The epitaph should have been Resurgam, however. The nail invariably worked its way up again within a quarter of an hour.
Nobby had tried to make love to Dorothy, of course, and, when she repulsed him, bore her no grudge. He had that happy temperament that is incapable of taking its own reverses very seriously. He was always debonair, always singing in a lusty baritone voice—his three favourite songs were; “Sonny Boy,” “ ’Twas Christmas Day in the Workhouse” (to the tune of “The Church’s One Foundation”), and “ ‘——!’ was all the band could play,” given with lively renderings of military music. He was twenty-six years old and was a widower, and had been successively a seller of newspapers, a petty thief, a Borstal boy, a soldier, a burglar and a tramp. These facts, however, you had to piece together for yourself, for he was not equal to giving a consecutive account of his life. His conversation was studded with casual picturesque memories—the six months he had served in a line regiment before he was invalided out with a damaged eye, the loathsomeness of the skilly in Holloway, his childhood in the Deptford gutters, the death of his wife, aged eighteen, in childbirth, when he was twenty, the horrible suppleness of the Borstal canes, the dull boom of the nitro-glycerine, blowing in the safe door at Woodward’s boot and shoe factory, where Nobby had cleared a hundred and twenty-five pounds and spent it in three weeks.
On the afternoon of the third day they reached the fringe of the hop country, and began to meet discouraged people, mostly tramps, trailing back to London with the news that there was nothing doing—hops were bad and the price was low, and the gypsies and “home pickers” had collared all the jobs. At this Flo and Charlie gave up hope altogether, but by an adroit mixture of bullying and persuasion Nobby managed to drive them a few miles farther. In a little village called Wale they fell in with an old Irishwoman—Mrs. McElligot was her name—who had just been given a job at a neighbouring hopfield, and they swapped some of their stolen apples for a piece of meat she had “bummed” earlier in the day. She gave them some useful hints about hop-picking and about what farms to try. They were all sprawling on the village green, tired out, opposite a little general shop with some newspaper posters outside.
“You’d best go down’n have a try at Chalmers’s,” Mrs. McElligot advised them in her base Dublin accent. “Dat’s a bit above five mile from here. I’ve heard tell as Chalmers wants a dozen pickers still. I daresay he’d give y’a job if you gets dere early enough.”
“Five miles! Gripes! Ain’t there none nearer’n that?” grumbled Charlie.
“Well, dere’s Norman’s. I got a job at Norman’s meself—I’m startin’ to-morrow mornin’. But ’twouldn’t be no use for you to try at Norman’s. He ain’t takin’ on none but home pickers, an’ dey say as he’s goin’ to let half his hops blow.”
“What’s home pickers?” said Nobby.
“Why, dem as has got homes o’ deir own. Eider you got to live in de neighbourhood, or else de farmer’s got to give y’a hut to sleep in. Dat’s de law nowadays. In de ole days when you come down hoppin’, you kipped in a stable an’ dere was no questions asked. But dem bloody interferin’ gets of a Labour Government brought in a law to say as no pickers was to be taken on widout de farmer had proper accommodation for ’em. So Norman only takes on folks as has got homes o’ deir own.”
“Well, you ain’t got a home of your own, have you?”
“No bloody fear! But Norman t’inks I have. I kidded’m I was stayin’ in a cottage near by. Between you an’ me, I’m skipperin’ in a cow byre. ’Tain’t so bad except for de stink o’ de muck, but you got to be out be five in de mornin’, else de cowmen ’ud catch you.”
“We ain’t got no experience of hopping,” Nobby said. “I wouldn’t know a bloody hop if I saw one. Best to let on you’re an old hand when you go up for a job, eh?”
“Hell! Hops don’t need no experience. Tear ’em off an’ fling ’em into de bin. Dat’s all dere is to it, wid hops.”
Dorothy was nearly asleep. She heard the others talking desultorily, first about hop-picking, then about some story in the newspapers of a girl who had disappeared from home. Flo and Charlie had been reading the posters on the shop-front opposite; and this had revived them somewhat, because the posters reminded them of London and its joys. The missing girl, in whose fate they seemed to be rather interested, was spoken of as “The Rector’s Daughter.”
“J’a see that one, Flo?” said Charlie, reading a poster aloud with intense relish: “ ‘Secret Love Life of Rector’s Daughter. Startling Revelations.’ Coo! Wish I ’ad a penny to ’ave a read of that!”
“Oh? What’s ’t all about, then?”
“What? Didn’t j’a read about it? Papers ’as bin full of it. Rector’s Daughter this and Rector’s Daughter that—wasn’t ’alf smutty, some of it, too.”
“She’s bit of hot stuff, the ole Rector’s Daughter,” said Nobby reflectively, lying on his back. “Wish she was here now! I’d know what to do with her, all right, I would.”
“ ’Twas a kid run away from home,” put in Mrs. McElligot. “She was carryin’ on wid a man twenty year older’n herself, an’ now she’s disappeared an’ dey’re searchin’ for her high an’ low.”
“Jacked off in the middle of the night in a motor-car with no clo’es on ’cep’ ’er nightdress,” said Charlie appreciatively. “The ’ole village sore ’em go.”
“Dere’s some t’ink as he’s took her abroad an’ sold her to one o’ dem flash cat-houses in Parrus,” added Mrs. McElligot.
“No clo’es on ’cep’ ’er nightdress? Dirty tart she must ’a been!”
The conversation might have proceeded to further details, but at this moment Dorothy interrupted it. What they were saying had roused a faint curiosity in her. She realised that she did not know the meaning of the word “Rector”. She sat up and asked Nobby:
“What is a Rector?”
“Rector? Why, a sky-pilot—parson bloke. Bloke that preaches and gives out the hymns and that in church. We passed one of ’em yesterday—riding a green bicycle and had his collar on back to front. A priest—clergyman. You know.”
“Oh. . . . Yes, I think so.”
“Priests! Bloody ole getsies dey are too, some o’ dem,” said Mrs. McElligot reminiscently.
Dorothy was left not much the wiser. What Nobby had said did enlighten her a little, but only a very little. The whole train of thought connected with “church” and “clergyman” was strangely vague and blurred in her mind. It was one of the gaps—there was a number of such gaps—in the mysterious knowledge that she had brought with her out of the past.
That was their third night on the road. When it was dark they slipped into a spinney as usual to “skipper,” and a little after midnight it began to pelt with rain. They spent a miserable hour stumbling to and fro in the darkness, trying to find a place to shelter, and finally found a hay-stack, where they huddled themselves on the lee side till it was light enough to see. Flo blubbered throughout the night in the most intolerable manner, and by the morning she was in a state of semi-collapse. Her silly fat face, washed clean by rain and tears, looked like a bladder of lard, if one can imagine a bladder of lard contorted with self-pity. Nobby rooted about under the hedge until he had collected an armful of partially dry sticks, and then managed to get a fire going and boil some tea as usual. There was no weather so bad that Nobby could not produce a can of tea. He carried, among other things, some pieces of old motor tyre that would make a flare when the wood was wet, and he even possessed the art, known only to a few cognoscenti among tramps, of getting water to boil over a candle.
Everyone’s limbs had stiffened after the horrible night, and Flo declared herself unable to walk a step further. Charlie backed her up. So, as the other two refused to move, Dorothy