“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 and Nobby went on to Chalmers’s farm, arranging a rendezvous where they should meet when they had tried their luck. They got to Chalmers’s, five miles away, found their way through vast orchards to the hopfields, and were told that the overseer “would be along presently.” So they waited four hours on the edge of the plantation, with the sun drying their clothes on their backs, watching the hop-pickers at work. It was a scene somehow peaceful and alluring. The hop bines, tall climbing plants like runner beans enormously magnified, grew in green leafy lanes, with the hops dangling from them in pale green bunches like gigantic grapes. When the wind stirred them they shook forth a fresh, bitter scent of sulphur and cool beer. In each lane of bines a family of sunburnt people were shredding the hops into sacking bins, and singing as they worked; and presently a hooter sounded and they knocked off to boil cans of tea over crackling fires of hop bines. Dorothy envied them greatly. How happy they looked, sitting round the fires with their cans of tea and their hunks of bread and bacon, in the smell of hops and wood smoke! She pined for such a job—however, for the present there was nothing doing. At about one o’clock the overseer arrived and told them that he had no jobs for them, so they trailed back to the road, only avenging themselves on Chalmers’s farm by stealing a dozen apples as they went.
When they reached their rendezvous, Flo and Charlie had vanished. Of course they searched for them, but, equally of course, they knew very well what had happened. Indeed, it was perfectly obvious. Flo had made eyes at some passing lorry driver, who had given the two of them a lift back to London for the chance of a good cuddle on the way. Worse yet, they had stolen both bundles. Dorothy and Nobby had not a scrap of food left, not a crust of bread nor a potato nor a pinch of tea, no bedding, and not even a snuff-tin in which to cook anything they could cadge or steal—nothing, in fact, except the clothes they stood up in.
The next thirty-six hours were a bad time—a very bad time. How they pined for a job, in their hunger and exhaustion! But the chances of getting one seemed to grow smaller and smaller as they got farther into the hop country. They made interminable marches from farm to farm, getting the same answer everywhere—no pickers needed—and they were so busy marching to and fro that they had not even time to beg, so that they had nothing to eat except stolen apples and damsons that tormented their stomachs with their acid juice and yet left them ravenously hungry. It did not rain that night, but it was much colder than before. Dorothy did not even attempt to sleep, but spent the night in crouching over the fire and keeping it alight. They were hiding in a beech wood, under a squat, ancient tree that kept the wind away but also wetted them periodically with sprinklings of chilly dew. Nobby, stretched on his back, mouth open, one broad cheek faintly illumined by the feeble rays of the fire, slept as peacefully as a child. All night long a vague wonder, born of sleeplessness and intolerable discomfort, kept stirring in Dorothy’s mind. Was this the life to which she had been bred—this life of wandering empty-bellied all day and shivering at night under dripping trees? Had it been like this even in the blank past? Where had she come from? Who was she? No answer came, and they were on the road at dawn. By the evening they had tried at eleven farms in all, and Dorothy’s legs were giving out, and she was so dizzy with fatigue that she found difficulty in walking straight.
But late in the evening, quite unexpectedly, their luck turned. They tried at a farm named Cairns’s, in the village of Clintock, and were taken on immediately, with no questions asked. The overseer merely looked them up and down, said briefly, “Right you are—you’ll do. Start in in the morning; bin number 7, set 19,” and did not even bother to ask their names. Hop-picking, it seemed, needed neither character nor experience.
They found their way to the meadow where the pickers’ camp was situated. In a dreamlike state, between exhaustion and the joy of having got a job at last, Dorothy found herself walking through a maze of tin-roofed huts and gypsies’ caravans with many-coloured washing hanging from the windows. Hordes of children swarmed in the narrow grass alleys between the huts, and ragged, agreeable-looking people were cooking meals over innumerable faggot fires. At the bottom of the field there were some round tin huts, much inferior to the others, set apart for unmarried people. An old man who was toasting cheese at a fire directed Dorothy to one of the women’s huts.
Dorothy pushed open the door of the hut. It was about twelve feet across, with unglazed windows which had been boarded up, and it had no furniture whatever. There seemed to be nothing in it but an enormous pile of straw reaching to the roof—in fact, the hut was almost entirely filled with straw. To Dorothy’s eyes, already sticky with sleep, the straw looked paradisically comfortable. She began to push her way into it, and was checked by a sharp yelp from beneath her.
“ ’Ere! What yer doin’ of? Get off of it! ’Oo asked you to walk about on my belly, stoopid?”
Seemingly there were women down among the straw. Dorothy