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 to-night. 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 to-morrow?” 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 oil-stove singing beneath the gluepot.
CHAPTER II
I
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 at 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 realised 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 realising 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 realised that it was their dirtiness that made them strange to her. The hands themselves seemed natural and appropriate, though she did not recognise 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 realising it to be her own. Yet it could not be said that she had recognised 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 realised 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: