby's knowledge of the road and his
boldness in thieving, but he was their social inferior--that was
their attitude. And as for Dorothy, they scarcely even deigned to
look at her after her half-crown came to an end.

Even on the second day their courage was failing. They lagged
behind, grumbled incessantly, and demanded more than their fair
share of food. By the third day it was almost impossible to keep
them on the road at all. They were pining to be back in London,
and had long ceased to care whether they ever got to the hopfields
or not; all they wanted to do was to sprawl in any comfortable
halting place they could find, and, when there was any food left,
devour endless snacks. After every halt there was a tedious
argument before they could be got to their feet again.

'Come on, blokes!' Nobby would say. 'Pack your peter up, Charlie.
Time we was getting off.'

'Oh, ---- getting off!' Charlie would answer morosely.

'Well, we can't skipper here, can we? We said we was going to hike
as far as Sevenoaks tonight, didn't we?'

'Oh, ---- Sevenoaks! Sevenoaks or any other bleeding place--it
don't make any bleeding difference to me.'

'But ---- it! We want to get a job tomorrow, don't we? And we got
to get down among the farms 'fore we can start looking for one.'

'Oh, ---- the farms! I wish I'd never 'eard of a ---- 'op! I
wasn't brought up to this ---- 'iking and skippering like you was.
I'm fed up; that's what I am ---- fed up.'

'If this is bloody 'opping,' Flo would chime in, 'I've 'ad my
bloody bellyful of it already.'

Nobby gave Dorothy his private opinion that Flo and Charlie would
probably 'jack off' if they got the chance of a lift back to
London. But as for Nobby, nothing disheartened him or ruffled his
good temper, not even when the nail in his boot was at its worst
and his filthy remnant of a sock was dark with blood. By the third
day the nail had worn a permanent hole in his foot, and Nobby had
to halt once in a mile to hammer it down.

''Scuse me, kid,' he would say; 'got to attend to my bloody hoof
again. This nail's a mulligatawny.'

He would search for a round stone, squat in the ditch and carefully
hammer the nail down.

'There!' he would say optimistically, feeling the place with his
thumb. 'THAT b--'s in his grave!'

The epitaph should have been Resurgam, however. The nail
invariably worked its way up again within a quarter of an hour.

Nobby had tried to make love to Dorothy, of course, and, when she
repulsed him, bore her no grudge. He had that happy temperament
that is incapable of taking its own reverses very seriously. He
was always debonair, always singing in a lusty baritone voice--his
three favourite songs were: 'Sonny Boy', ''Twas Christmas Day in
the Workhouse' (to the tune of 'The Church's One Foundation'), and
'"----!" was all the band could play', given with lively renderings
of military music. He was twenty-six years old and was a widower,
and had been successively a seller of newspapers, a petty thief,
a Borstal boy, a soldier, a burglar, and a tramp. These facts,
however, you had to piece together for yourself, for he was not
equal to giving a consecutive account of his life. His conversation
was studded with casual picturesque memories--the six months he had
served in a line regiment before he was invalided out with a damaged
eye, the loathsomeness of the skilly in Holloway, his childhood in
the Deptford gutters, the death of his wife, aged eighteen, in
childbirth, when he was twenty, the horrible suppleness of the
Borstal canes, the dull boom of the nitro- glycerine, blowing in the
safe door at Woodward's boot and shoe factory, where Nobby had
cleared a hundred and twenty-five pounds and spent it in three
weeks.

On the afternoon of the third day they reached the fringe of the
hop country, and began to meet discouraged people, mostly tramps,
trailing back to London with the news that there was nothing doing--
hops were bad and the price was low, and the gypsies and 'home
pickers' had collared all the jobs. At this Flo and Charlie gave
up hope altogether, but by an adroit mixture of bullying and
persuasion Nobby managed to drive them a few miles farther. In a
little village called Wale they fell in with an old Irishwoman--
Mrs McElligot was her name--who had just been given a job at a
neighbouring hopfield, and they swapped some of their stolen apples
for a piece of meat she had 'bummed' earlier in the day. She gave
them some useful hints about hop-picking and about what farms to
try. They were all sprawling on the village green, tired out,
opposite a little general shop with some newspaper posters outside.

'You'd best go down'n have a try at Chalmers's,' Mrs McElligot
advised them in her base Dublin accent. 'Dat's a bit above five
mile from here. I've heard tell as Chalmers wants a dozen pickers
still. I daresay he'd give y'a job if you gets dere early enough.'

'Five miles! Cripes! Ain't there none nearer'n that?' grumbled
Charlie.

'Well, dere's Norman's. I got a job at Norman's meself--I'm
startin' tomorrow mornin'. But 'twouldn't be no use for you to try
at Norman's. He ain't takin' on none but home pickers, an' dey say
as he's goin' to let half his hops blow.'

'What's home pickers?' said Nobby.

'Why, dem as has got homes o' deir own. Eider you got to live in
de neighbourhood, or else de farmer's got to give y'a hut to sleep
in. Dat's de law nowadays. In de ole days when you come down
hoppin', you kipped in a stable an' dere was no questions asked.
But dem bloody interferin' gets of a Labour Government brought in a
law to say as no pickers was to be taken on widout de farmer had
proper accommodation for 'em. So Norman only takes on folks as has
got homes o' deir own.'

'Well, you ain't got a home of your own, have you?'

'No bloody fear! But Norman t'inks I have. I kidded'm I was
stayin' in a cottage near by. Between you an' me, I'm skipperin'
in a cow byre. 'Tain't so bad except for de stink o' de muck, but
you got to be out be five in de mornin', else de cowmen 'ud catch
you.'

'We ain't got no experience of hopping,' Nobby said. 'I wouldn't
know a bloody hop if I saw one. Best to let on you're an old hand
when you go up for a job, eh?'

'Hell! Hops don't need no experience. Tear 'em off an' fling 'em
into de bin. Dat's all der is to it, wid hops.'

Dorothy was nearly asleep. She heard the others talking desultorily,
first about hop-picking, then about some story in the newspapers of
a girl who had disappeared from home. Flo and Charlie had been
reading the posters on the shop-front opposite; and this had revived
them somewhat, because the posters reminded them of London and its
joys. The missing girl, in whose fate they seemed to be rather
interested, was spoken of as 'The Rector's Daughter'.

'J'a see that one, Flo?' said Charlie, reading a poster aloud with
intense relish: '"Secret Love Life of Rector's Daughter.
Startling Revelations." Coo! Wish I 'ad a penny to 'ave a read of
that!'

'Oh? What's 't all about, then?'

'What? Didn't j'a read about it? Papers 'as bin full of it.
Rector's Daughter this and Rector's Daughter that--wasn't 'alf
smutty, some of it, too.'

'She's bit of hot stuff, the ole Rector's Daughter,' said Nobby
reflectively, lying on his back. 'Wish she was here now! I'd know
what to do with her, all right, I would.'

''Twas a kid run away from home,' put in Mrs McElligot. 'She was
carryin' on wid a man twenty year older'n herself, an' now she's
disappeared an' dey're searchin' for her high an' low.'

'Jacked off in the middle of the night in a motor-car with no
clo'es on 'cep' 'er nightdress,' said Charlie appreciatively. 'The
'ole village sore 'em go.'

'Dere's some t'ink as he's took her abroad an' sold her to one o'
dem flash cat-houses in Parrus,' added Mrs McElligot.

'No clo'es on 'cep' 'er nightdress? Dirty tart she must 'a been!'

The conversation might have proceeded to further details, but at
this moment Dorothy interrupted it. What they were saying had
roused a faint curiosity in her. She realized that she did not
know the meaning of the word 'Rector'. She sat up and asked Nobby:

'What is a Rector?'

'Rector? Why, a sky-pilot--parson bloke. Bloke that preaches and
gives out the hymns and that in church. We passed one of 'em
yesterday--riding a green bicycle and had his collar on back to
front. A priest--clergyman. YOU know.'

'Oh. . . . Yes, I think so.'

'Priests! Bloody ole getsies dey are too, some o' dem,' said Mrs
McElligot reminiscently.

Dorothy was left not much the wiser. What Nobby had said did
enlighten her a little, but only a very little. The whole train of
thought connected with 'church' and 'clergyman' was strangely vague
and blurred in her mind. It was one of the gaps--there was a
number of such gaps--in the mysterious knowledge that she had
brought with her out of the past.

That was their third night on the road. When it was dark they
slipped into a spinney as usual to 'skipper', and a little after
midnight it began to pelt with rain. They spent a miserable hour
stumbling to and fro in the darkness, trying to find a place to
shelter, and finally found a hay-stack, where they huddled
themselves on the lee side till it was light enough to see. Flo
blubbered throughout the night in the most intolerable manner, and
by the morning she was in a state of semi-collapse. Her silly fat
face, washed clean by rain and tears, looked like a bladder of
lard, if one can imagine a bladder of lard contorted with self-
pity. Nobby rooted about under the hedge until he had collected an
armful of partially dry sticks, and then managed to get a fire
going and boil some tea as usual. There was no weather so bad that
Nobby could not produce a can of tea. He carried, among other
things, some pieces of old motor tyre that would make a flare when
the wood was wet, and he even possessed the art, known only to a
few cognoscenti among tramps, of getting water to boil over a
candle.

Everyone's limbs had stiffened after the horrible night, and Flo
declared herself unable to walk a step farther. Charlie backed her
up. So, as the other two refused to move, Dorothy and Nobby went
on to Chalmers's farm, arranging a rendezvous where they should
meet when they had tried their luck. They got to Chalmers's, five
miles away, found their way through vast orchards to the hop-
fields, and were told that the overseer 'would be along presently'.
So they waited four hours on the edge of the plantation, with the
sun drying their clothes on their backs, watching the hop-pickers
at work. It was a scene somehow peaceful and alluring. The hop
bines, tall climbing plants like runner beans enormously magnified,
grew in green leafy lanes, with the hops dangling from them in pale
green bunches like gigantic grapes. When the wind stirred them
they shook forth a fresh, bitter scent of sulphur and cool beer.
In each lane of bines a family of sunburnt people were shredding
the hops into sacking bins, and singing as they worked; and
presently a hooter sounded and they knocked off to boil cans of tea
over crackling fires of hop bines. Dorothy envied them greatly.
How happy they looked, sitting round the fires with their cans of
tea and their hunks of bread and bacon, in the smell of hops and
wood smoke! She pined for such a job--however, for the present
there was nothing doing. At about one o'clock the overseer arrived
and told them that he had no jobs for them, so they trailed back to
the road, only avenging themselves on Chalmers's farm by stealing a
dozen apples as they went.

When they reached their rendezvous, Flo and Charlie had vanished.
Of course they searched for them, but, equally of course, they knew
very well what had happened. Indeed, it was perfectly obvious.
Flo had made eyes at some passing lorry driver, who had given the
two of them a lift back to London for the chance of a good cuddle
on the way. Worse yet, they had stolen both bundles. Dorothy and
Nobby had not a scrap of food left, not a crust of bread nor a
potato nor a pinch of tea, no bedding, and not even a snuff-tin in
which to cook anything they could cadge or steal--nothing, in fact,
except the clothes they stood up in.

The next thirty-six hours were a bad time--a very bad time. How
they pined for a job, in their hunger and exhaustion! But the
chances of getting one seemed to grow smaller and smaller as they
got farther into the hop country. They made interminable marches
from farm to farm, getting the same answer everywhere--no pickers
needed--and they were so busy marching to and fro that they had not
even time to beg, so that they had nothing to eat except stolen
apples and damsons that tormented their stomachs with their acid
juice and yet left them ravenously hungry. It did not rain that
night, but it was much colder than before. Dorothy did not even
attempt to sleep, but spent the night in crouching over the fire
and keeping it alight. They were hiding in a beech wood, under a
squat, ancient tree that kept the wind away but also wetted them
periodically with sprinklings of chilly dew. Nobby, stretched on
his back, mouth open, one broad cheek faintly illumined by the
feeble rays of the fire, slept as peacefully as a child. All night
long a vague wonder, born of sleeplessness and intolerable
discomfort, kept stirring in Dorothy's mind. Was this the life to
which she had been bred--this life of wandering empty-bellied all
day and shivering at night under dripping trees? Had it been like
this even in the blank past? Where had she come from? Who was
she? No answer came, and they were on the road at dawn. By the
evening they had tried at eleven farms in all, and Dorothy's legs
were giving out, and she was so dizzy with fatigue that she found
difficulty in walking straight.

But late in the evening, quite unexpectedly, their luck turned.
They tried at a farm named Cairns's, in the village of Clintock,
and were taken on immediately, with no questions asked. The
overseer merely looked them up and down, said briefly, 'Right you
are--you'll do. Start in the morning; bin number 7, set 19,' and
did not even bother to ask their names. Hop-picking, it seemed,
needed neither character nor experience.

They found their way to the meadow where the pickers' camp was
situated. In a dreamlike state, between exhaustion and the joy of
having got a job at last, Dorothy found herself walking through a
maze of tin-roofed huts and gypsies' caravans with many-coloured
washing hanging from the windows. Hordes of children swarmed in
the narrow grass alleys between the huts, and ragged, agreeable-
looking people were cooking meals over innumerable faggot fires.
At the bottom of the field there were some round tin huts, much
inferior to the others, set apart for unmarried people. An old man
who was toasting cheese at a fire directed Dorothy to one of the
women's huts.

Dorothy pushed open the door of the hut. It was about twelve feet
across, with unglazed windows which had been boarded up, and it had
no furniture whatever. There seemed to be nothing in it but an
enormous pile of straw reaching to the roof--in fact, the hut was
almost entirely filled with straw. To Dorothy's eyes, already
sticky with sleep, the straw looked paradisically comfortable. She
began to push her way into it, and was checked by a sharp yelp from
beneath her.

"Ere! What yer doin' of? Get off of it! 'Oo asked YOU to walk
about on my belly, stoopid?'

Seemingly there were women down among the straw. Dorothy burrowed
forward more circumspectly, tripped over something, sank into the
straw and in the same instant began to fall asleep. A rough-
looking woman, partially undressed, popped up like a mermaid from
the strawy sea.

''Ullo, mate!' she said. 'Jest about all in, ain't you, mate?'

'Yes, I'm tired--very tired.'

'Well, you'll bloody freeze in this straw with no bed-clo'es on
you. Ain't you got a blanket?'

'No.'

''Alf a mo, then. I got a poke 'ere.'

She dived down into the straw and re-emerged with a hop-poke seven
feet long. Dorothy was asleep already. She allowed herself to be
woken up, and inserted herself somehow into the sack, which was so
long that she could get into it head and all; and then she was half
wriggling, half sinking down, deep down, into a nest of straw
warmer and drier than she had conceived possible. The straw
tickled her nostrils and got into her hair and pricked her even
through the sack, but at that moment no imaginable sleeping place--
not Cleopatra's couch of swan's-down nor the floating bed of Haroun
al Raschid--could have caressed her more voluptuously.

3

It was remarkable how easily, once you had got a job, you settled
down to the routine of hop-picking. After only a week of it you
ranked as an expert picker, and felt as though you had been picking
hops all your life.

It was exceedingly easy work. Physically, no doubt, it was
exhausting--it kept you on your feet ten or twelve hours a day, and
you were dropping with sleep by six in the evening--but it needed
no kind of skill. Quite a third of the pickers in the camp were as
new to the job as Dorothy herself. Some of them had come down from
London with not the dimmest idea of what hops were like, or how you
picked them, or why. One man, it was said, on his first morning on
the way to the fields, had asked, 'Where are the spades?' He
imagined that hops were dug up out of the ground.

Except for Sundays, one day at the hop camp was very like another.
At half past five, at a tap on the wall of your hut, you crawled
out of your sleeping nest and began searching for your shoes, amid
sleepy curses from the women (there were six or seven or possibly
even eight of them) who were buried here and there in the straw.
In that vast pile of straw any clothes that you were so unwise as
to take off always lost themselves immediately. You grabbed an
armful of straw and another of dried hop bines, and a faggot from
the pile outside, and got the fire going for breakfast. Dorothy
always cooked Nobby's breakfast as well as her own, and tapped on
the wall of his hut when it was ready, she being better at waking
up in the morning than he. It was very cold on those September
mornings, the eastern sky was fading slowly from black to cobalt,
and the grass was silvery white with dew. Your breakfast was
always the same--bacon, tea, and bread fried in the grease of the
bacon. While you ate it you cooked another exactly similar meal,
to serve for dinner, and then, carrying your dinner-pail, you set
out for the fields, a mile-and-a-half walk through the blue, windy
dawn, with your nose running so in the cold that you had to stop
occasionally and wipe it on your sacking apron.

The hops were divided up into plantations of about an acre, and
each set--forty pickers or thereabouts, under a foreman who was
often a gypsy--picked one plantation at a time. The bines grew
twelve feet high or more, and they were trained up strings and
slung over horizontal wires, in rows a yard or two apart; in each
row there was a sacking bin like a very deep hammock slung on a
heavy wooden frame. As soon as you arrived you swung your bin into
position, slit the strings from the next two bines, and tore them
down--huge, tapering strands of foliage, like the plaits of
Rapunzel's hair, that came tumbling down on top of you, showering
you with dew. You dragged them into place over the bin, and then,
starting at the thick end of the bine, began tearing off the heavy
bunches of hops. At that hour of the morning you could only pick
slowly and awkwardly. Your hands were still stiff and the coldness
of the dew numbed them, and the hops were wet and slippery. The
great difficulty was to pick the hops without picking the leaves
and stalks as well; for the measurer was liable to refuse your hops
if they had too many leaves among them.

The stems of the bines were covered with minute thorns which within
two or three days had torn the skin of your hands to pieces. In
the morning it was a torment to begin picking when your fingers
were almost too stiff to bend and bleeding in a dozen places; but
the pain wore off when the cuts had reopened and the blood was
flowing freely. If the hops were good and you picked well, you
could strip a bine in ten minutes, and the best bines yielded half
a bushel of hops. But the hops varied greatly from one plantation
to another. In some they were as large as walnuts, and hung in
great leafless bunches which you could rip off with a single twist;
in others they were miserable things no bigger than peas, and grew
so thinly that you had to pick them one at a time. Some hops were
so bad that you could not pick a bushel of them in an hour.

It was slow work in the early morning, before the hops were dry
enough to handle. But presently the sun came out, and the lovely,
bitter odour began to stream from the warming hops, and people's
early-morning surliness wore off, and the work got into its stride.
From eight till midday you were picking, picking, picking, in a
sort of passion of work--a passionate eagerness, which grew
stronger and stronger as the morning advanced, to get each bine
done and shift your bin a little farther along the row. At the
beginning of each plantation all the bins started abreast, but by
degrees the better pickers forged ahead, and some of them had
finished their lane of hops when the others were barely halfway
along; whereupon, if you were far behind, they were allowed to turn
back and finish your row for you, which was called 'stealing your
hops'. Dorothy and Nobby were always among the last, there being
only two of them--there were four people at most of the bins. And
Nobby was a clumsy picker, with his great coarse hands; on the
whole, the women picked better than the men.

It was always a neck and neck race between the two bins on either
side of Dorothy and Nobby, bin number 6 and bin number 8. Bin
number 6 was a family of gypsies--a curly-headed, ear-ringed
father, an old dried-up leather-coloured mother, and two strapping
sons--and bin number 8 was an old East End costerwoman who wore a
broad hat and long black cloak and took snuff out of a papiermache
box with a steamer painted on the lid. She was always helped by
relays of daughters and granddaughters who came down from London
for two days at a time. There was quite a troop of children
working with the set, following the bins with baskets and gathering
up the fallen hops while the adults picked. And the old
costerwoman's tiny, pale granddaughter Rose, and a little gypsy
girl, dark as an Indian, were perpetually slipping off to steal
autumn raspberries and make swings out of hop bines; and the
constant singing round the bins was pierced by shrill cries from
the costerwoman of, 'Go on, Rose, you lazy little cat! Pick them
'ops up! I'll warm your a-- for you!' etc., etc.

Quite half the pickers in the set were gypsies--there were not less
than two hundred of them in the camp. Diddykies, the other pickers
called them. They were not a bad sort of people, friendly enough,
and they flattered you grossly when they wanted to get anything out
of you; yet they were sly, with the impenetrable slyness of
savages. In their oafish, Oriental faces there was a look as of
some wild but sluggish animal--a look of dense stupidity existing
side by side with untameable cunning. Their talk consisted of
about half a dozen remarks which they repeated over and over again
without ever growing tired of them. The two young gypsies at bin
number 6 would ask Nobby and Dorothy as many as a dozen times a day
the same conundrum:

'What is it the cleverest man in England couldn't do?'

'I don't know. What?'

'Tickle a gnat's a-- with a telegraph pole.'

At this, never-failing bellows of laughter. They were all
abysmally ignorant; they informed you with pride that not one of
them could read a single word. The old curly-headed father, who
had conceived some dim notion that Dorothy was a 'scholard', once
seriously asked her whether he could drive his caravan to New York.

At twelve o'clock a hooter down at the farm signalled to the
pickers to knock off work for an hour, and it was generally a
little before this that the measurer came round to collect the
hops. At a warning shout from the foreman of ''Ops ready, number
nineteen!' everyone would hasten to pick up the fallen hops, finish
off the tendrils that had been left unpicked here and there, and
clear the leaves out of the bin. There was an art in that. It did
not pay to pick too 'clean', for leaves and hops alike all went to
swell the tally. The old hands, such as the gypsies, were adepts
at knowing just how 'dirty' it was safe to pick.

The measurer would come round, carrying a wicker basket which held
a bushel, and accompanied by the 'bookie,' who entered the pickings
of each bin in a ledger. The 'bookies' were young men, clerks and
chartered accountants and the like, who took this job as a paying
holiday. The measurer would scoop the hops out of the bin a bushel
at a time, intoning as he did so, 'One! Two! Three! Four!' and
the pickers would enter the number in their tally books. Each
bushel they picked earned them twopence, and naturally there were
endless quarrels and accusations of unfairness over the measuring.
Hops are spongy things--you can crush a bushel of them into a quart
pot if you choose; so after each scoop one of the pickers would
lean over into the bin and stir the hops up to make them lie
looser, and then the measurer would hoist the end of the bin and
shake the hops together again. Some mornings he had orders to
'take them heavy', and would shovel them in so that he got a couple
of bushels at each scoop, whereat there were angry yells of, 'Look
how the b--'s ramming them down! Why don't you bloody well stamp
on them?' etc.; and the old hands would say darkly that they had
known measurers to be ducked in cowponds on the last day of
picking. From the bins the hops were put into pokes which
theoretically held a hundredweight; but it took two men to hoist a
full poke when the measurer had been 'taking them heavy'. You had
an hour for dinner, and you made a fire of hop bines--this was
forbidden, but everyone did it--and heated up your tea and ate your
bacon sandwiches. After dinner you were picking again till five or
six in the evening, when the measurer came once more to take your
hops, after which you were free to go back to the camp.

Looking back, afterwards, upon her interlude of hop-picking, it was
always the afternoons that Dorothy remembered. Those long,
laborious hours in the strong sunlight, in the sound of forty
voices singing, in the smell of hops and wood smoke, had a quality
peculiar and unforgettable. As the afternoon wore on you grew
almost too tired to stand, and the small green hop lice got into
your hair and into your ears and worried you, and your hands, from
the sulphurous juice, were as black as a Negro's except where they
were bleeding. Yet you were happy, with an unreasonable happiness.
The work took hold of you and absorbed you. It was stupid work,
mechanical, exhausting, and every day more painful to the hands,
and yet you never wearied of it; when the weather was fine and the
hops were good you had the feeling that you could go on picking for
ever and for ever. It gave you a physical joy, a warm satisfied
feeling inside you, to stand there hour after hour, tearing off the
heavy clusters and watching the pale green pile grow higher and
higher in your bin, every bushel another twopence in your pocket.
The sun burned down upon you, baking you brown, and the bitter,
never-palling scent, like a wind from oceans of cool beer, flowed
into your nostrils and refreshed you. When the sun was shining
everybody sang as they worked; the plantations rang with singing.
For some reason all the songs were sad that autumn--songs about
rejected love and fidelity unrewarded, like gutter versions of
Carmen and Manon Lescaut. There was:

THERE they GO--IN their joy--
'APPY girl--LUCKY boy--
But 'ere am _I-I-I_--
Broken--'A-A-Arted!

And there was:

But I'm dan--cing with tears--in my eyes--
'Cos the girl--in my arms--isn't you-o-ou!

And:

The bells--are ringing--for Sally--
But no-o-ot--for Sally--and me!

The little gypsy girl used to sing over and over again:

We're so misable, all so misable,
Down on Misable Farm!

And though everyone told her that the name of it was Misery Farm,
she persisted in calling it Misable Farm. The old costerwoman and
her granddaughter Rose had a hop-picking song which went:

'Our lousy 'ops!
Our lousy 'ops!
When the measurer 'e comes round,
Pick 'em up, pick 'em up off the ground!
When 'e comes to measure,
'E never knows where to stop;
Ay, ay, get in the bin
And take the bloody lot!'

'There they go in their joy', and 'The bells are ringing for
Sally', were the especial favourites. The pickers never grew tired
of singing them; they must have sung both of them several hundred
times over before the season came to an end. As much a part of the
atmosphere of the hopfields as the bitter scent and the blowsy
sunlight were the tunes of those two songs, ringing through the
leafy lanes of the bines.

When you got back to the camp, at half past six or thereabouts, you
squatted down by the stream that ran past the huts, and washed your
face, probably for the first time that day. It took you twenty
minutes or so to get the coal-black filth off your hands. Water
and even soap made no impression on it; only two things would
remove it--one of them was mud, and the other, curiously enough,
was hop juice. Then you cooked your supper, which was usually
bread and tea and bacon again, unless Nobby had been along to the
village and bought two pennyworth of pieces from the butcher. It
was always Nobby who did the shopping. He was the sort of man who
knows how to get four pennyworth of meat from the butcher for
twopence, and, besides, he was expert in tiny economies. For
instance, he always bought a cottage loaf in preference to any of
the other shapes, because, as he used to point out, a cottage loaf
seems like two loaves when you tear it in half.

Even before you had eaten your supper you were dropping with sleep,
but the huge fires that people used to build between the huts were
too agreeable to leave. The farm allowed two faggots a day for
each hut, but the pickers plundered as many more as they wanted,
and also great lumps of elm root which kept smouldering till
morning. On some nights the fires were so enormous that twenty
people could sit round them in comfort, and there was singing far
into the night, and telling of stories and roasting of stolen
apples. Youths and girls slipped off to the dark lanes together,
and a few bold spirits like Nobby set out with sacks and robbed the
neighbouring orchards, and the children played hide-and-seek in the
dusk and harried the nightjars which haunted the camp and which, in
their cockney ignorance, they imagined to be pheasants. On
Saturday nights fifty or sixty of the pickers used to get drunk in
the pub and then march down the village street roaring bawdy songs,
to the scandal of the inhabitants, who looked on the hopping season
as decent provincials in Roman Gaul might have looked on the yearly
incursion of the Goths.

When finally you managed to drag yourself away to your nest in the
straw, it was none too warm or comfortable. After that first
blissful night, Dorothy discovered that straw is wretched stuff to
sleep in. It is not only prickly, but, unlike hay, it lets in the
draught from every possible direction. However, you had the chance
to steal an almost unlimited number of hop-pokes from the fields,
and by making herself a sort of cocoon of four hop-pokes, one on
top of the other, she managed to keep warm enough to sleep at any
rate five hours a night.

4

As to what you earned by hop-picking, it was just enough to keep
body and soul together, and no more.

The rate of pay at Cairns's was twopence a bushel, and given good
hops a practised picker can average three bushels an hour. In
theory, therefore, it would have been possible to earn thirty
shillings by a sixty-hour week. Actually, no one in the camp came
anywhere near this figure. The best pickers of all earned thirteen
or fourteen shillings a week, and the worst hardly as much as six
shillings. Nobby and Dorothy, pooling their hops and dividing the
proceeds, made round about ten shillings a week each.

There were various reasons for this. To begin with, there was the
badness of the hops in some of the fields. Again, there were the
delays which wasted an hour or two of every day. When one
plantation was finished you had to carry your bin to the next,
which might be a mile distant; and then perhaps it would turn out
that there was some mistake, and the set, struggling under their
bins (they weighed a hundredweight), would have to waste another
half-hour in traipsing elsewhere. Worst of all, there was the
rain. It was a bad September that year, raining one day in three.
Sometimes for a whole morning or afternoon you shivered miserably
in the shelter of the unstripped bines, with a dripping hop-poke
round your shoulders, waiting for the rain to stop. It was
impossible to pick when it was raining. The hops were too slippery
to handle, and if you did pick them it was worse than useless, for
when sodden with water they shrank all to nothing in the bin.
Sometimes you were in the fields all day to earn a shilling or
less.

This did not matter to the majority of the pickers, for quite half
of them were gypsies and accustomed to starvation wages, and most
of the others were respectable East Enders, costermongers and small
shopkeepers and the like, who came hop-picking for a holiday and
were satisfied if they earned enough for their fare both ways and a
bit of fun on Saturday nights. The farmers knew this and traded on
it. Indeed, were it not that hop-picking is regarded as a holiday,
the industry would collapse forthwith, for the price of hops is now
so low that no farmer could afford to pay his pickers a living
wage.

Twice a week you could 'sub' up to the amount of half your
earnings. If you left before the picking was finished (an
inconvenient thing for the farmers) they had the right to pay you
off at the rate of a penny a bushel instead of twopence--that is,
to pocket half of what they owed you. It was also common knowledge
that towards the end of the season, when all the pickers had a fair
sum owing to them and would not want to sacrifice it by throwing up
their jobs, the farmer would reduce the rate of payment from
twopence a bushel to a penny halfpenny. Strikes were practically
impossible. The pickers had no union, and the foremen of the sets,
instead of being paid twopence a bushel like the others, were paid
a weekly wage which stopped automatically if there was a strike;
so naturally they would raise Heaven and earth to prevent one.
Altogether, the farmers had the pickers in a cleft stick; but it
was not the farmers who were to blame--the low price of hops was
the root of the trouble. Also as Dorothy observed later, very few
of the pickers had more than a dim idea of the amount they earned.
The system of piecework disguised the low rate of payment.

For the first few days, before they could 'sub', Dorothy and Nobby
very nearly starved, and would have starved altogether if the other
pickers had not fed them. But everyone was extraordinarily kind.
There was a party of people who shared one of the larger huts a
little farther up the row, a flower-seller named Jim Burrows and a
man named Jim Turle who was vermin man at a large London restaurant,
who had married sisters and were close friends, and these people had
taken a liking to Dorothy. They saw to it that she and Nobby should
not starve. Every evening during the first few days May Turle, aged
fifteen, would arrive with a saucepan full of stew, which was
presented with studied casualness, lest there should be any hint of
charity about it. The formula was always the same:

'Please, Ellen, mother says as she was just going to throw this
stew away, and then she thought as p'raps you might like it. She
ain't got no use for it, she says, and so you'd be doing her a
kindness if you was to take it.'

It was extraordinary what a lot of things the Turles and the
Burrowses were 'just going to throw away' during those first few
days. On one occasion they even gave Nobby and Dorothy half a
pig's head ready stewed; and besides food they gave them several
cooking pots and a tin plate which could be used as a frying-pan.
Best of all, they asked no uncomfortable questions. They knew well
enough that there was some mystery in Dorothy's life--'You could
see,' they said, 'as Ellen had COME DOWN IN THE WORLD'--but they
made it a point of honour not to embarrass her by asking questions
about it. It was not until she had been more than a fortnight at
the camp that Dorothy was even obliged to put herself to the
trouble of inventing a surname.

As soon as Dorothy and Nobby could 'sub', their money troubles were
at an end. They lived with surprising ease at the rate of one and
sixpence a day for the two of them. Fourpence of this went on
tobacco for Nobby, and fourpence-halfpenny on a loaf of bread; and
they spent about sevenpence a day on tea, sugar, milk (you could
get milk at the farm at a halfpenny a half-pint), and margarine and
'pieces' of bacon. But, of course, you never got through the day
without squandering another penny or two. You were everlastingly
hungry, everlastingly doing sums in farthings to see whether you
could afford a kipper or a doughnut or a pennyworth of potato
chips, and, wretched as the pickers' earnings were, half the
population of Kent seemed to be in conspiracy to tickle their money
out of their pockets. The local shopkeepers, with four hundred
hop-pickers quartered upon them, made more during the hop season
than all the rest of the year put together, which did not prevent
them from looking down on the pickers as cockney dirt. In the
afternoon the farm hands would come round the bins selling apples
and pears at seven a penny, and London hawkers would come with
baskets of doughnuts or water ices or 'halfpenny lollies'. At
night the camp was thronged by hawkers who drove down from London
with vans of horrifyingly cheap groceries, fish and chips, jellied
eels, shrimps, shop-soiled cakes, and gaunt, glassy-eyed rabbits
which had lain two years on the ice and were being sold off at
ninepence a time.

For the most part it was a filthy diet upon which the hop-pickers
lived--inevitably so, for even if you had the money to buy proper
food, there was no time to cook it except on Sundays. Probably it
was only the abundance of stolen apples that prevented the camp
from being ravaged by scurvy. There was constant, systematic
thieving of apples; practically everyone in the camp either stole
them or shared them. There were even parties of young men
(employed, so it was said, by London fruit-costers) who bicycled
down from London every week-end for the purpose of raiding the
orchards. As for Nobby, he had reduced fruit-stealing to a
science. Within a week he had collected a gang of youths who
looked up to him as a hero because he was a real burglar and had
been in jail four times, and every night they would set out at dusk
with sacks and come back with as much as two hundredweight of
fruit. There were vast orchards near the hopfields, and the
apples, especially the beautiful little Golden Russets, were lying
in piles under the trees, rotting, because the farmers could not
sell them. It was a sin not to rake them, Nobby said. On two
occasions he and his gang even stole a chicken. How they managed
to do it without waking the neighbourhood was a mystery; but it
appeared that Nobby knew some dodge of slipping a sack over a
chicken's head, so that it 'ceas'd upon the midnight with no
pain'--or at any rate, with no noise.

In this manner a week and then a fortnight went by, and Dorothy was
no nearer to solving the problem of her own identity. Indeed, she
was further from it than ever, for except at odd moments the
subject had almost vanished from her mind. More and more she had
come to take her curious situation for granted, to abandon all
thoughts of either yesterday or tomorrow. That was the natural
effect of life in the hopfields; it narrowed the range of your
consciousness to the passing minute. You could not struggle with
nebulous mental problems when you were everlastingly sleepy and
everlastingly occupied--for when you were not at work in the fields
you were either cooking, or fetching things from the village, or
coaxing a fire out of wet sticks, or trudging to and fro with cans
of water. (There was only one water tap in the camp, and that was
two hundred yards from Dorothy's hut, and the unspeakable earth
latrine was at the same distance.) It was a life that wore you
out, used up every ounce of your energy, and kept you profoundly,
unquestionably happy. In the literal sense of the word, it
stupefied you. The long days in the fields, the coarse food and
insufficient sleep, the smell of hops and wood smoke, lulled you
into an almost beastlike heaviness. Your wits seemed to thicken,
just as your skin did, in the rain and sunshine and perpetual fresh
air.

On Sundays, of course, there was no work in the fields; but Sunday
morning was a busy time, for it was then that people cooked their
principal meal of the week, and did their laundering and mending.
All over the camp, while the jangle of bells from the village
church came down the wind, mingling with the thin strains of 'O God
our Help' from the ill-attended open-air service held by St
Somebody's Mission to Hop-pickers, huge faggot fires were blazing,
and water boiling in buckets and tin cans and saucepans and
anything else that people could lay their hands on, and ragged
washing fluttering from the roofs of all the huts. On the first
Sunday Dorothy borrowed a basin from the Turles and washed first
her hair, then her underclothes and Nobby's shirt. Her underclothes
were in a shocking state. How long she had worn them she did not
know, but certainly not less than ten days, and they had been slept
in all that while. Her stockings had hardly any feet left to them,
and as for her shoes, they only held together because of the mud
that caked them.

After she had set the washing to dry she cooked the dinner, and
they dined opulently off half a stewed chicken (stolen), boiled
potatoes (stolen), stewed apples (stolen), and tea out of real tea-
cups with handles on them, borrowed from Mrs Burrows. And after
dinner, the whole afternoon, Dorothy sat against the sunny side of
the hut, with a dry hop-poke across her knees to hold her dress
down, alternately dozing and reawakening. Two-thirds of the people
in the camp were doing exactly the same thing; just dozing in the
sun, and waking to gaze at nothing, like cows. It was all you felt
equal to, after a week of heavy work.

About three o'clock, as she sat there on the verge of sleep, Nobby
sauntered by, bare to the waist--his shirt was drying--with a copy
of a Sunday newspaper that he had succeeded in borrowing. It was
Pippin's Weekly, the dirtiest of the five dirty Sunday newspapers.
He dropped it in Dorothy's lap as he passed.

'Have a read of that, kid,' he said generously.

Dorothy took Pippin's Weekly and laid it across her knees, feeling
herself far too sleepy to read. A huge headline stared her in the
face: 'PASSION DRAMA IN COUNTRY RECTORY.' And then there were
some more headlines, and something in leaded type, and an inset
photograph of a girl's face. For the space of five seconds or
thereabouts Dorothy was actually gazing at a blackish, smudgy, but
quite recognizable portrait of herself.

There was a column or so of print beneath the photograph. As a
matter of fact, most of the newspapers had dropped the 'Rector's
Daughter' mystery by this time, for it was more than a fortnight
old and stale news. But Pippin's Weekly cared little whether its
news was new so long as it was spicy, and that week's crop of rapes
and murders had been a poor one. They were giving the 'Rector's
Daughter' one final boost--giving her, in fact, the place of honour
at the top left-hand corner of the front page.

Dorothy gazed inertly at the photograph. A girl's face, looking
out at her from beds of black unappetizing print--it conveyed
absolutely nothing to her mind. She re-read mechanically the
words, 'PASSION DRAMA IN COUNTRY RECTORY', without either
understanding them or feeling the slightest interest in them. She
was, she discovered, totally unequal to the effort of reading; even
the effort of looking at the photographs was too much for her.
Heavy sleep was weighing down her head. Her eyes, in the act of
closing, flitted across the page to a photograph that was either of
Lord Snowden or of the man who wouldn't wear a truss, and then, in
the same instant, she fell asleep, with Pippin's Weekly across her
knees.

It was not uncomfortable against the corrugated iron wall of the
hut, and she hardly stirred till six o'clock, when Nobby woke her
up to tell her that he had got tea ready; whereat Dorothy put
Pippin's Weekly thriftily away (it would come in for lighting the
fire), without looking at it again. So for the moment the chance
of solving her problem passed by. And the problem might have
remained unsolved even for months longer, had not a disagreeable
accident, a week later, frightened her out of the contented and
unreflecting state in which she was living.

5

The following Sunday night two policemen suddenly descended upon
the camp and arrested Nobby and two others for theft.

It happened all in a moment, and Nobby could not have escaped
even if he had been warned beforehand, for the countryside was
pullulating with special constables. There are vast numbers of
special constables in Kent. They are sworn in every autumn--a sort
of militia to deal with the marauding tribes of hop-pickers. The
farmers had been growing tired of the orchard-robbing, and had
decided to make an example, in terrorem.

Of course there was a tremendous uproar in the camp. Dorothy came
out of her hut to discover what was the matter, and saw a firelit
ring of people towards which everyone was running. She ran after
them, and a horrid chill went through her, because it seemed to her
that she knew already what it was that had happened. She managed
to wriggle her way to the front of the crowd, and saw the very
thing that she had been fearing.

There stood Nobby, in the grip of an enormous policeman, and
another policeman was holding two frightened youths by the arms.
One of them, a wretched child hardly sixteen years old, was crying
bitterly. Mr Cairns, a stiff-built man with grey whiskers, and two
farm hands, were keeping guard over the stolen property that had
been dug out of the straw of Nobby's hut. Exhibit A, a pile of
apples; Exhibit B, some blood-stained chicken feathers. Nobby
caught sight of Dorothy among the crowd, grinned at her with a
flash of large teeth, and winked. There was a confused din of
shouting:

'Look at the pore little b-- crying! Let 'im go! Bloody shame,
pore little kid like that! Serve the young bastard right, getting
us all into trouble! Let 'im go! Always got to put the blame on
us bloody hop-pickers! Can't lose a bloody apple without it's us
that's took it. Let 'im go! Shut up, can't you? S'pose they was
YOUR bloody apples? Wouldn't YOU bloodiwell--' etc., etc., etc.
And then: 'Stand back mate! 'Ere comes the kid's mother.'

A huge Toby jug of a woman, with monstrous breasts and her hair
coming down her back, forced her way through the ring of people and
began roaring first at the policeman and Mr Cairns, then at Nobby,
who had led her son astray. Finally the farm hands managed to drag
her away. Through the woman's yells Dorothy could hear Mr Cairns
gruffly interrogating Nobby:

'Now then, young man, just you own up and tell us who you shared
them apples with! We're going to put a stop to this thieving game,
once and for all. You own up, and I dessay we'll take it into
consideration.'

Nobby answered, as blithely as ever, 'Consideration, your a--!'

'Don't you get giving me any of your lip, young man! Or else
you'll catch it all the hotter when you go up before the
magistrate.'

'Catch it hotter, your a--!'

Nobby grinned. His own wit filled him with delight. He caught
Dorothy's eye and winked at her once again before being led away.
And that was the last she ever saw of him.

There was further shouting, and when the prisoners were removed a
few dozen men followed them, booing at the policemen and Mr Cairns,
but nobody dared to interfere. Dorothy meanwhile had crept away;
she did not even stop to find out whether there would be an
opportunity of saying goodbye to Nobby--she was too frightened, too
anxious to escape. Her knees were trembling uncontrollably. When
she got back to the hut, the other women were sitting up, talking
excitedly about Nobby's arrest. She burrowed deep into the straw
and hid herself, to be out of the sound of their voices. They
continued talking half the night, and of course, because Dorothy
had supposedly been Nobby's 'tart', they kept condoling with her
and plying her with questions. She did not answer them--pretended
to be asleep. But there would be, she knew well enough, no sleep
for her that night.

The whole thing had frightened and upset her--but it had frightened
her more than was reasonable or understandable. For she was in no
kind of danger. The farm hands did not know that she had shared
the stolen apples--for that matter, nearly everyone in the camp had
shared them--and Nobby would never betray her. It was not even
that she was greatly concerned for Nobby, who was frankly not
troubled by the prospect of a month in jail. It was something that
was happening inside her--some change that was taking place in the
atmosphere of her mind.

It seemed to her that she was no longer the same person that she
had been an hour ago. Within her and without, everything was
changed. It was as though a bubble in her brain had burst, setting
free thoughts, feelings, fears of which she had forgotten the
existence. All the dreamlike apathy of the past three weeks was
shattered. For it was precisely as in a dream that she had been
living--it is the especial condition of a dream that one accepts
everything, questions nothing. Dirt, rags, vagabondage, begging,
stealing--all had seemed natural to her. Even the loss of her
memory had seemed natural; at least, she had hardly given it a
thought till this moment. The question 'WHO AM I?' had faded out
of her mind till sometimes she had forgotten it for hours together.
It was only now that it returned with any real urgency.

For nearly the whole of a miserable night that question went to and
fro in her brain. But it was not so much the question itself that
troubled her as the knowledge that it was about to be answered.
Her memory was coming back to her, that was certain, and some ugly
shock was coming with it. She actually feared the moment when she
should discover her own identity. Something that she did not want
to face was waiting just below the surface of her consciousness.

At half past five she got up and groped for her shoes as usual.
She went outside, got the fire going, and stuck the can of water
among the hot embers to boil. Just as she did so a memory, seeming
irrelevant, flashed across her mind. It was of that halt on the
village green at Wale, a fortnight ago--the time when they had met
the old Irishwoman, Mrs McElligot. Very vividly she remembered the
scene. Herself lying exhausted on the grass, with her arm over her
face; and Nobby and Mrs McElligot talking across her supine body;
and Charlie, with succulent relish, reading out the poster, 'Secret
Love Life of Rector's Daughter'; and herself, mystified but not
deeply interested, sitting up and asking, 'What is a Rector?'

At that a deadly chill, like a hand of ice, fastened about her
heart. She got up and hurried, almost ran back to the hut, then
burrowed down to the place where her sacks lay and felt in the
straw beneath them. In that vast mound of straw all your loose
possessions got lost and gradually worked their way to the bottom.
But after searching for some minutes, and getting herself well
cursed by several women who were still half asleep, Dorothy found
what she was looking for. It was the copy of Pippin's Weekly which
Nobby had given her a week ago. She took it outside, knelt down,
and spread it out in the light of the fire.

It was on the front page--a photograph, and three big headlines.
Yes! There it was!

PASSION DRAMA IN COUNTRY RECTORY

PARSON'S DAUGHTER AND ELDERLY SEDUCER

WHITE-HAIRED FATHER PROSTRATE WITH GRIEF

(Pippin's Weekly Special)

'I would sooner have seen her in her grave!' was the heartbroken
cry of the Rev. Charles Hare, Rector of Knype Hill, Suffolk, on
learning of his twenty-eight-year-old daughter's elopement with an
elderly bachelor named Warburton, described as an artist.

Miss Hare, who left the town on the night of the twenty-first of
August, is still missing, and all attempts to trace her have
failed. [In leaded type] Rumour, as yet unconfirmed, states that
she was recently seen with a male companion in a hotel of evil
repute in Vienna.

Readers of Pippin's Weekly will recall that the elopement took
place in dramatic circumstances. A little before midnight on the
twenty-first of August, Mrs Evelina Semprill, a widowed lady who
inhabits the house next door to Mr Warburton's, happened by chance
to look out of her bedroom window and saw Mr Warburton standing at
his front gate in conversation with a young woman. As it was a
clear moonlight night, Mrs Semprill was able to distinguish this
young woman as Miss Hare, the Rector's daughter. The pair remained
at the gate for several minutes, and before going indoors they
exchanged embraces which Mrs Semprill describes as being of a
passionate nature. About half an hour later they reappeared in Mr
Warburton's car, which was backed out of the front gate, and drove
off in the direction of the Ipswich road. Miss Hare was dressed in
scanty attire, and appeared to be under the influence of alcohol.

It is now learned that for some time past Miss Hare had been in the
habit of making clandestine visits to Mr Warburton's house. Mrs
Semprill, who could only with great difficulty be persuaded to
speak upon so painful a subject, has further revealed--

Dorothy crumpled Pippin's Weekly violently between her hands and
thrust it into the fire, upsetting the can of water. There was a
cloud of ashes and sulphurous smoke, and almost in the same instant
Dorothy pulled the paper out of the fire unburnt. No use funking
it--better to learn the worst. She read on, with a horrible
fascination. It was not a nice kind of story to read about
yourself. For it was strange, but she had no longer any shadow of
doubt that this girl of whom she was reading was herself. She
examined the photograph. It was a blurred, nebulous thing, but
quite unmistakable. Besides, she had no need of the photograph to
remind her. She could remember everything--every circumstance of
her life, up to that evening when she had come home tired out from
Mr Warburton's house, and, presumably, fallen asleep in the
conservatory. It was all so clear in her mind that it was almost
incredible that she had ever forgotten it.

She ate no breakfast that day, and did not think to prepare
anything for the midday meal; but when the time came, from force of
habit, she set out for the hopfields with the other pickers. With
difficulty, being alone, she dragged the heavy bin into position,
pulled the next bine down and began picking. But after a few
minutes she found that it was quite impossible; even the mechanical
labour of picking was beyond her. That horrible, lying story in
Pippin's Weekly had so unstrung her that it was impossible even for
an instant to focus her mind upon anything else. Its lickerish
phrases were going over and over in her head. 'Embraces of a
passionate nature'--'in scanty attire'--'under the influence of
alcohol'--as each one came back into her memory it brought with it
such a pang that she wanted to cry out as though in physical pain.

After a while she stopped even pretending to pick, let the bine
fall across her bin, and sat down against one of the posts that
supported the wires. The other pickers observed her plight, and
were sympathetic. Ellen was a bit cut up, they said. What else
could you expect, after her bloke had been knocked off? (Everyone
in the camp, of course, had taken it for granted that Nobby was
Dorothy's lover.) They advised her to go down to the farm and
report sick. And towards twelve o'clock, when the measurer was
due, everyone in the set came across with a hatful of hops and
dropped it into her bin.

When the measurer arrived he found Dorothy still sitting on the
ground. Beneath her dirt and sunburn she was very pale; her face
looked haggard, and much older than before. Her bin was twenty
yards behind the rest of the set, and there were less than three
bushels of hops in it.

'What's the game?' he demanded. 'You ill?'

'No.'

'Well, why ain't you bin pickin', then? What you think this is--
toff's picnic? You don't come up 'ere to sit about on the ground,
you know.'

'You cheese it and don't get nagging of 'er!' shouted the old
cockney costerwoman suddenly. 'Can't the pore girl 'ave a bit of
rest and peace if she wants it? Ain't 'er bloke in the clink
thanks to you and your bloody nosing pals of coppers? She's got
enough to worry 'er 'thout being ---- about by every bloody
copper's nark in Kent!'

'That'll be enough from you, Ma!' said the measurer gruffly, but he
looked more sympathetic on hearing that it was Dorothy's lover who
had been arrested on the previous night. When the costerwoman had
got her kettle boiling she called Dorothy to her bin and gave her a
cup of strong tea and a hunk of bread and cheese; and after the
dinner interval another picker who had no partner was sent up to
share Dorothy's bin. He was a small, weazened old tramp named
Deafie. Dorothy felt somewhat better after the tea. Encouraged by
Deafie's example--for he was an excellent picker--she managed to do
her fair share of work during the afternoon.

She had thought things over, and was less distracted than before.
The phrases in Pippin's Weekly still made her wince with shame, but
she was equal now to facing the situation. She understood well
enough what had happened to her, and what had led to Mrs Semprill's
libel. Mrs Semprill had seen them together at the gate and had
seen Mr Warburton kissing her; and after that, when they were both
missing from Knype Hill, it was only too natural--natural for Mrs
Semprill, that is--to infer that they had eloped together. As for
the picturesque details, she had invented them later. Or HAD she
invented them? That was the one thing you could never be certain
of with Mrs Semprill--whether she told her lies consciously and
deliberately AS lies, or whether, in her strange and disgusting
mind, she somehow succeeded in believing them.

Well, anyway, the harm was done--no use worrying about it any
longer. Meanwhile, there was the question of getting back to Knype
Hill. She would have to send for some clothes, and she would need
two pounds for her train fare home. Home! The word sent a pang
through her heart. Home, after weeks of dirt and hunger! How she
longed for it, now that she remembered it!

But--!

A chilly little doubt raised its head. There was one aspect of the
matter that she had not thought of till this moment. COULD she,
after all, go home? Dared she?

Could she face Knype Hill after everything that had happened? That
was the question. When you have figured on the front page of
Pippin's Weekly--'in scanty attire'--'under the influence of
alcohol'--ah, don't let's think of it again! But when you have
been plastered all over with horrible, dishonouring libels, can you
go back to a town of two thousand inhabitants where everybody knows
everybody else's private history and talks about it all day long?

She did not know--could not decide. At one moment it seemed to her
that the story of her elopement was so palpably absurd that no one
could possibly have believed it. Mr Warburton, for instance, could
contradict it--most certainly would contradict it, for every
possible reason. But the next moment she remembered that Mr
Warburton had gone abroad, and unless this affair had got into the
continental newspapers, he might not even have heard of it; and
then she quailed again. She knew what it means to have to live
down a scandal in a small country town. The glances and furtive
nudges when you passed! The prying eyes following you down the
street from behind curtained windows! The knots of youths on the
corners round Blifil-Gordon's factory, lewdly discussing you!

'George! Say, George! J'a see that bit of stuff over there? With
fair 'air?'

'What, the skinny one? Yes. 'Oo's she?'

'Rector's daughter, she is. Miss 'Are. But, say! What you think
she done two years ago? Done a bunk with a bloke old enough to bin
'er father. Regular properly went on the razzle with 'im in Paris!
Never think it to look at 'er, would you?'

'GO on!'

'She did! Straight, she did. It was in the papers and all. Only
'e give 'er the chuck three weeks afterwards, and she come back
'ome again as bold as brass. Nerve, eh?'

Yes, it would take some living down. For years, for a decade it
might be, they would be talking about her like that. And the worst
of it was that the story in Pippin's Weekly was probably a mere
bowdlerized vestige of what Mrs Semprill had been saying in the
town. Naturally, Pippin's Weekly had not wanted to commit itself
too far. But was there anything that would ever restrain Mrs
Semprill? Only the limits of her imagination--and they were almost
as wide as the sky.

One thing, however, reassured Dorothy, and that was the thought
that her father, at any rate, would do his best to shield her. Of
course, there would be others as well. It was not as though she
were friendless. The church congregation, at least, knew her and
trusted her, and the Mothers' Union and the Girl Guides and the
women on her visiting list would never believe such stories about
her. But it was her father who mattered most. Almost any
situation is bearable if you have a home to go back to and a family
who will stand by you. With courage, and her father's support, she
might face things out. By the evening she had decided that it
would be perfectly all right to go back to Knype Hill, though no
doubt it would be disagreeable at first, and when work was over for
the day she 'subbed' a shilling, and went down to the general shop
in the village and bought a penny packet of notepaper. Back in the
camp, sitting on the grass by the fire--no tables or chairs in the
camp, of course--she began to write with a stump of pencil:

Dearest Father,--I can't tell you how glad I am, after everything
that has happened, to be able to write to you again. And I do hope
you have not been too anxious about me or too worried by those
horrible stories in the newspapers. I don't know what you must
have thought when I suddenly disappeared like that and you didn't
hear from me for nearly a month. But you see--'

How strange the pencil felt in her torn and stiffened fingers! She
could only write a large, sprawling hand like that of a child. But
she wrote a long letter, explaining everything, and asking him to
send her some clothes and two pounds for her fare home. Also, she
asked him to write to her under an assumed name she gave him--Ellen
Millborough, after Millborough in Suffolk. It seemed a queer thing
to have to do, to use a false name; dishonest--criminal, almost.
But she dared not risk its being known in the village, and perhaps
in the camp as well, that she was Dorothy Hare, the notorious
'Rector's Daughter'.

6

Once her mind was made up, Dorothy was pining to escape from the
hop camp. On the following day she could hardly bring herself to
go on with the stupid work of picking, and the discomforts and bad
food were intolerable now that she had memories to compare them
with. She would have taken to flight immediately if only she had
had enough money to get her home. The instant her father's letter
with the two pounds arrived, she would say good-bye to the Turles
and take the train for home, and breathe a sigh of relief to get
there, in spite of the ugly scandals that had got to be faced.

On the third day after writing she went down the village post
office and asked for her letter. The postmistress, a woman with
the face of a dachshund and a bitter contempt for all hop-pickers,
told her frostily that no letter had come. Dorothy was
disappointed. A pity--it must have been held up in the post.
However, it didn't matter; tomorrow would be soon enough--only
another day to wait.

The next evening she went again, quite certain that it would have
arrived this time. Still no letter. This time a misgiving
assailed her; and on the fifth evening, when there was yet again no
letter, the misgiving changed into a horrible panic. She bought
another packet of notepaper and wrote an enormous letter, using up
the whole four sheets, explaining over and over again what had
happened and imploring her father not to leave her in such
suspense. Having posted it, she made up her mind that she would
let a whole week go by before calling at the post office again.

This was Saturday. By Wednesday her resolve had broken down. When
the hooter sounded for the midday interval she left her bin and
hurried down to the post office--it was a mile and a half away, and
it meant missing her dinner. Having got there she went shame-
facedly up to the counter, almost afraid to speak. The dog-faced
postmistress was sitting in her brass-barred cage at the end of the
counter, ticking figures in a long shaped account book. She gave
Dorothy a brief nosy glance and went on with her work, taking no
notice of her.

Something painful was happening in Dorothy's diaphragm. She was
finding it difficult to breathe, 'Are there any letters for me?'
she managed to say at last.

'Name?' said the postmistress, ticking away.

'Ellen Millborough.'

The postmistress turned her long dachshund nose over her shoulder
for an instant and glanced at the M partition of the Poste Restante
letter-box.

'No,' she said, turning back to her account book.

In some manner Dorothy got herself outside and began to walk back
towards the hopfields, then halted. A deadly feeling of emptiness
at the pit of her stomach, caused partly by hunger, made her too
weak to walk.

Her father's silence could mean only one thing. He believed Mrs
Semprill's story--believed that she, Dorothy, had run away from
home in disgraceful circumstances and then told lies to excuse
herself. He was too angry and too disgusted to write to her. All
he wanted was to get rid of her, drop all communication with her;
get her out of sight and out of mind, as a mere scandal to be
covered up and forgotten.

She could not go home after this. She dared not. Now that she had
seen what her father's attitude was, it had opened her eyes to the
rashness of the thing she had been contemplating. Of COURSE she
could not go home! To slink back in disgrace, to bring shame on
her father's house by coming there--ah, impossible, utterly
impossible! How could she even have thought of it?

What then? There was nothing for it but to go right away--right
away to some place that was big enough to hide in. London,
perhaps. Somewhere where nobody knew her and the mere sight of her
face or mention of her name would not drag into the light a string
of dirty memories.

As she stood there the sound of bells floated towards her, from the
village church round the bend of the road, where the ringers were
amusing themselves by ringing 'Abide with Me', as one picks out a
tune with one finger on the piano. But presently 'Abide with Me'
gave way to the familiar Sunday-morning jangle. 'Oh do leave my
wife alone! She is so drunk she can't get home!'--the same peal
that the bells of St Athelstan's had been used to ring three years
ago before they were unswung. The sound planted a spear of
homesickness in Dorothy's heart, bringing back to her with
momentary vividness a medley of remembered things--the smell of the
glue-pot in the conservatory when she was making costumes for the
school play, and the chatter of starlings outside her bedroom
window, interrupting her prayers before Holy Communion, and Mrs
Pither's doleful voice chronicling the pains in the backs of her
legs, and the worries of the collapsing belfry and the shop-debts
and the bindweed in the peas--all the multitudinous, urgent details
of a life that had alternated between work and prayer.

Prayer! For a very short time, a minute perhaps, the thought
arrested her. Prayer--in those days it had been the very source
and centre of her life. In trouble or in happiness, it was to
prayer that she had turned. And she realized--the first time that
it had crossed her mind--that she had not uttered a prayer since
leaving home, not even since her memory had come back to her.
Moreover, she was aware that she had no longer the smallest impulse
to pray. Mechanically, she began a whispered prayer, and stopped
almost instantly; the words were empty and futile. Prayer, which
had been the mainstay of her life, had no meaning for her any
longer. She recorded this fact as she walked slowly up the road,
and she recorded it briefly, almost casually, as though it had been
something seen in passing--a flower in the ditch or a bird crossing
the road--something noticed and then dismissed. She had not even
the time to reflect upon what it might mean. It was shouldered out
of her mind by more momentous things.

It was of the future that she had got to be thinking now. She was
already fairly clear in her mind as to what she must do. When the
hop-picking was at an end she must go up to London, write to her
father for money and her clothes--for however angry he might be,
she could not believe that he intended to leave her utterly in the
lurch--and then start looking for a job. It was the measure of her
ignorance that those dreaded words 'looking for a job' sounded
hardly at all dreadful in her ears. She knew herself strong and
willing--knew that there were plenty of jobs that she was capable
of doing. She could be a nursery governess, for instance--no,
better, a housemaid or a parlourmaid. There were not many things
in a house that she could not do better than most servants;
besides, the more menial her job, the easier it would be to keep
her past history secret.

At any rate, her father's house was closed to her, that was
certain. From now on she had got to fend for herself. On this
decision, with only a very dim idea of what it meant, she quickened
her pace and got back to the fields in time for the afternoon
shift.

The hop-picking season had not much longer to run. In a week or
thereabouts Cairns's would be closing down, and the cockneys would
take the hoppers' train to London, and the gypsies would catch
their horses, pack their caravans, and march northward to
Lincolnshire, to scramble for jobs in the potato fields. As for
the cockneys, they had had their bellyful of hop-picking by this
time. They were pining to be back in dear old London, with
Woolworths and the fried-fish shop round the corner, and no more
sleeping in straw and frying bacon in tin lids with your eyes
weeping from wood smoke. Hopping was a holiday, but the kind of
holiday that you were glad to see the last of. You came down
cheering, but you went home cheering louder still and swearing that
you would never go hopping again--until next August, when you had
forgotten the cold nights and the bad pay and the damage to your
hands, and remembered only the blowsy afternoons in the sun and the
boozing of stone pots of beer round the red camp fires at night.

The mornings were growing bleak and Novemberish; grey skies, the
first leaves falling, and finches and starlings already flocking
for the winter. Dorothy had written yet again to her father,
asking for money and some clothes; he had left her letter
unanswered, nor had anybody else written to her. Indeed, there was
no one except her father who knew her present address; but somehow
she had hoped that Mr Warburton might write. Her courage almost
failed her now, especially at nights in the wretched straw, when
she lay awake thinking of the vague and menacing future. She
picked her hops with a sort of desperation, a sort of frenzy of
energy, more aware each day that every handful of hops meant
another fraction of a farthing between herself and starvation.
Deafie, her bin-mate, like herself, was picking against time, for
it was the last money he would earn till next year's hopping season
came round. The figure they aimed at was five shillings a day--
thirty bushels--between the two of them, but there was no day when
they quite attained it.

Deafie was a queer old man and a poor companion after Nobby, but
not a bad sort. He was a ship's steward by profession, but a tramp
of many years' standing, as deaf as a post and therefore something
of a Mr F.'s aunt in conversation. He was also an exhibitionist,
but quite harmless. For hours together he used to sing a little
song that went 'With my willy willy--WITH my willy willy', and
though he could not hear what he was singing it seemed to cause him
some kind of pleasure. He had the hairiest ears Dorothy had ever
seen. There were tufts like miniature Dundreary whiskers growing
out of each of his ears. Every year Deafie came hop-picking at
Cairns's farm, saved up a pound, and then spent a paradisiac week
in a lodging-house in Newington Butts before going back to the
road. This was the only week in the year when he slept in what
could be called, except by courtesy, a bed.

The picking came to an end on 28 September. There were several
fields still unpicked, but they were poor hops and at the last
moment Mr Cairns decided to 'let them blow'. Set number 19
finished their last field at two in the afternoon, and the little
gypsy foreman swarmed up the poles and retrieved the derelict
bunches, and the measurer carted the last hops away. As he
disappeared there was a sudden shout of 'Put 'em in the bins!' and
Dorothy saw six men bearing down upon her with a fiendish
expression on their faces, and all the women in the set scattering
and running. Before she could collect her wits to escape the men
had seized her, laid her at full length in a bin and swung her
violently from side to side. Then she was dragged out and kissed
by a young gypsy smelling of onions. She struggled at first, but
she saw the same thing being done to the other women in the set, so
she submitted. It appeared that putting the women in the bins was
an invariable custom on the last day of picking. There were great
doings in the camp that night, and not much sleep for anybody.
Long after midnight Dorothy found herself moving with a ring of
people about a mighty fire, one hand clasped by a rosy butcher-boy
and the other by a very drunk old woman in a Scotch bonnet out of a
cracker, to the tune of 'Auld Lang Syne'.

In the morning they went up to the farm to draw their money, and
Dorothy drew one pound and fourpence, and earned another fivepence
by adding up their tally books for people who could not read or
write. The cockney pickers paid you a penny for this job; the
gypsies paid you only in flattery. Then Dorothy set out for West
Ackworth station, four miles away, together with the Turles, Mr
Turle carrying the tin trunk, Mrs Turle carrying the baby, the
other children carrying various odds and ends, and Dorothy wheeling
the perambulator which held the Turles' entire stock of crockery,
and which had two circular wheels and two elliptical.

They got to the station about midday, the hoppers' train was due to
start at one, and it arrived at two and started at a quarter past
three. After a journey of incredible slowness, zigzagging all over
Kent to pick up a dozen hop-pickers here and half a dozen there,
going back on its tracks over and over again and backing into
sidings to let other trains pass--taking, in fact, six hours to do
thirty-five miles--it landed them in London a little after nine at
night.

7

Dorothy slept that night with the Turles. They had grown so fond
of her that they would have given her shelter for a week or a
fortnight if she had been willing to impose on their hospitality.
Their two rooms (they lived in a tenement house not far from Tower
Bridge Road) were a tight fit for seven people including children,
but they made her a bed of sorts on the floor out of two rag mats,
an old cushion and an overcoat.

In the morning she said good-bye to the Turles and thanked them
for all their kindness towards her, and then went straight to
Bermondsey public baths and washed off the accumulated dirt of five
weeks. After that she set out to look for a lodging, having in her
possession sixteen and eightpence in cash, and the clothes she
stood up in. She had darned and cleaned her clothes as best she
could, and being black they did not show the dirt quite as badly as
they might have done. From the knees down she was now passably
respectable. On the last day of picking a 'home picker' in the
next set, named Mrs Killfrew, had presented her with a good pair
of shoes that had been her daughter's, and a pair of woollen
stockings.

It was not until the evening that Dorothy managed to find herself a
room. For something like ten hours she was wandering up and down,
from Bermondsey into Southwark, from Southwark into Lambeth,
through labyrinthine streets where snotty-nosed children played at
hop-scotch on pavements horrible with banana skins and decaying
cabbage leaves. At every house she tried it was the same story--
the landlady refused point-blank to take her in. One after another
a succession of hostile women, standing in their doorways as
defensively as though she had been a motor bandit or a government
inspector, looked her up and down, said briefly, 'We don't TAKE
single girls,' and shut the door in her face. She did not know it,
of course, but the very look of her was enough to rouse any
respectable landlady's suspicions. Her stained and ragged clothes
they might possibly have put up with; but the fact that she had no
luggage damned her from the start. A single girl with no luggage
is invariably a bad lot--this is the first and greatest of the
apophthegms of the London landlady.

At about seven o'clock, too tired to stand on her feet any longer,
she ventured into a filthy, flyblown little cafe near the Old Vic
theatre and asked for a cup of tea. The proprietress, getting into
conversation with her and learning that she wanted a room, advised
her to 'try at Mary's, in Wellings Court, jest orff the Cut'.
'Mary', it appeared, was not particular and would let a room to
anybody who could pay. Her proper name was Mrs Sawyer, but the
boys all called her Mary.

Dorothy found Wellings Court with some difficulty. You went along
Lambeth Cut till you got to a Jew clothes-shop called Knockout
Trousers Ltd, then you turned up a narrow alley, and then turned to
your left again up another alley so narrow that its grimy plaster
walls almost brushed you as you went. In the plaster, persevering
boys had cut the word ---- innumerable times and too deeply to be
erased. At the far end of the alley you found yourself in a small
court where four tall narrow houses with iron staircases stood
facing one another.

Dorothy made inquiries and found 'Mary' in a subterranean den
beneath one of the houses. She was a drabby old creature with
remarkably thin hair and face so emaciated that it looked like a
rouged and powdered skull. Her voice was cracked, shrewish, and
nevertheless ineffably dreary. She asked Dorothy no questions, and
indeed scarcely even looked at her, but simply demanded ten
shillings and then said in her ugly voice:

'Twenty-nine. Third floor. Go up be the back stairs.'

Apparently the back stairs were those inside the house. Dorothy
went up the dark, spiral staircase, between sweating walls, in a
smell of old overcoats, dishwater and slops. As she reached the
second floor there was a loud squeal of laughter, and two rowdy-
looking girls came out of one of the rooms and stared at her for a
moment. They looked young, their faces being quite hidden under
rouge and pink powder, and their lips painted scarlet as geranium
petals. But amid the pink powder their china-blue eyes were tired
and old; and that was somehow horrible, because it reminded you of
a girl's mask with an old woman's face behind it. The taller of
the two greeted Dorothy.

''Ullo, dearie!'

'Hullo!'

'You new 'ere? Which room you kipping in?'

'Number twenty-nine.'

'God, ain't that a bloody dungeon to put you in! You going out
tonight?'

'No, I don't think so,' said Dorothy, privately a little astonished
at the question. 'I'm too tired.'

'Thought you wasn't, when I saw you 'adn't dolled up. But, say!
dearie, you ain't on the beach, are you? Not spoiling the ship for
a 'aporth of tar? Because f'rinstance if you want the lend of a
lipstick, you only got to say the word. We're all chums 'ere, you
know.'

'Oh. . . . No, thank you,' said Dorothy, taken aback.

'Oh, well! Time Doris and me was moving. Got a 'portant business
engagement in Leicester Square.' Here she nudged the other girl
with her hip, and both of them sniggered in a silly mirthless
manner. 'But, say!' added the taller girl confidentially, 'ain't
it a bloody treat to 'ave a good night's kip all alone once in a
way? Wish _I_ could. All on your Jack Jones with no bloody great
man's feet shoving you about. 'S all right when you can afford it,
eh?'

'Yes,' said Dorothy, feeling that this answer was expected of her,
and with only a very vague notion of what the other was talking
about.

'Well, ta ta, dearie! Sleep tight. And jes' look out for the
smash and grab raiders 'bout 'ar-parse one!'

When the two girls had skipped downstairs with another of their
meaningless squeals of laughter, Dorothy found her way to room
number 29 and opened the door. A cold, evil smell met her. The
room measured about eight feet each way, and was very dark. The
furniture was simple. In the middle of the room, a narrow iron
bedstead with a ragged coverlet and greyish sheets; against the
wall, a packing case with a tin basin and an empty whisky bottle
intended for water; tacked over the bed, a photograph of Bebe
Daniels torn out of Film Fun.

The sheets were not only dirty, but damp. Dorothy got into the
bed, but she had only undressed to her chemise, or what was left of
her chemise, her underclothes by this time being almost entirely in
ruins; she could not bring herself to lay her bare body between
those nauseous sheets. And once in bed, though she was aching from
head to foot with fatigue, she could not sleep. She was unnerved
and full of forebodings. The atmosphere of this vile place brought
home to her more vividly than before the fact that she was helpless
and friendless and had only six shillings between herself and the
streets. Moreover, as the night wore on the house grew noisier and
noisier. The walls were so thin that you could hear everything
that was happening. There were bursts of shrill idiotic laughter,
hoarse male voices singing, a gramophone drawling out limericks,
noisy kisses, strange deathlike groans, and once or twice the
violent rattling of an iron bed. Towards midnight the noises began
to form themselves into a rhythm in Dorothy's brain, and she fell
lightly and unrestfully asleep. She was woken about a minute
later, as it seemed, by her door being flung open, and two dimly
seen female shapes rushed in, tore every scrap of clothing from her
bed except the sheets, and rushed out again. There was a chronic
shortage of blankets at 'Mary's', and the only way of getting
enough of them was to rob somebody else's bed. Hence the term
'smash and grab raiders'.

In the morning, half an hour before opening time, Dorothy went to
the nearest public library to look at the advertisements in the
newspapers. Already a score of vaguely mangy-looking people were
prowling up and down, and the number swelled by ones and twos till
there were no less than sixty. Presently the doors of the library
opened, and in they all surged, racing for a board at the other end
of the reading-room where the 'Situations Vacant' columns from
various newspapers had been cut out and pinned up. And in the wake
of the job-hunters came poor old bundles of rags, men and women
both, who had spent the night in the streets and came to the
library to sleep. They came shambling in behind the others,
flopped down with grunts of relief at the nearest table, and pulled
the nearest periodical towards them; it might be the Free Church
Messenger, it might be the Vegetarian Sentinel--it didn't matter
what it was, but you couldn't stay in the library unless you
pretended to be reading. They opened their papers, and in the same
instant fell asleep, with their chins on their breasts. And the
attendant walked round prodding them in turn like a stoker poking a
succession of fires, and they grunted and woke up as he prodded
them, and then fell asleep again the instant he had passed.

Meanwhile a battle was raging round the advertisement board,
everybody struggling to get to the front. Two young men in blue
overalls came running up behind the others, and one of them put his
head down and fought his way through the crowd as though it had
been a football scrum. In a moment he was at the board. He turned
to his companion: ''Ere we are, Joe--I got it! "Mechanics wanted--
Locke's Garage, Camden Town." C'm on out of it!' He fought his
way out again, and both of them scooted for the door. They were
going to Camden Town as fast as their legs would carry them. And
at this moment, in every public library in London, mechanics out of
work were reading that identical notice and starting on the race
for the job, which in all probability had already been given to
someone who could afford to buy a paper for himself and had seen
the notice at six in the morning.

Dorothy managed to get to the board at last, and made a note of
some of the addresses where 'cook generals' were wanted. There
were plenty to choose from--indeed, half the ladies in London
seemed to be crying out for strong capable general servants. With
a list of twenty addresses in her pocket, and having had a
breakfast of bread and margarine and tea which cost her threepence,
Dorothy set out to look for a job, not unhopefully.

She was too ignorant as yet to know that her chances of finding
work unaided were practically nil; but the next four days gradually
enlightened her. During those four days she applied for eighteen
jobs, and sent written applications for four others. She trudged
enormous distances all through the southern suburbs: Clapham,
Brixton, Dulwich, Penge, Sydenham, Beckenham, Norwood--even as far
as Croydon on one occasion. She was haled into neat suburban
drawing-rooms and interviewed by women of every conceivable type--
large, chubby, bullying women, thin, acid, catty women, alert
frigid women in gold pince-nez, vague rambling women who looked as
though they practised vegetarianism or attended spiritualist
seances. And one and all, fat or thin, chilly or motherly, they
reacted to her in precisely the same way. They simply looked her
over, heard her speak, stared inquisitively, asked her a dozen
embarrassing and impertinent questions, and then turned her down.

Any experienced person could have told her how it would be. In her
circumstances it was not to be expected that anyone would take the
risk of employing her. Her ragged clothes and her lack of
references were against her, and her educated accent, which she did
not know how to disguise, wrecked whatever chances she might have
had. The tramps and cockney hop-pickers had not noticed her
accent, but the suburban housewives noticed it quickly enough, and
it scared them in just the same way as the fact that she had no
luggage had scared the landladies. The moment they had heard her
speak, and spotted her for a gentlewoman, the game was up. She
grew quite used to the startled, mystified look that came over
their faces as soon as she opened her mouth--the prying, feminine
glance from her face to her damaged hands, and from those to the
darns in her skirt. Some of the women asked her outright what a
girl of her class was doing seeking work as a servant. They
sniffed, no doubt, that she had 'been in trouble'--that is, had an
illegitimate baby--and after probing her with their questions they
got rid of her as quickly as possible.

As soon as she had an address to give Dorothy had written to her
father, and when on the third day no answer came, she wrote again,
despairingly this time--it was her fifth letter, and four had gone
unanswered--telling him that she must starve if he did not send her
money at once. There was just time for her to get an answer before
her week at 'Mary's' was up and she was thrown out for not paying
her rent.

Meanwhile, she continued the useless search for work, while her
money dwindled at the rate of a shilling a day--a sum just
sufficient to keep her alive while leaving her chronically hungry.
She had almost given up the hope that her father would do anything
to help her. And strangely enough her first panic had died down,
as she grew hungrier and the chances of getting a job grew remoter,
into a species of miserable apathy. She suffered, but she was not
greatly afraid. The sub-world into which she was descending seemed
less terrible now that it was nearer.

The autumn weather, though fine, was growing colder. Each day the
sun, fighting his losing battle against the winter, struggled a
little later through the mist to dye the house-fronts with pale
aquarelle colours. Dorothy was in the streets all day, or in the
public library, only going back to 'Mary's' to sleep, and then
taking the precaution of dragging her bed across the door. She had
grasped by this time that 'Mary's' was--not actually a brothel, for
there is hardly such a thing in London, but a well-known refuge of
prostitutes. It was for that reason that you paid ten shillings a
week for a kennel not worth five. Old 'Mary' (she was not the
proprietress of the house, merely the manageress) had been a
prostitute herself in her day, and looked it. Living in such a
place damned you even in the eyes of Lambeth Cut. Women sniffed
when you passed them, men took an offensive interest in you. The
Jew on the corner, the owner of Knockout Trousers Ltd, was the
worst of all. He was a solid young man of about thirty, with
bulging red cheeks and curly black hair like astrakhan. For twelve
hours a day he stood on the pavement roaring with brazen lungs that
you couldn't get a cheaper pair of trousers in London, and
obstructing the passers-by. You had only to halt for a fraction of
a second, and he seized you by the arm and bundled you inside the
shop by main force. Once he got you there his manner became
positively threatening. If you said anything disparaging about his
trousers he offered to fight, and weak-minded people bought pairs
of trousers in sheer physical terror. But busy though he was, he
kept a sharp eye open for the 'birds', as he called them; and
Dorothy appeared to fascinate him beyond all other 'birds'. He had
grasped that she was not a prostitute, but living at 'Mary's', she
must--so he reasoned--be on the very verge of becoming one. The
thought made his mouth water. When he saw her coming down the
alley he would post himself at the corner, with his massive chest
well displayed and one black lecherous eye turned inquiringly upon
her ('Are you ready to begin yet?' his eye seemed to be saying),
and, as she passed, give her a discreet pinch on the backside.

On the last morning of her week at 'Mary's', Dorothy went downstairs
and looked, with only a faint flicker of hope, at the slate in the
hallway where the names of people for whom there were letters were
chalked up. There was no letter for 'Ellen Millborough'. That
settled it; there was nothing left to do except to walk out into the
street. It did not occur to her to do as every other woman in the
house would have done--that is, pitch a hard-up tale and try to
cadge another night's lodging rent free. She simply walked out of
the house, and had not even the nerve to tell 'Mary' that she was
going.

She had no plan, absolutely no plan whatever. Except for half an
hour at noon when she went out to spend threepence out of her last
fourpence on bread and margarine and tea, she passed the entire day
in the public library, reading weekly papers. In the morning she
read the Barber's Record, and in the afternoon Cage Birds. They
were the only papers she could get hold of, for there were always
so many idlers in the library that you had to scramble to get hold
of a paper at all. She read them from cover to cover, even the
advertisements. She pored for hours together over such
technicalities as How to strop French Razors, Why the Electric
Hairbrush is Unhygienic, Do Budgies thrive on Rapeseed? It was the
only occupation that she felt equal to. She was in a strange
lethargic state in which it was easier to interest herself in How
to strop French Razors than in her own desperate plight. All fear
had left her. Of the future she was utterly unable to think; even
so far ahead as tonight she could barely see. There was a night in
the streets ahead of her, that was all she knew, and even about
that she only vaguely cared. Meanwhile there were Cage Birds and
the Barber's Record; and they were, strangely, absorbingly
interesting.

At nine o'clock the attendant came round with a long hooked pole
and turned out the gaslights, the library was closed. Dorothy
turned to the left, up the Waterloo Road, towards the river. On
the iron footbridge she halted for a moment. The night wind was
blowing. Deep banks of mist, like dunes, were rising from the
river, and, as the wind caught them, swirling north-eastward across
the town. A swirl of mist enveloped Dorothy, penetrating her thin
clothes and making her shudder with a sudden foretaste of the
night's cold. She walked on and arrived, by the process of
gravitation that draws all roofless people to the same spot, at
Trafalgar Square.

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