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
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
&
nbsp; 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
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