The Fortunate Youth

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The head of the school snapped his fingers impatiently and fussed up
to the model-stand. "What's the matter? Tired already? Take it easy
for a minute, if you like."

"No," said Paul, instinctively stiffening himself. "I'm never
tired."

It was his boast that he could stand longer in a given pose than any
other model, and thereby he had earned reputation.

"Then don't go to pieces, my boy," said the head of the school, not
unkindly. "You're supposed to be a Greek athlete and not Venus
rising from the sea or a jelly at a children's party."

Paul flushed all over, and insane anger shook him. How dared the
mar. speak to him like that? He kept the pose, thinking wild
thoughts. Every moment the strain grew less bearable, the
consciousness of his degradation more intense. He longed for
something to happen, something dramatic, something that would show
the vampires what manner of man he was. He was histrionic in his
anguish.

A fly settled on his back--a damp, sluggish fly that had survived
the winter--and it crawled horribly up his spine. He bore it for a
few moments, and then his over-excited nerves gave way and he dashed
his hand behind him. Somebody laughed. He raised his clenched fists
and glared at the class.

"Ay, yo' can laugh--you can laugh till yo' bust!" he cried,
falling back into his Lancashire accent. "But yo'll never see me,
here agen. Never, never, never, so help me God!"

He rushed away. The head of the school followed him and, while he
was dressing, reasoned with him.

"Nay," said Paul. "Never agen. Aw'm doan wi' th' whole business."

And as Paul walked home through the hurrying streets, he thought
regretfully of twenty speeches which would have more adequately
signified his indignant retirement from the profession.

CHAPTER VI

PAUL'S model-self being dead, he regarded it with complacency and
set his foot on it, little doubting that it was another
stepping-stone.

He spoke loftily of his independence.

"But how are you going to earn your living?" asked Jane, the
practical.

"I shall follow one of the arts," Paul replied. "I think I am a
poet, but I might be a painter or a musician."

"You do sing and play lovely," said Jane.

He had recently purchased from a pawnshop a second-hand mandoline,
which he had mastered by the aid of a sixpenny handbook, and he
would play on it accompaniments to sentimental ballads which he sang
in a high baritone.

"I'll not choose yet awhile," said Paul, disregarding the tribute.
"Something will happen. The 'moving finger' will point--"

"What moving finger?"

"The finger of Destiny," said Paul.

And, as the superb youth predicted, something did happen a day or
two afterwards.

They were walking in Regent Street, and stopped, as was their wont,
before a photographer's window where portraits of celebrities were
exposed to view. Paul loved this window, bad loved it from the
moment of discovery, a couple of years before. It was a Temple of
Fame. The fact of your portrait being exhibited, with your style and
title printed below, marked you as one of the great ones of the
earth. Often he had said to Jane: "When I am there you'll be proud,
won't you?"

And she had looked up to him adoringly and wondered why he was not
there already.

It was Paul's habit to scrutinize the faces of those who had
achieved greatness, Archbishops, Field-Marshals, Cabinet Ministers,
and to speculate on the quality of mind that had raised them to
their high estate; and often he would shift his position, so as to
obtain a glimpse of his own features in the plate-glass window, and
compare them with those of the famous. Thus he would determine that
he had the brow of the divine, the nose of the statesman and the
firm lips of the soldier. It was a stimulating pastime. He was born
to great things; but to what great things he knew not. The sphere in
which his glory should be fulfilled was as yet hidden in the mists
of time.

But this morning, instead of roving over the illustrious gallery,
his eye caught and was fascinated by a single portrait. He stood
staring at it for a long time, lost in the thrill of thought.

At last Jane touched his arm. "What are you looking at?"

He pointed. "Do you see that?"

"Yes. It's--" She named an eminent actor, then in the heyday of
his fame, of whom legend hath it that his photographs were bought in
thousands by love-lorn maidens who slept with them beneath their
pillows.

Paul drew her away from the little knot of idlers clustered round
the window. "There's nothing that man can do that I can't do," said
Paul.

"You're twenty times better looking," said Jane.

"I have more intelligence," said Paul.

"Of course," said Jane.

"I'm going to be an actor," said Paul.

"Oh!" cried Jane in sudden rapture. Then her sturdy common-sense
asserted itself. "But can you act?"

"I'm sure I could, if I tried. You've only got to have the genius to
start with and the rest is easy."

As she did not dare question his genius, she remained silent.

"I'm going to be an actor," said he, "and when I'm not acting I
shall be a poet."

In spite of her adoration Jane could not forbear a shaft of
raillery. "You'll leave yourself some time to be a musician, won't
you?"

He laughed. His alert and retentive mind had seized, long ago, on
Rowlatt's recommendation at the Little Bear Inn, and he had
developed, perhaps half consciously, a half sense of humour. A whole
sense, however, is not congruous with the fervid beliefs and soaring
ambitions of eighteen. Your sense of humour, that delicate
percipience of proportion, that subrident check on impulse, that
touch of the divine fellowship with human frailty, is a thing of
mellower growth. It is a solvent and not an excitant. It does not
stimulate to sublime effort; but it can cool raging passion. It can
take the salt from tears, the bitterness from judgment, the keenness
from despair; but in its universal manifestation it would
effectually stop a naval engagement.

Paul laughed. "You mustn't think I brag too much, Jane," said he.
"For anybody else I know what I say would be ridiculous. But for me
it's different. I'm going to be a great man. I know it. If I'm not
going to be a great actor, I shall be a great something else. God
doesn't put such things into people's heads for nothing. He didn't
take me from the factory in Bludston and set me here with you,
walking up Regent Street, like a gentleman, just to throw me back
into the gutter."

"But who said you were going back to the gutter?" asked Jane.

"Nobody. I wanted to get right with myself. But--that getting
right with oneself--do you think it egotistic?"

"I don't quite know what that is."

He defined the term.

"No," she said seriously. "I don't think it is. Everybody has got a
self to consider. I don't look on it as ego-what-d'-you-call-it to
strike out for myself instead of going on helping mother to mind the
shop. So why should you?"

"Besides, I owe a duty to my parents, don't I?" he asked eagerly.

But here Jane took her own line. "I can't see that you do,
considering that they've done nothing for you."

"They've done everything for me," he protested vehemently. "They've
made me what I am."

"They didn't take much trouble about it," said Jane.

They squabbled for a while after the manner of boy and girl. At last
she cried: "Don't you see I'm proud of you for yourself and not for
your silly old parents? What have they got to do with me? And
besides, you'll never find them."

"I don't think you know what you're talking about," he said loftily.
"It is time we were getting home."

He walked on for some time stiffly, his head in the air, not
condescending to speak. She had uttered blasphemy. He would find his
parents, he vowed to himself, if only to spite Jane. Presently his
ear caught a little sniff, and looking down, saw her dabbing her
eyes with her handkerchief. His heart softened at once. "Never
mind," said he. "You didn't mean it."

"It's only because I love you, Paul," she murmured wretchedly.

"That's all right," he said. "Let us go in here"--they were
passing a confectioner's--"and we'll have some jam-puffs."

Paul went to his friend Rowlatt, who had already heard, through one
of his assistants who had a friend in the Life School, of the
dramatic end of the model's career.

"I quite sympathize with you," Rowlatt laughed. "I've wondered how
you stuck it so long. What are you going to do now?"

"I'm going on the stage."

"How are you going to get there?"

"I don't know," said Paul, "but if I knew an actor, he would be able
to tell me. I thought perhaps you might know an actor."

"I do--one or two," replied Rowlatt; "but they're just ordinary
actors--not managers; and I shouldn't think they'd be able to do
anything for you."

"Except what I say," Paul persisted. "They'll tell me how one sets
about being an actor."

Rowlatt scribbled a couple of introductions on visiting cards, and
Paul went away satisfied. He called on the two actors. The first, in
atrabiliar mood, advised him to sweep crossings, black shoes, break
stones by the roadside, cart manure, sell tripe or stocks and
shares, blow out his brains rather than enter a profession over
whose portals was inscribed the legend, Lasciate ogni speranza--he
snapped his finger and thumb to summon memory as if it were a dog.

"Voi che intrate," continued Paul, delighted at showing off the one
Italian tag he had picked up from his reading. And filled with one
of the purest joys of the young literary life and therefore
untouched by pessimistic counsel, he left the despairing actor.

The second, a brighter and more successful man, talked with Paul for
a long time about all manner of things. Having no notion of his
antecedents, he assumed him to be a friend of Rowlatt and met him on
terms of social equality. Paul expanded like a flower to the sun. It
was the first time he had spoken with an educated man on common
ground--a man to whom the great imaginative English writers were
familiar friends, who ran from Chaucer to Lamb and from Dryden to
Browning with amazing facility. The strong wine of allusive talk
mounted to Paul's brain. Tingling with excitement, he brought out
all his small artillery of scholarship and acquitted himself so well
that his host sent him off with a cordial letter to a manager of his
acquaintance.

The letter opened the difficult door of the theatre. His absurd
beauty of face and figure, a far greater recommendation in the eyes
of the manager who had begun rehearsals for an elaborate romantic
production than a knowledge of The Faerie Queene, obtained for him
an immediate engagement--to walk on as a gilded youth of Italy in
two or three scenes at a salary of thirty shillings a week. Paul
went home and spread himself like a young peacock before Jane, and
said: "I am an actor."

The girl's eyes glowed. "You are wonderful."

"No, not I," replied Paul modestly. "It is my star."

"Have you got a big part?" asked Jane.

He laughed pityingly, sweeping back his black curls. "No, you silly,
I haven't any lines to speak"--he had at once caught up the phrase--
"I must begin at the beginning. Every actor has to do it."

"You'll get mother and me orders to come and see you, won't you?"

"You shall have a box," declared Paul the magnificent.

Thus began a new phase in the career of Paul Kegworthy. After the
first few days of bewilderment on the bare, bleak stage, where
oddments of dilapidated furniture served to indicate thrones and
staircases and palace doors and mossy banks; where men and women in
ordinary costume behaved towards one another in the most ridiculous
way and went through unintelligible actions with phantom properties;
where the actor-manager would pause in the breath of an impassioned
utterance and cry out, "Oh, my God! stop that hammering!" where
nothing looked the least bit in the world like the lovely ordered
picture he had been accustomed to delight in from the shilling
gallery--after the first few days he began to focus this strange
world and to suffer its fascination. And he was proud of the silent
part allotted to him, a lazy lute-player in attendance on the great
lady, who lounged about on terrace steps in picturesque attitudes.
He was glad that he was not an unimportant member of the crowd of
courtiers who came on in a bunch and bowed and nodded and pretended
to talk to one another and went off again. He realized that he would
be in sight of the audience all the time. It did not strike him that
the manager was using him merely as a piece of decoration.

One day, however, at rehearsal the leading lady said: "If my
lute-player could play a few chords here--or the orchestra for
him-it would help me tremendously. I've got all this long cross with
nothing to say."

Paul seized his opportunity. "I can play the mandoline," said he.

"Oh, can you?" said the manager, and Paul was handed over to the
musical director, and the next day rehearsed with a real instrument
which he twanged in the manner prescribed. He did not fail to
announce himself to Jane as a musician.

Gradually he found his feet among the heterogeneous band who walk on
at London theatres. Some were frankly vulgar, some were
pretentiously genteel, a good many were young men of gentle birth
from the public schools and universities. Paul's infallible instinct
drew him into timid companionship with the last. He knew little of
the things they talked about, golf and cricket prospects, and the
then brain-baffling Ibsen, but he listened modestly, hoping to
learn. He reaped the advantage of having played "the sedulous ape"
to his patrons of the studios. His tricks were somewhat exaggerated;
his sweep of the hat when ladies passed him at the stage door
entrance was lower than custom deems necessary; he was quicker in
courteous gesture than the young men from the universities; he bowed
more deferentially to an interlocutor than is customary outside
Court circles; but they were all the tricks of good breeding. More
than one girl asked if he were of foreign extraction. He remembered
Rowlatt's question of years ago, and, as then, he felt curiously
pleased. He confessed to an exotic strain: to Italian origin. Italy
was romantic. When he obtained a line part and he appeared on the
bill, he took the opportunity of changing a name linked with
unpleasant associations which he did not regard as his own.
Kegworthy was cast into the limbo of common things, and he became
Paul Savelli. But this was later.

He made friends at the theatre. Some of the women, by petting and
flattery, did their best to spoil him; but Paul was too ambitious,
too much absorbed in his dream of greatness and his dilettante
literary and musical pursuits, too much yet of a boy to be greatly
affected. What he prized far more highly than feminine blandishments
was the new comradeship with his own sex. Instinctively he sought
them, as a sick dog seeks grass, unconsciously feeling the need of
them in his mental and moral development. Besides, the attitude of
the women reminded him of that of the women painters in his younger
days. He had no intention of playing the pet monkey again. His
masculinity revolted. The young barbarian clamoured. A hard day on
the river he found much more to his taste than sporting in the shade
of a Kensington flat over tea and sandwiches with no matter how
sentimental an Amaryllis. Jane, who had seen the performance, though
not from a box, a couple of upper-circle seats being all that Paul
could obtain from the acting-manager, and had been vastly impressed
by Paul's dominating position in the stage fairy-world, said to him,
with a sniff that choked a sigh: "Now that you've got all those
pretty girls around you, I suppose you soon won't think of me any
longer?"

Paul waved the dreaded houris away as though they were midges. "I'm
sick of girls," he replied in a tone of such sincerity that Jane
tossed her head.

"Oh? Then I suppose you lump me with the rest and are sick of me
too?"

"Don't worry a fellow," said Paul. "You're not a girl-not in that
sense, I mean. You're a pal."

"Anyway, they're lots prettier than what I am," she said defiantly.

He looked at her critically, after the brutal manner of obtuse
boyhood, and beheld an object quite agreeable to the sight. Her
Londoner's ordinarily colourless checks were flushed, her blue eyes
shone bright, her little chin was in the air and her parted lips
showed a flash of white teeth. She wore a neat simple blouse and
skirt and held her slim, half-developed figure taut. Paul shook his
head. "Jolly few of them--without grease-paint on."

"But you see them all painted up."

He burst into laughter. "Then they're beastly, near by! You silly
kid, don't you know? We've got to make up, otherwise no one in front
would be able to see our mouths and noses and eyes. From the front
we look lovely; but close to we're horrors."

"Well, how should I know that?" asked Jane.

"You couldn't unless you saw us--or were told. But now you know."

"Do you look beastly too?"

"Vile," he laughed.

"I'm glad I didn't think of going on the stage,"' she said, childish
yet very feminine unreason combining with atavistic puritanism. "I
shouldn't like to paint my face."

"You get used to it," said Paul, the experienced.

"I think it horrid to paint your face."

He swung to the door--they were in the little parlour behind the
shop--a flash of anger in his eyes. "If you think everything I do
horrid, I can't talk to you."

He marched out. Jane suddenly realized that she had behaved badly.
She whipped herself. She had behaved atrociously. Of course she had
been jealous of the theatre girls; but had he not been proving to
her all the time in what small account he held them? And now he had
gone. At seventeen a beloved gone for an hour is a beloved gone for
ever. She rushed to the foot of the stairs on which his ascending
steps still creaked.

"Paul!"

"Yes."

"Come back! Do come back!"

Paul came back and followed her into the parlour.

"I'm sorry," she said.

He graciously forgave her, having already arrived at the mature
conclusion that females were unaccountable folk whose excursions
into unreason should be regarded by man with pitying indulgence.
And, in spite of the seriousness with which he took himself, he was
a sunny-tempered youth.

Barney Bill, putting into the Port of London, so to speak, in order
to take in cargo, also visited the theatre towards the end of the
run of the piece. He waited, by arrangement, for Paul outside the
stage door, and Paul, coming out, linked arms and took him to a
blazing bar in Piccadilly Circus and ministered to his thirst, with
a princely air.

"It seems rum," said Bill, wiping his lips with the back of his
hand, after a mighty pull at the pint tankard--"it seems rum that
you should be standing me drinks at a swell place like this. It
seems only yesterday that you was a two-penn'orth of nothing jogging
along o' me in the old 'bus."

"I've moved a bit since then, haven't I?" said Paul.

"You have, sonny," said Barney Bill. "But"-he sighed and looked
around the noisy glittering place, at the smart barmaids, the
well-clad throng of loungers, some in evening dress, the half-dozen
gorgeous ladies sitting with men at little tables by the window--
"I thinks as how you gets more real happiness in a quiet village
pub, and the beer is cheaper, and--gorblimey!"

He ran his finger between his stringy neck and the frayed stand-up
collar that would have sawn his head off but for the toughness of
his hide. To do Paul honour he had arrayed himself in his best--a
wondrously cut and heavily-braided morning coat and
lavender-coloured trousers of eccentric shape, and a funny little
billycock hat too small for him, and a thunder-and-lightning
necktie, all of which he had purchased nearly twenty years ago to
grace a certain, wedding a. which he had been best man. Since then
he had worn the Nessus shirt of a costume not more than half-a-dozen
times. The twisted, bright-eyed little man, so obviously ill at ease
in his amazing garb, and the beautiful youth, debonair in his
well-fitting blue serge, formed a queer contrast.

"Don't you never long for the wind of God and the smell of the
rain?" asked Barney Bill.

"I haven't the time," said Paul. "I'm busy all day long."

"Well, well," said Barney Bill, "the fellow wasn't far wrong who
said it takes all sorts to make a world. There are some as likes
electric light and some as likes the stars. Gimme the stars." And in
his countryman's way he set the beer in his tankard swirling round
and round before he put it again to his lips.

Paul sipped his beer reflectively. "You may find happiness and peace
of soul under the stars," said he, sagely, "and if I were a free
agent I'd join you tomorrow. But you can't find fame. You can't rise
to great things. I want to--well, I don't quite know what I want
to do," he laughed, "but it's something big."

"Yuss, my boy," said Barney Bill. "I understand. You was always like
that. You haven't come any nearer finding your 'igh-born
parents?"--there was a twinkle in his eyes--"'ave yer?"

"I'm not going to bother any more about them, whoever they are,"
said Paul, lighting a cigarette. "When I was a kid I used to dream
that they would find me and do everything for me. Now I'm a man with
experience of life, I find that I've got to do everything for
myself. And by George!"--he thumped the bar and smiled the radiant
smile of the young Apollo--"I'm going to do it."

Barney Bill took off his Luke's iron crown of a billycock hat and
scratched his cropped and grizzled head. "How old are you, sonny?"

"Nearly nineteen," said Paul.

"By Gosh!" said Barney Bill.

He put on his hat at a comfortable but rakish angle. He looked like
a music-hall humourist. A couple of the gorgeous ladies giggled.

"Yuss," said he, "you're a man with an experience of life--and
nobody can do nothing for you but yerself. Poor old Barney Bill has
been past helping you this many a year."

"But I owe everything to you!" cried Paul, boyishly. "If it hadn't
been for you, I should still be working in that factory at
Bludston."

Bill winked and nodded acquiescence as he finished his tankard.

"I've often wondered--since I've grown up--what induced you to
take me away. What was it?"

Bill cocked his head on one side and regarded him queerly. "Now
you're arsking," said he.

Paul persisted. "You must have had some reason."

"I suppose I was interested in them parents of yours," said Barney
Bill.

And that was all he would say on the subject.

The days went on. The piece had run through the summer and autumn,
and Paul, a favourite with the management, was engaged for the next
production. At rehearsal one day the author put in a couple of
lines, of which he was given one to speak. He now was in very truth
an actor. Jane could no longer taunt him in her naughty moods
(invariably followed by bitter repentance) with playing a dumb part
like a trained dog. He had a real part, typewritten and done up in a
brown-paper cover, which was handed to him, with lack of humour, by
the assistant stage manager.

In view of his own instantaneous success he tried to persuade Jane
to go on the stage; but Jane had no artistic ambitions, to say
nothing of her disinclination to paint her face. She preferred the
prosaic reality of stenography and typewriting. No sphere could be
too dazzling for Paul; he was born to great things, the
consciousness of his high destiny being at once her glory and her
despair; but, as regards herself, her outlook on life was cool and
sober. Paul was peacock born; it was for him to strut about in
iridescent plumage. She was a humble daw and knew her station. It
must be said that Paul held out the stage as a career more on
account of the social status that it would give to Jane than through
a belief in her histrionic possibilities. He too, fond as he was of
the girl with whom he had grown up, recognized the essential
difference between them. She was as pretty, as sensible, as helpful
a little daw as ever chattered; but the young peacock never for an
instant forgot her daw-dom.

Jane's profound common-sense reaped its reward the following spring
when she found herself obliged to earn her livelihood. 'Her mother
died, and the shop was sold, and an aunt in Cricklewood offered Jane
a home, on condition that she paid for her keep. This she was soon
able to do when she obtained a situation with a business firm in the
city. The work was hard and the salary small; but Jane had a brave
heart and held her head high. In her simple philosophy life was
work, and dreaming an occasional luxury. Her mother's death grieved
her deeply, for she was a girl of strong affections, and the
breaking up of her life with Paul seemed an irremediable
catastrophe.

"It's just as well," said her aunt, "that there's an end of it, or
you'd be making a fool of yourself over that young actor chap with
his pretty face. I don't hold with any of them."

But Jane was too proud to reply.

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