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:
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‘“——!” was all the band could play; “——! ——!” And the same to you!’ |