The Fortunate Youth

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He got up and stared at her. "Yo' told me to win."

"So you ran for me?"

"Ay!"

She rose to her feet and looked down upon him, somewhat overwhelmed
by her responsibility. So in ancient days might a fair maiden have
regarded her knight who underwent entirely unnecessary batterings
for her sake. "Then for me you've won," she said. "I wish I could
give you a prize."

But what in the nature of a prize for a gutter imp of eleven does a
pocketless young woman attired for the serious business of a school
treat carry upon her person? She laughed in pretty embarrassment.
"If I gave you something quite useless, what would you do with it?"

"I 'u'd hide it safe, so 'ut nobody should see it," said Paul,
thinking of his precious cards.

"Wouldn't you show it to anybody?"

"By Gum!--" he checked himself suddenly. Such, he had learned,
was not Sunday-school language. "I wouldno' show it to a dog," said
he.

Maisie Shepherd, aware of romantic foolishness, slipped a cornelian
heart from a thin gold chain round her neck. "It's all I can give
you for a prize, if you will have it."

If he would have it? The Koh-i-Noor' in his clutch (and a knowledge
of its value) could not have given him more thrilling rapture. He
was speechless with amazement; Maisie, thrilled too, realized that a
word spoken would have rung false. The boy gloated over his
treasure; but she did not know--how could she?--what it meant to
him. To Paul the bauble was a bit of the warm wonder that was she.

"How are you going to keep it?" she asked.

He hoicked a bit of his shirt-tail from his breeches and proceeded
to knot the cornelian heart secure therein. Maisie fled rapidly on
the verge of hysterics, After that the school treat had but one
meaning for Paul. He fed, it is true, in Pantagruelian fashion on
luscious viands, transcending his imagination of those which lay
behind Blinks the confectioner's window in Bludston: there he
succumbed to the animal; but the sports, the swing-boats, the
merry-go-round, offered no temptation. He hovered around Maisie
Shepherd like a little dog-quite content to keep her in sight. And
every two or three minutes he fumbled about his breeches to see that
the knotted treasure was safe.

The day sank into late afternoon. The children had been fed. The
weary elders had their tea. The vicarage party took a few moments'
rest in the shade of a clump of firs some distance away from the
marquee. Behind the screen lay Paul, his eyes on his goddess, his
heels in the air, a buttercup-stalk between his teeth. He felt the
comforting knot beneath his thigh. For the first time, perhaps, in
his life, he knew utter happiness. He heard the talk, but did not
listen. Suddenly, however, the sound of his own name caused him to
prick his ears. Paul Kegworthy! They were talking about him. There
could be no mistake. He slithered a foot or two nearer.

"No matter whether his people are drunkards or murderers," said the
beloved voice, "he is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in '
my life. Have you ever spoken to him, Winifred?"

"No," said the vicar's daughter. "Of course I've noticed him. Every
one does-he is remarkable."

"I don't believe he's a child of these people at all," Maisie
declared. "He's of a different clay. He's as sensitive as-as a
sensitive plant. You ought to keep your eye on him, Mr. Merewether.
I believe he's a poor little prince in a fairy tale."

"A freak--a lusus naturae" said the vicar.

Paul did not know what a lusus naturae was, but it sounded mighty
grand.

"He's a fairy prince, and one day he'll come into his kingdom."

"My dear, if you saw his mother!"

"But I'm sure no one but a princess could be Paul Kegworthy's
mother," laughed Maisie.

"And his father?"

"A prince too!"

And Paul listened and drank in his goddess's words greedily. Truth
clear as crystal fell from her lips. A wild wonder racked his little
soul. She had said that his mother was not his mother, and that his
father was a prince. The tidings capped the glory of an effulgent
day.

When he sneaked home late Mrs. Button, who had learned how he had
misspent his time, gave him a merciless thrashing. Why should he be
trapesing about with Sunday schools, she asked, with impolite
embroidery, while his poor little brothers and sisters were crying
in the street? She would learn him to Mess about with parsons and
Sunday-school teachers. She was in process of "learning" him when
Mr. Button entered. He swore in a manner which would have turned out
armies in Flanders pallid, and kicked Paul into the scullery. There
the boy remained and went supperless to his bed of sacks, aching and
tearless. Before he slept he put his cornelian heart in his
hiding-hole. What cared he for stripes or kicks or curses with the
Vision Splendid glowing before his eyes?

CHAPTER II

FOR splenetic reasons which none but the Buttons of this world can
appreciate, Paul was forbidden, under pain of ghastly tortures, to
go near the Sunday school again, and, lest he should defy authority,
he was told off on Sunday afternoons to mind the baby, either in the
street or the scullery, according to the weather, while the other
little Buttons were not allowed to approach him. The defection of
the brilliant scholar having been brought to the vicar's notice, he
ventured to call one Saturday afternoon on the Buttons, but such was
the contumely with which he was received that the good man hastily
retreated. In lung power he was outmatched. In repartee he was
singularly outclassed. He then sent the superintendent of the
school, a man of brawn and zeal, to see what muscular Christianity
could accomplish. But muscular Christianity, losing its head, came
off with a black eye. After that the Buttons were left alone, and no
friendly hand drew Paul within the gates of his Sunday Paradise. He
thought of it with aching wistfulness. The only thing that the
superintendent could do was to give him surreptitiously a
prayer-book, bidding him perfect himself in the Catechism in view of
future Confirmation. But, as emulation of his fellows and not
religious zeal was the mainspring of Paul's enthusiasm, the pious
behest was disregarded. Paul dived into the volume occasionally,
however, for intellectual entertainment.

As for the fragrant and beautiful goddess, she had disappeared into
thin air. Paul hung for a week or two about the vicarage, in the
hope of seeing her, but in vain. As a matter of fact, Maisie
Shepherd had left for Scotland the morning after the school treat;
people don't come to Bludston for long and happy holidays. So Paul
had to feed his ardent little soul on memories. That she had not
been an impalpable creature of his fancy was proven by the precious
cornelian heart. Her words, too, were written in fine flame across
his childish mind. Paul began to live the life of dreams.

He longed for books. The fragmentary glimpses of history and
geography in the Board school standard whetted without satisfying
his imagination. There was not a book in the house in Budge Street,
and he had never a penny to buy one. Sometimes Button would bring
home a dirty newspaper, which Paul would steal and read in secret,
but its contents seemed to lack continuity. He thirsted for a story.
Once a generous boy, since dead-he was too good to live had given
him a handful of penny dreadfuls, whence he had derived his
knowledge of pirates and Red Indians. Too careless and confident, he
had left them about the kitchen, and his indignant mother had used
them to light the fire. The burning of his library was an enduring
tragedy. He realized that it must be reconstituted; but how? His
nimble wit hit on a plan. Vagrant as an unowned dog, he could roam
the streets at pleasure. Why should he not sell newspapers-in a
quarter of the town, be it understood, remote from both factory and
Budge Street? He sold newspapers for three weeks before he was found
out. Then he was chastised and forced to go on selling newspapers
with no profit to himself, for his person was rigorously searched
and coppers confiscated as soon as he came home. But during the
three weeks' traffic on his own account he had amassed a sufficient
hoard of pennies for the purchase of several books in gaudy paper
covers exposed for sale in the little stationer's shop round the
corner. Soon he discovered that if he could batik a copper or two on
his way home his mother would be none the wiser. The stationer
became his banker, and when the amount of the deposit equaled the
price of a book, Paul withdrew his money's worth. So a goodly
library of amazing rubbish was stored by degrees under the scullery
slab, until it outgrew safe accommodation; whereupon Paul
transferred the bulk of it to a hole in a bit of waste ground, a
deserted brickfield on the ragged outskirts of the town. At last
misfortune befell him. One dreary afternoon of rain he dropped his
new bundle of papers in the mud of the roadway. To avoid death he
had to spring from the path of a thundering tramcar. A heavy cart
ran over the bundle. While he was ruefully and hastily gathering the
papers together, a band of street children swooped down and kicked
them lustily about the filth. He was battling with one urchin when a
policeman grabbed him. With an elusive twist he escaped and ran like
a terrified hare. Disaster followed, and that was the end of his
career as a newsvendor.

Greater leisure for reading, however, compensated the loss of the
occasional penny. He read dazzling tales of dukes with palaces (like
Chudley Court), and countesses with ropes of diamonds in their hair,
who all bore a resemblance to the fragrant one. And dukes and
countesses lived the most resplendent lives, and spoke such
beautiful language, and had such a way with them! He felt a curious
pride in being able to enter into all their haughty emotions. Then,
one day, he began a story about a poor little outcast boy in a slum.
At first he did not care for it. His soaring spirit disdained boys
in slums. It had its being on higher planes. But he read on, and,
reading on, grew interested, until interest was intensified into
absorption For the outcast boy in the slums, you must know, was
really the kidnapped child of a prince and a princess, and after the
most romantic adventures was enfolded in his parents' arms, married
a duke's beauteous daughter, whom in his poverty he had worshipped
from afar, and drove away with his bride in a coach-and-six.

To little Paul Kegworthy the clotted nonsense was a revelation from
on high. He was that outcast boy. The memorable pronouncement of the
goddess received confirmation in some kind of holy writ. The Vision
Splendid, hitherto confused, crystallized into focus. He realized
vividly how he differed in feature and form and intellect and
character from the low crowd with whom he was associated. His
unpopularity was derived from envy. His manifest superiority was
gall to their base natures. Yes, he had got to the heart of the
mystery. Mrs. Button was not his mother. For reasons unknown he had
been kidnapped. Aware of his high lineage, she hated him and beat
him and despitefully used him. She never gushed, it is true, over
her offspring; but the little Buttons flourished under genuine
motherment. They, inconsiderable brats, were her veritable children.
Whereas he, Paul-it was as plain as daylight. Somewhere far away in
the great world, an august and griefstricken pair, at that very
moment, were mourning the loss of their only son. There they were,
in their marble palace, surrounded by flunkeys all crimson and gold
(men servants were always "gorgeously apparelled flunkeys" in Paul's
books), sitting at a table loaded with pineapples on golden dishes,
and eating out their hearts with longing. He could hear their talk.

"If only our beloved son were with us," said the princess, wiping
away a tear.

"We must be patient, my sweet Highness," replied the prince, with
lofty resignation stamped on his noble brow. "Let us trust to Heaven
to remove the cankerworm that is gnawing our vitals."

Paul felt very sorry for them, and he, too, wiped away a tear.

For many years he remembered that day. He was alone in his
brickfield on a gusty March morning-the Easter holidays had released
him from school-squatting by his hole under the lee of a mass of
earth and rubbish. It was a mean expanse, blackened by soot and
defiled by refuse. Here and there bramble and stunted gorse
struggled for an existence; but the flora mainly consisted in bits
of old boots and foul raiment protruding grotesquely from the soil,
half-buried cans, rusty bits of iron, and broken bottles. On one
side the backs of grimy little houses, their yards full of
fluttering drab underwear' marked the edge of the hopeless town
which rose above them in forbidding buildings, belching chimney
shafts and the spikes of a couple of spires. On the other sides it
was bounded by the brick walls of factories, the municipal gasworks
and the approach to the railway station, indicated by signal-posts
standing out against the sky like gallows, and a tram-line bordered
by a row of skeleton cottages. Golgotha was a grim garden compared
with Paul's brickfield. Sometimes the children of the town scuttled
about it like dingy little rabbits. But more often it was a desolate
solitude. Perhaps all but the lowest of the parents of Bludston had
put the place out of bounds, as gipsies and other dwellers in vans
were allowed to camp there. It also bore an evil name because a
night murder or two had been committed in its murky seclusion. Paul
knew the exact spot, an ugly cavity toward the gasworks end, where a
woman had been "done in," and even he, lord of the brickfield,
preferred to remain at a purifying distance. But it was his own
domain. He felt in it a certain pride of possession. The hollow
under the lee of the rubbish-heap, by the side of the hole where he
kept his paper library, was the most homelike place he knew.

For many years he remembered that day. The light that never was on
sea or land fell upon the brickfield. He had read the story at one
stretch. He had sat there for hours reading, for hours rapt in his
Vision. At last material darkness began to gather round him, and he
awoke with a start to realization that he had been sitting there
most of the day. With a sigh he replaced his book in the hole, which
he cunningly masked with a lump of hard clay, and, feeling stiff and
cold, ran, childlike, homeward. In the silence of the night he took
out his cornelian heart and fondled it. The day had been curiously
like, yet utterly unlike, the day on which she had taken it from her
neck. In a dim fashion he knew that the two days were of infinite
significance in his life and were complementary. He had been
waiting, as it were, for nine months for this day's revelation, this
day's confirmation.

Paul rose the next morning, a human being with a fixed idea, an
unquestioned faith in his destiny. His star shone clear. He was born
to great things. In those early years that followed it was not a
matter of an imaginative child's vanity, but the unalterable, serene
conviction of a child's soul. The prince and princess were
realities, his future greatness a magnificent certitude. You must
remember this, if you would understand Paul's after-life. It was
built on this radiant knowledge. In the afternoon he met Billy
Goodge and the gang. They were playing at soldiers, Billy
distinguished by a cocked hat made out of newspaper and a wooden
sword.

"Coom on, Susie, wi be going to knock hell out of the boys in
Stamford Street."

Paul folded his arms and looked at him contemptuously, as became one
of his noble blood. "You could no' knock hell out of a bug."

"What's that tha says?"

Paul repeated the insult.

"Say that agen!" blustered the cocked-hatted leader.

Paul said it again and nothing happened, Billy received vociferous
and sanguinary advice couched in sanguinary terms.

"Try and hit me!" said Billy.

The scene was oddly parallel with one in the story of the outcast
boy of the gutter. Paul, conscious of experiment, calmly went up to
him and kicked him. He kicked him hard. The sensation was delicious.
Billy edged away. He knew from past experience that if it came to
blows he was no match for Paul, but hitherto, having shown fight, he
had received the support of the gang. Now, however, there was an
extraordinary quality in Paul's defiance which took the spirit out
of him. Once more he was urged by the ragged brats to deeds of
blood. He did not respond. Paul kicked him again before his
followers. If he could have gone on kicking him for ever and ever
what delirium of joy were eternity! Billy edged farther away. The
mongrel game-cock was beaten. Paul, dramatically conscious of what
the unrecognized prince would do in such a circumstance, advanced,
smacked his face, plucked the cocked hat from his head, the sword
from his hand, and invested himself with these insignia of
leadership, Billy melted silently into the subfusc air of Budge
Street. The ragged regiment looked around and there was no Billy.
Paul Keg worthy, the raggedest of them all, with nothing to
recommend him but his ridiculous exotic beauty and the paper and
wooden spolia opima of the vanquished, stood before them, a tattered
Caesar. The gang hung spellbound. They were ready, small band of
heroes, to follow him against the hordes of Stamford Street. They
only awaited his signal. Paul tasted a joy known but to few of the
sons of men-absolute power over, and supreme contempt for, his
fellows. He stood for a moment or two, in the grey, miserable street
discordant with the wailings of babies and the clamour of futile
little girls, who, after the manner of women, had no idea of
political crisis, and the shrill objurgations of slattern mothers
and the raucous cries of an idealist vendor of hyacinths, and,
cocked hat on head and wooden sword in hand, he looked at his
fawning army. Then came the touch of genius that was often to
characterize his actions in after years. It was mimetic, as he had
read of such a thing in his paper-covered textbooks-but it was none
the less a touch of genius. He frowned on the dirty, ignoble little
boys. What had he in common with them-he, the son of a prince?
Nothing. He snapped his sword across his knee, tore his cocked hat
in two, and, casting the fragments before them, marched proudly
toward the very last place on the face of the earth that he desired
to visit-his own home. The army remained for a few seconds
bewildered by the dramatic and unexpected, and, leaderless, did what
many a real army has done in similar circumstances, straggled into
disintegration.

Thenceforward, Paul, had he so chosen, could have ruled despotically
in Budge Street. But he did not choose. The games from which he used
to be excluded, or in which he used to be allowed to join on
sufferance, no longer appealed to him. He preferred to let Joey
Meakin lead the gang, vice Billy Goodge deposed, while he himself
remained aloof. Now and then he condescended to arbitrate between
disputants or to kick a little brute of a, bully, but he felt that,
in doing so, he was derogating from his high dignity. It was his joy
to feel himself a dark, majestic power overshadowing the street, a
kind of Grand Llama hidden in mystery. Often he would walk through
the midst of the children, seemingly unconscious of their existence,
acting strenuously to himself his part of a high-born prince.

This lasted till a dark and awful day when Mr. Button pitched him
into the factory. These were times before kindly Education Acts and
Factory Acts decreed that no boy under twelve years of age should
work in a factory, and that every boy under fourteen should spend
half his time at the factory and half at school. Paul's education
was considered complete, and he had to plunge into full time at the
grim and grinding place. He had joined the great army of workers. A
wide gulf separated him from the gang of Budge Street. It existed
for him no more than did the little girls and babies. Life changed
its aspect entirely. Gone were the days of vagabondage, the lazy,
the delicious even though cold and hungry hours of dreaming and
reading in the brickfield; gone was the happy freedom of the
chartered libertine of the gutter. He was bound, a little slave,
like hundreds of other little slaves and thousands of big ones, to a
relentless machine. He entered the hopeless factory gate at six in
the morning and left it at half-past five in the evening; and, his
rough food swallowed, slunk to his kennel in the scullery like a
little tired dog. And Mr. Button drank, and beat Mrs. Button, and
Mrs. Button beat Paul whenever she felt in the humour and had
anything handy to do it with, and, as a matter of course,
confiscated his wages on Saturday and set him to mind the baby on
Sunday afternoons. In the monotony, weariness and greyness of life
the glory of the Vision began to grow dim.

In the factory he was not thrown into competition with other boys.
He was the skip, the drudge, the carrier and fetcher, the cleaner
and polisher for a work-bench of men devoid of sentiment and blind
to his princely qualities. He tried, indeed, by nimbleness of hand
and intelligence, to impress them with his superiority to his
predecessors, but they were not impressed. At the most he escaped
curses. His mind began to work in the logic of the real. Entrance
into his kingdom implied as a primary condition release from the
factory. But how could such release come, when every morning a
remorseless and insensate hook-just like a certain hook in the
machinery whose deadly certainty of grip fascinated and terrified
him, caught him from his morning sleep every morning of .his life,
save Sunday, and swung him inexorably into the factory? He looked
around and saw that no one was released, except through death or
illness or incompetence. And the incompetent starved. Any child in
Budge Street with a grain of sense knew that. There was no release.
He, son of a prince, would work for ever and ever in Bludston. His
heart failed him. And there was no one to whom he could tell the
tragic and romantic story of his birth. One or two happy gleams of
brightness, however, lightened his darkness and prevented the Vision
from fading entirely into the greyness of the factory sky. Once the
Owner, an unspeakable god with a bald pink head and a paunch vastly
chained with gold, conducted a party of ladies over the works. One
of the latter, a very grand lady, noticed him at his bench and
came-and spoke kindly to him. Her voice had the same sweet timbre as
his goddess's. After she had left him his quick ears caught her
question to the Owner: "Where did you get your young Apollo? Not out
of Lancashire, surely? He's wonderful." And just before she passed
out of sight she turned and looked at him and smiled. He learned on
inquiry that she was the Marchioness of Chudley. The instant
recognition of him by one of his own aristocratic caste revived his
faith. The day would assuredly come. Suppose it had been his own
mother, instead of the Marchioness? Stranger things happened in the
books. The other gleam proceeded from one of the workmen at his
bench, a serious and socialistic person who occasionally lent him
something to read: Foxe's "Book of Martyrs," "Mill on Liberty,"
Bellamy's "Looking Backward," at that time at the height of its
popularity. And sometimes he would talk to Paul about collectivism
and the new era that was coming when there would be no such words as
rich and poor, because there would be no such classes as they
denoted.

Paul would say: "Then a prince will be no better than a factory
hand?"

"There won't be any princes, I tell thee," his friend would reply,
and launch out into a denunciation of tyrants.

But this did not suit Paul. If there were to be no princes, where,
would he come in? So, while grateful to the evangelist for talking
to him and treating him as a human being, he totally rejected his
gospel. It struck at the very foundations of his visionary destiny.
He was afraid to argue, for his friend was vehement. Also confession
of aristocratic prejudices might turn friendship into enmity. But
his passionate antagonism to the communistic theory, all the more
intense through suppression, strengthened his fantastic faith.
Still, the transient smile of a marchioness and the political
economy of a sour-avised operative are not enough to keep alive the
romance of underfed, ill-clad, overdriven childhood. And after a
while he was deprived even of the latter consolation, his friend
being shifted to another end of the factory. In despair he turned to
Ada, the eldest of the little Buttons, who now had reached years of
comparative discretion, and strove to interest her in his dreams,
veiling his identity under a fictitious name; but Ada, an
unimaginative and practical child with a growing family to look
after, either listened stupidly or consigned him, in the local
vernacular, to perdition.

"But suppose 'it was me that was the unknown prince? Supposing it
was me I've been talking about all the time? Supposing it was me
that went away and came back in a gold coach and six horses, with a
duke's daughter all over diamonds by my side, what would tha say?"

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