Wilkins: “Shut up, shut up! Stop that hollering or I don’t serve any of you.”
Mrs. McElligot: “D’you feel de blood runnin’ back into your toes, dearie?”
Mrs. Wayne: “He do speak rough to you, don’t he? Not what I’d call a reely gentlemanly kind of man.”
Snouter: “This is —— Starvation Corner, this is. Cripes! Couldn’t I do a couple of them sausages!”
The tarts (in chorus): “Kippers ’ere! ’Urry up with them kippers! Mis-ter Wil-kins! Kippers all round! And a doughnut!”
Charlie: “Not ’alf! Got to fill up on the smell of ’em this morning. Sooner be ’ere than on the perishing Square, all the same.”
Ginger: “ ’Ere, Deafie! You’ve ’ad your ’alf! Gimme me that bleeding cup.”
Mr. Tallboys (chanting): “Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with joy! . . .”
Mrs. McElligot: “Begod I’m half asleep already. It’s de heat o’ de room as does it.”
Mr. Wilkins: “Stop that singing there! You know the rules.”
The tarts (in chorus): “Kipp-ers!”
Snouter: “—— doughnuts! Cold prog! It turns my belly sick.”
Daddy: “Even the tea they give you ain’t no more than water with a bit of dust in it.” (Belches.)
Charlie: “Bes’ thing—’ave a bit of shut-eye and forget about it. Dream about perishing cut off the joint and two veg. Less get our ’eads on the table and pack up comfortable.”
Mrs. McElligot: “Lean up agen me shoulder, dearie. I’ve got more flesh on me bones’n what you have.”
Ginger: “I’d give a tanner for a bleeding fag, if ’ad a bleeding tanner.”
Charlie: “Pack up. Get your ’ead agenst mine, Snouter. That’s right. Jesus, won’t I perishing sleep!”
(A dish of smoking kippers is borne past to the tarts’ table.)
Snouter (drowsily): “More —— kippers. Wonder ’ow many times she’s bin on ’er back to pay for that lot.”
Mrs. McElligot (half asleep): “ ’Twas a pity, ’twas a real pity, when Michael went off on his jack an’ left me wid de bloody baby an’ all. . . .”
Mrs. Bendigo (furiously, following the dish of kippers with accusing finger): “Look at that, girls! Look at that! Kippers! Don’t it make you bloody wild? We don’t get kippers for breakfast, do we, girls? Bloody tarts swallering down kippers as fast as they can turn ’em out of the pan, and us ’ere with a cup of tea between four of us and lucky to get that! Kippers!”
Mr. Tallboys (stage curate-wise): “The wages of sin is kippers.”
Ginger: “Don’t breathe in my face, Deafie. I can’t bleeding stand it.”
Charlie (in his sleep): “Charles-Wisdom-drunk-and-incapable-drunk?-yes-six-shillings-move-on-next!
Dorothy (on Mrs. McElligot’s bosom): “Oh, joy, joy!” (They are asleep.)
II
And so it goes on.
Dorothy endured this life for ten days—to be exact, nine days and ten nights. It was hard to see what else she could do. Her father, seemingly, had abandoned her altogether, and though she had friends in London who would readily have helped her, she did not feel that she could face them after what had happened, or what was supposed to have happened. And she dared not apply to organised charity because it would almost certainly lead to the discovery of her name, and hence, perhaps, to a fresh hullabaloo about the “Rector’s Daughter.”
So she stayed in London, and became one of that curious tribe, rare but never quite extinct—the tribe of women who are penniless and homeless, but who make such desperate efforts to hide it that they very nearly succeed; women who wash their faces at drinking fountains in the cold of the dawn, and carefully uncrumple their clothes after sleepless nights, and carry themselves with an air of reserve and decency, so that only their faces, pale beneath sunburn, tell you for certain that they are destitute. It was not in her to become a hardened beggar like most of the people about her. Her first twenty-four hours on the Square she spent without any food whatever, except for the cup of tea that she had had overnight and a third of a cup more that she had had at Wilkins’s café in the morning. But in the evening, made desperate by hunger and the others’ example, she walked up to a strange woman, mastered her voice with an effort, and said: “Please, Madam, could you give me twopence? I have had nothing to eat since yesterday.” The woman stared, but she opened her purse and gave Dorothy threepence. Dorothy did not know it, but her educated accent, which had made it impossible to get work as a servant, was an invaluable asset to her as a beggar.
After that she found that it was really very easy to beg the daily shilling or so that was needed to keep her alive. And yet she never begged—it seemed to her that actually she could not do it—except when hunger was past bearing or when she had got to lay in the precious penny that was the passport to Wilkins’s café in the morning. With Nobby, on the way to the hopfields, she had begged without fear or scruple. But it had been different then; she had not known what she was doing. Now, it was only under the spur of actual hunger that she could screw her courage to the point, and ask for a few coppers from some women whose face looked friendly. It was always women that she begged from, of course. She did once try begging from a man—but only once.
For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading—used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom and the horrible communism of the square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream.
Meanwhile, the police were getting to know her by sight. On the Square people are perpetually coming and going, more or less unnoticed. They arrive from nowhere with their drums and their bundles, camp for a few days and nights and then disappear as mysteriously as they came. If you stay for more than a week or thereabouts, the police will mark you down as an habitual beggar, and they will arrest you sooner or later. It is impossible for them to enforce the begging laws at all regularly, but from time to time they make a sudden raid and capture two or three of the people they have had their eye on. And so it happened in Dorothy’s case.
One evening she was “knocked off,” in company with Mrs. McElligot and another woman whose name she did not know. They had been careless and begged off a nasty old lady with a face like a horse, who had promptly walked up to the nearest policeman and given them in charge.
Dorothy did not mind very much. Everything was dreamlike now—the face of the nasty old lady, eagerly accusing them, and the walk to the station with a young policeman’s gentle, almost deferential hand on her arm; and then the white-tiled cell, with the fatherly sergeant handing her a cup of tea through the grille and telling her that the magistrate wouldn’t be too hard on her if she pleaded guilty. In the cell next door Mrs. McElligot stormed at the sergeant, called him a bloody get and then spent half the night in bewailing her fate. But Dorothy had no feeling save vague relief at being in so clean and warm a place. She crept immediately on to the plank bed that was fixed like a shelf to