The Fortunate Youth

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Edited by Charles Aldarondo Aldarondo@yahoo.com

THE FORTUNATE YOUTH

BY
WILLIAM J. LOCKE

CHAPTER I

PAUL KEGWORTHY lived with his mother, Mrs. Button, his stepfather,
Mr. Button, and six little Buttons, his half brothers and sisters.
His was not an ideal home; it consisted in a bedroom, a kitchen and
a scullery in a grimy little house in a grimy street made up of rows
of exactly similar grimy little houses, and forming one of a hundred
similar streets in a northern manufacturing town. Mr. and Mrs.
Button worked in a factory and took in as lodgers grimy single men
who also worked in factories. They were not a model couple; they
were rather, in fact, the scandal of Budge Street, which did not
itself enjoy, in Bludston, a reputation for holiness. Neither was
good to look upon. Mr. Button, who was Lancashire bred and born,
divided the yearnings of his spirit between strong drink and
dog-fights. Mrs. Button, a viperous Londoner, yearned for noise.
When Mr. Button came home drunk he punched his wife about the head
and kicked her about the body, while they both exhausted the
vocabulary of vituperation of North and South, to the horror and
edification of the neighbourhood. When Mr. Button was sober Mrs.
Button chastised little Paul. She would have done so when Mr. Button
was drunk, but she had not the time. The periods, therefore, of his
mother's martyrdom were those of Paul's enfranchisement. If he saw
his stepfather come down the street with steady gait, he fled in
terror; if he saw him reeling homeward he lingered about with light
and joyous heart.

The brood of young Buttons was fed spasmodically and clad at random,
but their meals were regular and their raiment well assorted
compared with Paul's. Naturally they came in for clouts and thumps
like all the children in Budge Street; it was only Paul who
underwent organized chastisement. The little Buttons often did
wrong; but in the mother's eyes Paul could never do right. In an
animal way she was fond of the children of Button, and in a way
equally animal she bore a venomous dislike to the child of
Keg-worthy. Who and what Kegworthy had been neither Paul nor any
inhabitant of Bludston knew. Once the boy inquired, and she broke a
worn frying-pan over his head. Kegworthy, whoever he might have
been, was wrapt in mystery. She had appeared in the town when Paul
was a year old, giving herself out as a widow. That she was by no
means destitute was obvious from the fact that she at once rented
the house in Budge Street, took in lodgers, and lived at her ease.
Button, who was one of the lodgers, cast upon her the eyes of desire
and married her. Why she married Button she could never determine.
Perhaps she had a romantic idea--and there is romance even in Budge
Street-that Button would support her. He very soon shattered any
such illusion by appropriating the remainder of her fortune and
kicking her into the factory with hobnailed boots. It would be wrong
to say that Mrs. Button did not complain; she did. She tent the air
of Budge Street with horrible execration; but she went to the
factory, where, save for the intervals of retirement rendered
necessary by the births of the little Buttons, she was contented
enough to stay.

If Paul Kegworthy had been of the same fibre as the little Buttons,
he would have felt, thought and acted as they, and this history
would never have been written. He would have grown up to man's
estate in the factory and have been merged an indistinguishable unit
in the drab mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the
day, flood the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of
clanging and shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather
in clotted greyness on the football ground. He might have been sober
and industrious-the proletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed
of Buttons-but he would have taken the colour of his environment,
and the world outside Bludston would never have heard of him. Paul,
however, differed greatly from the little Buttons. They, children of
the grey cap and the red shawl, resembled hundreds of thousands of
little human rabbits similarly parented. Only the trained eye could
have identified them among a score or two of their congeners. For
the most part, they were dingily fair, with snub noses, coarse
mouths, and eyes of an indeterminate blue. Of that type, once
blowsily good-looking, was Mrs. Button herself. But Paul wandered a
changeling about the Bludston streets. In the rows of urchins in the
crowded Board School classroom he sat as conspicuous as any little
Martian who might have been bundled down to earth. He had wavy black
hair, of raven black, a dark olive complexion, flushed, in spite of
haphazard nourishment and nights spent on the stone floor of the
reeking scullery, with the warm blood of health, great liquid black
eyes, and the exquisitely delicate features of a young Praxitelean
god. It was this preposterous perfection which, while redeeming him
from ridiculous beauty by giving his childish face a certain
rigidity, differentiated him outwardly from his fellows. Mr. Button,
to whom the unusual was anathema, declared that the sight of the
monstrosity made him sick, and rarely suffered him in his presence;
and one day Mrs. Button, discovering him in front of the cracked
mirror in which Mr. Button shaved, when his hand was steady enough,
on Sunday afternoons, smote him over the face with a pound of rump
steak which she happened to be carrying, instinctively desirous not
only to correct her son for vanity, but also to spoil the comeliness
of which he might be vain.

Until a wonderful and illuminating happening in his eleventh year,
little Paul Kegworthy had taken existence with the fatalism of a
child. Of his stepfather, who smelt lustily of sour beer, bad
tobacco and incidentally of other things undetected by Paul's
nostrils, and whom he saw rarely, he dwelt in mortal terror. When he
heard of the Devil, at Sunday school, which he attended, to his
stepfather's disgust, he pictured the Prince of Darkness not as a
gentleman, not even as a picturesque personage with horns and tail,
but as Mr. Button. As regards his mother, he had a confused idea
that he was a living blight on her existence. He was not sorry,
because it was not his fault, but in his childish way he coldly
excused her, and, more from a queer consciousness of blighterdom
than from dread of her hand and tongue, he avoided her as much as
possible. In the little Buttons his experience as scapegoat taught
him to take but little interest. From his earliest memories they
were the first to be fed, clothed and bedded; to his own share fell
the exiguous scraps. As they were much younger than himself, he
found no pleasure in their companionship. For society he sought such
of the youth of Budge Street as would admit him into their raucous
fellowship. But, for some reason which his immature mind could not
fathom, he felt a pariah even among his coevals. He could run as
fast as Billy Goodge, the undisputed leader of the gang; he could
dribble the rag football past him any time he desired; once he had
sent him home to his mother with a bleeding nose, and, even in that
hour of triumph, popular sympathy had been with Billy, not with him.
It was the only problem in existence to which his fatalism did not
supply the key. He knew himself to be a better man than Billy
Goodge. There was no doubt about it. At school, where Billy was the
woodenest blockhead, he was top of his class. He knew things about
troy weight and geography and Isaac and the Mariners of England of
which Billy did not dream. To Billy the football news in the
Saturday afternoon edition of The Bludston Herald was a cryptogram;
to him it was an open book. He would stand, acknowledged scholar, at
the street corner and read out from the soiled copy retrieved by
Chunky, the newsboy, the enthralling story of the football day,
never stumbling over a syllable, athrill with the joy of being the
umbilicus of a tense world, and, when the recital was over, he would
have the mortification of seeing the throng pass away from him with
the remorselessness of a cloud scudding from the moon. And he would
hear Billy Goodge say exultantly:

"Didn't Aw tell yo' the Wolves hadn't a dog's chance?"

And he would see the admiring gang slap Billy on the back, and hear
"Good owd Billy!" and never a word of thanks to him. Then, knowing
Billy to be a liar, he would tell him so, yelping shrilly, in
Buttonesque vernacular (North and South):

"This morning tha said it was five to one on Sheffield United."

"Listen to Susie!"

The parasitic urchins would yell at the witticism--the eternal
petitio principii of childhood, which Billy, secure in his cohort
from bloody nose, felt justified in making. And Paul Kegworthy, the
rag of a newspaper crumpled tight in his little hand, would watch
them disappear and wonder at the paradox of life. In any sphere of
human effort, so he dimly and childishly realized, he could wipe out
Billy Goodge. He had a soul-reaching contempt for Billy Goodge, a
passionate envy of him. Why did Billy hold his position instead of
crumbling into dust before him? Assuredly he was a better man than
Billy. When, Billy duce et auspice Billy, the gang played at pirates
or Red Indians, it was pitiful to watch their ignorant endeavours.
Paul, deeply read in the subject, gave them chapter and verse for
his suggestions. But they heeded him so little that he would turn
away contemptuously, disdaining the travesty of the noble game, and
dream of a gang of brighter spirits whom he could lead to glory.
Paul had many such dreams wherewith he sought to cheat the realities
of existence: but until the Great Happening the dream was not better
than the drink: after it came the Vision Splendid.

The wonderful thing happened all because Maisie Shepherd, a slip of
a girl of nineteen, staying at St. Luke's Vicarage, spilled a bottle
of scent over her f rock.

It was the morning of the St. Luke's annual Sunday-school treat. The
waggonette was at the vicarage door. The vicar and his wife and
daughter waited fussily for Maisie, an unpunctual damsel. The vicar
looked at his watch. They were three minutes late, He tut-tutted
impatiently. The vicar's daughter ran indoors in search of Maisie
and pounced upon her as she sat on the edge of the bed in the act of
perfuming a handkerchief. The shock caused the bottle to slip mouth
downward from her hand and empty the contents into her lap. She
cried out in dismay.

"Never mind," said the vicar's daughter. "Come along. Dad and mother
are prancing about downstairs."

"But I must change my dress!"

"You've no time."

"I'm wet through. This is the strongest scent known. It's twenty-six
shillings a bottle, and one little drop is enough. I shall be a
walking pestilence."

The vicar's daughter laughed heartlessly. "You do smell strong. But
you'll disinfect Bludston, and that will be a good thing." Whereupon
she dragged the tearful and redolent damsel from the room.

In the hard-featured yard of the schoolhouse the children were
assembled-the girls on one side, the boys on the other. Curates and
teachers hovered about the intervening space. Almost every child
wore its Sunday best. Even the shabbiest little girls had a clean
white pinafore to hide deficiencies beneath, and the untidiest
little boy showed a scrubbed face. The majority of the boys wore
clean collars; some grinned over gaudy neckties. The only one who
appeared in his week-day grime and tatterdemalion outfit was little
Paul Kegworthy. He had not changed his clothes, because he had no
others; and he had not washed his face, because it had not occurred
to him to do so. Moreover, Mrs. Button had made no attempt to
improve his forlorn aspect, for the simple reason that she had never
heard of the Sunday-school treat. It was part of Paul's philosophy
to dispense, as far as he could, with parental control. On Sunday
afternoons the little Buttons played in the streets, where Paul, had
he so chosen, might have played also: but he put himself, so to
speak, to Sunday school, where, besides learning lots of queer
things about God and Jesus Christ which interested him keenly, he
could shine above his fellows by recitations of collects and bits of
Catechism, which did not interest him at all. Then he won scores of
good-conduct cards, gaudy treasures, with pictures of Daniel in the
Lions' Den and the Marriage of Cana and such like, which he secreted
preciously beneath a loose slab in the scullery floor. He did not
show them to his mother, knowing that she would tear them up and
bang him over the head; and for similar reasons he refrained from
telling her of the Sunday-school treat. If she came to hear of it,
as possibly she would through one of the little Buttons, who might
pick up the news in the street, he would be soundly beaten. But
there was a chance of her not hearing, and he desired to be no more
of a blight than he could help. So Paul, vagabond and self-reliant
from his babyhood, turned up at the Sunday-school treat, hatless and
coatless, his dirty little toes visible through the holes in his
boots, and his shapeless and tattered breeches secured to his person
by a single brace. The better-dressed urchins moved away from him
and made rude remarks, after the generous manner of their kind; but
Paul did not care. Pariahdom was his accustomed portion. He was
there for his own pleasure. They were going to ride in a train. They
were going to have a wonderful afternoon in a nobleman's park, a
place all grass and trees, elusive to the imagination. There was a
stupefying prospect of wondrous things in profusion to eat and
drink-jam, ginger-beer, cake! So rumour had it; and to
unsophisticated Paul rumour was gospel truth. With all these
unexperienced joys before him, what cared he for the blankety little
blanks who gibed at him? If you imagine that little Paul Kegworthy
formulated his thoughts as would the angel choir-boy in the
pictures, you are mistaken. The baby language of Bludston would
petrify the foc'sle of a tramp, steamer. The North of England is
justly proud of its virility.

The Sunday school, marshalled by curates and teachers, awaited the
party from the vicarage. The thick and darkened sunshine of Bludston
flooded the asphalt of the yard, which sent up a reek of heat,
causing curates to fan themselves with their black straw hats, and
little boys in clean collars to wriggle in sticky discomfort, while
in the still air above the ignoble town hung the heavy pall of
smoke. Presently there was the sound of wheels and the sight of the
head of the vicar's coachman above the coping of the schoolyard
wall. Then the gates opened and the vicar and his wife and Miss
Merewether, her daughter, and Maisie Shepherd appeared and were
immediately greeted by curates and teachers.

Maisie Shepherd, a stranger in a strange land, pretty, pink,
blushing, hatefully self-conscious, detached herself, after a minute
or two, from the group and looked with timid curiosity on the
children. She was a London girl, her head still dancing with the
delights of her first season, and she had never been to a
Sunday-school treat in her life. Madge Merewether, her old
schoolfellow, had told her she was to help amuse the little girls.
Heaven knew how she was to do it. Already the unintelligibility of
Lancashire speech had filled her with dismay. The array of
hard-faced little girls daunted her; she turned to the boys, but she
only saw one--the little hatless, coatless scarecrow with the
perfect features And arresting grace, who stood out among his smug
companions with the singularly vivid incongruity of a Greek Hermes
in the central hall of Madame Tussaud's waxwork exhibition.
Fascinated, she strayed down the line toward him. She halted, looked
for a second or two into a pair of liquid black eyes and then
blushed in agonized shyness. She stared at the beautiful boy, and
the beautiful boy stared at her, and not a word could she find in
her head to speak. She turned abruptly and moved away. The boy broke
rank and slowly followed her.

For little Paul Kegworthy the heavens had opened and flooded his
senses, till he nearly fainted, with the perfume of celestial lands.
The intoxicating sweetness of it bewildered his young brain. It was
nothing delicate, evanescent, like the smell of a flower. It as
thick, pungent, cloying, compelling. Mouth agape and nostril wide,
he followed the exquisite source of the emanation like one in a
dream, half across the yard. A curate laughingly and unsuspectingly
brought him back to earth by laying hands on him and bundling him
back into his place. There he remained, being a docile urchin; but
his eyes remained fixed on Maisie Shepherd. She was only a rosebud
beauty of an English girl, her beauty heightened by the colour of
distress, but to Paul the radiance of her person almost rivalled the
wonder of her perfume. It was his first meeting of a goddess face to
face, and he surrendered his whole being in adoration.

In a few minutes the children were marched through the squalid
streets, a strident band, to the dingy railway station, a grimy
proletariat third-class railway station in which the sign "First
Class Waiting Room" glared an outrage and a mockery, and were
marshalled into the waiting train. The wonderful experience of which
Paul had dreamed for weeks--he had never ridden in a train
before--began; and soon the murky environs of the town were left
behind and the train sped through the open country.

His companions in the railway carriage crowded at the windows,
fighting vigorously for right of place; but Paul sat alone in the
middle of the seat, unmoved by the new sensation and speed, and by
the glimpses of blue sky and waving trees above the others' heads.
The glory of the day was blotted out until he should see and smell
the goddess again. At the wayside station where they descended he
saw her in the distance, and the glory came once more. She caught
his eye, smiled and nodded. He felt a queer thrill run through him.
He had been singled out from among all the boys. He alone knew her.

Brakes took them from the station down a country road and, after a
mile or so, through stone gates of a stately park, where wonder
after wonder was set out before Paul's unaccustomed eyes. On either
side of this roadway stretched rolling grass with clumps and glades
of great trees in their July bravery--more trees than Paul
imagined could be in the world. There were sunlit upland patches and
cool dells of shade carpeted with golden buttercups, where cattle
fed lazily. Once a herd of fallow deer browsing by the wayside
scuttled away at the noisy approach of the brakes. Only afterward
did Paul learn their name and nature: to him then they were mythical
beasts of fairyland. Once also the long pile-of the Tudor house came
into view, flashing-white in the sunshine. The teacher in charge of
the brake explained that it was the Marquis of Chudley's residence.
It was more beautiful than anything Paul had ever seen; it was
bigger than many churches put together; the word "Palace" came into
his head--it transcended all his preconceived ideas of palaces:
yet in such a palace only could dwell the radiant and sweet-smelling
lady of his dream. The certainty gave him a curious satisfaction.

They arrived at the spot where the marquees were erected, and at
once began the traditional routine of the school treat-games for the
girls, manlier sports for the boys. Lord Chudley, patron of the
living of St. Luke's, Bludston, and Lord Bountiful of the feast, had
provided swing-boats and a merry-go-round which discoursed infernal
music to enraptured ears. Paul stood aloof for a while from these
delights, his eye on the section of the girls among whom his goddess
moved. As soon as she became detached and he could approach her
without attracting notice, he crept within the magic circle of the
scent and lay down prone, drinking in its intoxication, and, as she
moved, he wriggled toward her on his stomach like a young snake.

After a time she came near him. "Why aren't you playing with the
other boys?" she asked.

Paul sat on his heels. "Dunno, miss," he said shyly.

She glanced at his rapscallion attire, blushed, and blamed herself
for the tactless question. "This is a beautiful place, isn't it?"

"It's heavenly," said Paul, with his eyes on her.

"One scarcely wants to do anything but just-just-well, be here." She
smiled.

He nodded and said, "Ay!" Then he grew bolder. "I like being alone,"
he declared defiantly.

"Then I'll leave you," she laughed.

The blood flushed deep under his unwashed olive skin, and he leaped
to his feet. "Aw didn't mean that!" he protested hotly. "It wur them
other boys."

She was touched by his beauty and quick sensitiveness. "I was only
teasing. I'm sure you like being with me."

Paul had never heard such exquisite tones from human lips. To his
ears, accustomed to the harsh Lancashire burr, her low, accentless
voice was music. So another of his senses was caught in the
enchantment.

"Yo' speak so pretty," said he.

At that moment a spruce but perspiring young teacher came up. "We're
going to have some boys' races, miss, and we want the ladies to look
on. His lordship has offered prizes. The first is a boys' race-under
eleven."

"You can join in that, anyhow," she said to Paul. "Go along and let
me see you win."

Paul scudded off, his heart aflame, his hand, as he ran, tucking in
the shirt whose evasion from the breeches was beyond the control of
the single brace. Besides, crawling on your stomach is dislocating
even to the most neatly secured attire. But his action was
mechanical. His thoughts were with his goddess. In his inarticulate
mind he knew himself to be her champion. He sped under her
consecration. He knew he could run. He could run like a young deer.
Though despised, could he not outrun any of the youth in Budge
Street? He took his place in the line of competing children. Far
away in the grassy distance were two men holding a stretched string.
On one side of him was a tubby boy with a freckled face and an
amorphous nose on which the perspiration beaded; on the other a
lank, consumptive creature, in Eton collar and red tie and a sprig
of sweet William in his buttonhole, a very superior person. Neither
of them desired his propinquity. They tried to hustle him from the
line. But Paul, born Ishmael, had his hand against them. The fat
boy, smitten beneath the belt, doubled up in pain and the
consumptive person rubbed agonized shins. A curate, walking down
repressing bulges and levelling up concavities, ordained order. The
line stood tense. Away beyond, toward the goal, appeared a white
mass, which Paul knew to be the ladies in their summer dresses; and
among them, though he could not distinguish her, was she in whose
eyes he was to win glory. The prize did not matter. It was for her
that he was running. In his childish mind he felt passionately
identified with her. He was her champion.

The word was given. The urchins started. Paul, his little elbows
squared behind him and his eyes fixed vacantly in space, ran with
his soul in the toes that protruded through the ragged old boots. He
knew not who was in front or who was behind. It was the madness of
battle. He ran and ran, until somebody put his arms round him and
stopped him.

"Steady on, my boy-steady on!"

Paul looked round in a dazed way. "Have A' won th' race?"

"I'm afraid not, my lad."

With a great effort he screwed his mind to another question. "Wheer
did A' coom in?"

"About sixth, but you ran awfully well."

Sixth! He had come in sixth! Sky and grass and trees and white mass
of ladies (among whom was the goddess) and unconsiderable men and
boys became a shimmering blur. He seemed to stagger away, stagger
miles away, until, finding himself quite alone, he threw himself
down under a beech tree, and, after a few moments' vivid realization
of what had happened, sobbed out the agony of his little soul's
despair. Sixth! He had come in sixth! He had failed miserably in his
championship. How she must despise him--she who had sent him forth to
victory! And yet how 'had it been possible? How had it been possible
that other boys could beat him? He was he. An indomitable personage.
Some hideous injustice guided human affairs. Why shouldn't he have
won? He could not tell. But he had not won. She had sent him forth
to win. He had lost. He had come in a sickening sixth. The disgrace
devastated him.

Maisie Shepherd, interested in her child champion, sought him out
and easily found him under the beech tree. "Why, what is the
matter?"

As he did not answer, she knelt by his side and put her hand on his
lean shoulder. "Tell me what has happened."

Again the celestial fragrance overspread his senses. He checked his
sobs and wiped his eyes with the back of his grubby hand. "Aw didn't
win," he moaned.

"Poor little chap," she said comfortingly. "Did you want to win so
very much?"

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