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 nights 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 this 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!”
II
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.