The Complete Novels Of George Orwell (66 page)

‘That’ll be enough from you, Ma!’ said the measurer gruffly, but he looked more sympathetic on hearing that it was Dorothy’s lover who had been arrested on the previous night. When the costerwoman had got her kettle boiling she called Dorothy to her bin and gave her a cup of strong tea and a hunk of bread and cheese; and after the dinner interval another picker who had no partner was sent up to share Dorothy’s bin. He was a small, weazened old tramp named Deafie. Dorothy felt somewhat better after the tea. Encouraged by Deafie’s example–for he was an excellent picker–she managed to do her fair share of work during the afternoon.

She had thought things over, and was less distracted than before. The phrases in
Pippin’s Weekly
still made her wince with shame, but she was equal now to facing the situation. She understood well enough what had happened to her, and what had led to Mrs Semprill’s libel. Mrs Semprill had seen them together at the gate and had seen Mr Warburton kissing her; and after that, when they were both missing from Knype Hill, it was only too natural–natural for Mrs Semprill, that is–to infer that they had eloped together. As for the picturesque details, she had invented them later. Or
had
she invented them? That was the one thing you could never be certain of with Mrs Semprill–whether she told her lies consciously and deliberately
as
lies, or whether, in her strange and disgusting mind, she somehow succeeded in believing them.

Well, anyway, the harm was done–no use worrying about it any longer. Meanwhile, there was the question of getting back to Knype Hill. She would have to send for some clothes, and she would need two pounds for her train fare home. Home! The word sent a pang through her heart. Home, after weeks of dirt and hunger! How she longed for it, now that she remembered it!

But–!

A chilly little doubt raised its head. There was one aspect of the matter that she had not thought of till this moment.
Could
she, after all, go home? Dared she?

Could she face Knype Hill after everything that had happened? That was
the question. When you have figured on the front page of
Pippin’s Weekly–
in scanty attire’–‘under the influence of alcohol’–ah, don’t let’s think of it again! But when you have been plastered all over with horrible, dishonouring libels, can you go back to a town of two thousand inhabitants where everybody knows everybody else’s private history and talks about it all day long?

She did not know–could not decide. At one moment it seemed to her that the story of her elopement was so palpably absurd that no one could possibly have believed it. Mr Warburton, for instance, could contradict it–most certainly would contradict it, for every possible reason. But the next moment she remembered that Mr Warburton had gone abroad, and unless this affair had got into the continental newspapers, he might not even have heard of it; and then she quailed again. She knew what it means to have to live down a scandal in a small country town. The glances and furtive nudges when you passed! The prying eyes following you down the street from behind curtained windows! The knots of youths on the corners round Blifil-Gordon’s factory, lewdly discussing you!

‘George! Say, George! J’a see that bit of stuff over there? With fair ’air?’

‘What, the skinny one? Yes. ‘Oo’s she?’

‘Rector’s daughter, she is. Miss ’Are. But, say! What you think she done two years ago? Done a bunk with a bloke old enough to bin ’er father. Regular properly went on the razzle with ’im in Paris! Never think it to look at ’er, would you?’

‘Go
on!’

‘She did! Straight, she did. It was in the papers and all. Only ’e give ’er the chuck three weeks afterwards, and she come back ‘ome again as bold as brass. Nerve, eh?’

Yes, it would take some living down. For years, for a decade it might be, they would be talking about her like that. And the worst of it was that the story in
Pippin’s Weekly
was probably a mere bowdlerized vestige of what Mrs Semprill had been saying in the town. Naturally,
Pippin’s Weekly
had not wanted to commit itself too far. But was there anything that would ever restrain Mrs Semprill? Only the limits of her imagination–and they were almost as wide as the sky.

One thing, however, reassured Dorothy, and that was the thought that her father, at any rate, would do his best to shield her. Of course, there would be others as well. It was not as though she were friendless. The church congregation, at least, knew her and trusted her, and the Mothers’ Union and the Girl Guides and the women on her visiting list would never believe such stories about her. But it was her father who mattered most. Almost any situation is bearable if you have a home to go back to and a family who will stand by you. With courage, and her father’s support, she might face things out. By the evening she had decided that it would be perfectly all right to go back to Knype Hill, though no doubt it would be disagreeable at first, and when work was over for the day she ‘subbed’ a shilling, and went down to the general shop in the village and bought a penny packet of notepaper. Back in the camp, sitting on the grass by the fire–no tables or chairs in the camp, of
course–she began to write with a stump of pencil:

Dearest Father,–I can’t tell you how glad I am, after everything that has happened, to be able to write to you again. And I do hope you have not been too anxious about me or too worried by those horrible stories in the newspapers. I don’t know what you must have thought when I suddenly disappeared like that and you didn’t hear from me for nearly a month. But you see–’

How strange the pencil felt in her torn and stiffened fingers! She could only write a large, sprawling hand like that of a child. But she wrote a long letter, explaining everything, and asking him to send her some clothes and two pounds for her fare home. Also, she asked him to write to her under an assumed name she gave him–Ellen Millborough, after Millborough in Suffolk. It seemed a queer thing to have to do, to use a false name; dishonest–criminal, almost. But she dared not risk its being known in the village, and perhaps in the camp as well, that she was Dorothy Hare, the notorious ‘Rector’s Daughter’.

Once her mind was made up, Dorothy was pining to escape from the hop camp. On the following day she could hardly bring herself to go on with the stupid work of picking, and the discomforts and bad food were intolerable now that she had memories to compare them with. She would have taken to flight immediately if only she had had enough money to get her home. The instant her father’s letter with the two pounds arrived, she would say good-bye to the Turles and take the train for home, and breathe a sigh of relief to get there, in spite of the ugly scandals that had got to be faced.

On the third day after writing she went down the village post office and asked for her letter. The postmistress, a woman with the face of a dachshund and a bitter contempt for all hop-pickers, told her frostily that no letter had come. Dorothy was disappointed. A pity–it must have been held up in the post. However, it didn’t matter; tomorrow would be soon enough–only another day to wait.

The next evening she went again, quite certain that it would have arrived this time. Still no letter. This time a misgiving assailed her; and on the fifth evening, when there was yet again no letter, the misgiving changed into a horrible panic. She bought another packet of notepaper and wrote an enormous letter, using up the whole four sheets, explaining over and over again what had happened and imploring her father not to leave her in such suspense. Having posted it, she made up her mind that she would let a whole week go by before calling at the post office again.

This was Saturday. By Wednesday her resolve had broken down. When the hooter sounded for the midday interval she left her bin and hurried down to the post office–it was a mile and a half away, and it meant missing her dinner. Having got there she went shame-facedly up to the counter, almost afraid to speak. The dog-faced postmistress was sitting in her brass-barred cage at the end of the counter, ticking figures in a long shaped account book. She gave Dorothy a brief nosy glance and went on with her work, taking no notice of her.

Something painful was happening in Dorothy’s diaphragm. She was finding it difficult to breathe, ‘Are there any letters for me?’ she managed to say at last.

‘Name?’ said the postmistress, ticking away.

‘Ellen Millborough.’

The postmistress turned her long dachshund nose over her shoulder for an instant and glanced at the M partition of the Poste Restante letter-box.

‘No,’ she said, turning back to her account book.

In some manner Dorothy got herself outside and began to walk back towards the hopfields, then halted. A deadly feeling of emptiness at the pit of her stomach, caused partly by hunger, made her too weak to walk.

Her father’s silence could mean only one thing. He believed Mrs Semprill’s story–believed that she, Dorothy, had run away from home in disgraceful circumstances and then told lies to excuse herself. He was too angry and too disgusted to write to her. All he wanted was to get rid of her, drop all communication with her; get her out of sight and out of mind, as a mere scandal to be covered up and forgotten.

She could not go home after this. She dared not. Now that she had seen what her father’s attitude was, it had opened her eyes to the rashness of the thing she had been contemplating. Of
course
she could not go home! To slink back in disgrace, to bring shame on her father’s house by coming there–ah, impossible, utterly impossible! How could she even have thought of it?

What then? There was nothing for it but to go right away–right away to some place that was big enough to hide in. London, perhaps. Somewhere where nobody knew her and the mere sight of her face or mention of her name would not drag into the light a string of dirty memories.

As she stood there the sound of bells floated towards her, from the village church round the bend of the road, where the ringers were amusing themselves by ringing ‘Abide with Me’, as one picks out a tune with one finger on the piano. But presently ‘Abide with Me’ gave way to the familiar Sunday-morning jangle. ’Oh do leave my wife alone! She is so drunk she can’t get home!’–the same peal that the bells of St Athelstan’s had been used to ring three years ago before they were unswung. The sound planted a spear of homesickness in Dorothy’s heart, bringing back to her with momentary vividness a medley of remembered things–the smell of the glue-pot in the conservatory when she was making costumes for the school play, and the chatter of starlings outside her bedroom window, interrupting her prayers before Holy Communion, and Mrs Pither’s doleful voice chronicling the pains in the backs of her legs, and the worries of the collapsing belfry and the shopdebts and the bindweed in the peas–all the multitudinous, urgent details of a life that had alternated between work and prayer.

Prayer! For a very short time, a minute perhaps, the thought arrested her. Prayer–in those days it had been the very source and centre of her life. In trouble or in happiness, it was to prayer that she had turned. And she realized–the first time that it had crossed her mind–that she had not uttered a prayer since leaving home, not even since her memory had come back to her. Moreover, she was aware that she had no longer the smallest impulse to pray. Mechanically, she began a whispered prayer, and stopped almost instantly; the words were empty and futile. Prayer, which had been the mainstay of her life, had no meaning for her any longer. She recorded this fact as she walked slowly up the road, and she recorded it briefly, almost casually, as though it had been something seen in passing–a flower in the ditch or a bird crossing the road–something noticed and then dismissed. She had not even the time to reflect upon what it might mean. It was shouldered out of her mind by more momentous things.

It was of the future that she had got to be thinking now. She was already fairly clear in her mind as to what she must do. When the hop-picking was at an end she must go up to London, write to her father for money and her clothes–for however angry he might be, she could not believe that he intended to leave her utterly in the lurch–and then start looking for a job. It was the measure of her ignorance that those dreaded words ‘looking for a job’ sounded hardly at all dreadful in her ears. She knew herself strong and willing–knew that there were plenty of jobs that she was capable of doing. She could be a nursery governess, for instance–no, better, a housemaid or a parlourmaid. There were not many things in a house that she could not do better than most servants; besides, the more menial her job, the easier it would be to keep her past history secret.

At any rate, her father’s house was closed to her, that was certain. From now on she had got to fend for herself. On this decision, with only a very dim idea of what it meant, she quickened her pace and got back to the fields in time for the afternoon shift.

The hop-picking season had not much longer to run. In a week or thereabouts Cairns’s would be closing down, and the cockneys would take the hoppers’ train to London, and the gypsies would catch their horses, pack their caravans, and march northward to Lincolnshire, to scramble for jobs in the potato fields. As for the cockneys, they had had their bellyful of hop-picking by this time. They were pining to be back in dear old London, with Woolworths and the fried-fish shop round the corner, and no more sleeping in straw and frying bacon in tin lids with your eyes weeping from wood smoke. Hopping was a holiday, but the kind of holiday that you were glad to see the last of. You came down cheering, but you went home cheering louder still and swearing that you would never go hopping again–until next August, when you had forgotten the cold nights and the bad pay and the damage to your hands, and remembered only the blowsy afternoons in the sun and the boozing of stone pots of beer round the red camp fires at night.

The mornings were growing bleak and Novemberish; grey skies, the first leaves falling, and finches and starlings already flocking for the winter.
Dorothy had written yet again to her father, asking for money and some clothes; he had left her letter unanswered, nor had anybody else written to her. Indeed, there was no one except her father who knew her present address; but somehow she had hoped that Mr Warburton might write. Her courage almost failed her now, especially at nights in the wretched straw, when she lay awake thinking of the vague and menacing future. She picked her hops with a sort of desperation, a sort of frenzy of energy, more aware each day that every handful of hops meant another fraction of a farthing between herself and starvation. Deafie, her bin-mate, like herself, was picking against time, for it was the last money he would earn till next year’s hopping season came round. The figure they aimed at was five shillings a day–thirty bushels–between the two of them, but there was no day when they quite attained it.