The Fortunate Youth

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On their last night together in the Barn Street house they sat alone
in the little back-parlour as they had done for the last six years--all
their impressionable childish days. It was the only home that
Paul had known, and he felt the tragedy of its dissolution. They sat
on the old horsehair sofa, behind the table, very tearful, very
close together in spirit, holding each other's hands. They talked as
the young talk--and the old, for the matter of that. She trembled
at his wants unministered to in his new lodgings. He waved away
prospective discomfort: what did it matter? He was a man and could
rough it. It was she herself whose loss would be irreparable. She
sighed; he would soon forget her. He vowed undying remembrance by
all his gods. Some beautiful creature of the theatre would carry him
off. He laughed at such an absurdity. Jane would always be his
confidante, his intimate. Even though they lived under different
roofs, they would meet and have their long happy jaunts together.
Jane said dolefully that it could only be on Sundays, as their
respective working hours would never correspond--"And you haven't
given me your Sundays for a year," she added. Paul slid from the
dark theme and, to comfort her, spoke glowingly of the future, when
he should have achieved his greatness. He would give her a beautiful
house with carriages and servants, and she would not have to work.

"But if you are not there, what's the good of anything?" she said.

"I'll come to see you, silly dear," he replied ingenuously.

Before they parted for the night she threw her arms round his neck
impulsively. "Don't quite forget me, Paul. It would break my heart.
I've only you left now poor mother's gone."

Paul kissed her and vowed again. He did not vow that he would be a
mother to her, though to the girl's heart it seemed as if he did.
The little girl was aching for a note in his voice that never came.
Now, ninety-nine youths in a hundred who held, at such a sentimental
moment, a comely and not uncared-for maiden in their arms, would
have lost their heads (and their hearts) and vowed in the desired
manner. But Paul was different, and Jane knew it, to her sorrow. He
was by no means temperamentally cold; far from it. But, you see, he
lived intensely in his dream, and only on its outer fringe had Jane
her place. In the heart of it, hidden in amethystine mist, from
which only flashed the diadem on her hair, dwelt the exquisite, the
incomparable lady, the princess who should share his kingdom, while
he knelt at her feet and worshipped her and kissed the rosy tips of
her calm fingers. So, as it never entered his head to kiss the
finger tips of poor Jane, it never entered his head to fancy himself
in love with her. Therefore, when she threw herself into his arms,
he hugged her in a very sincere and brotherly way, but kissed her
with a pair of cast lips of Adonis. Of course he would never forget
her. Jane went to bed and sobbed her heart out. Paul slept but
little. The breaking up of the home meant the end of many precious
and gentle things, and without them he knew that his life would be
the poorer. And he vowed once more, to himself, that he would never
prove disloyal to Jane.

While he remained in London he saw what he could of her, sacrificing
many a Sunday's outing with the theatre folk. Jane, instinctively
aware of this, and finding in his demeanour, after examining it with
femininely jealous, microscopic eyes, nothing perfunctory, was duly
grateful. and gave him of her girlish best. She developed very
quickly after her entrance into the worid of struggle. Very soon it
was the woman and not the child who listened to the marvellous
youth's story of the wonders that would be. She never again threw
herself into his arms, and he never again called her a "little
silly." She was dimly aware of change, though she knew that the
world could hold no other man for her. But Paul was not.

And then Paul went on tour.

CHAPTER VII

PAUL had been four years on the stage. Save as a memory they had as
little influence on the colour of his after-life as his years at
Bludston or his years in the studios. He was the man born to be
king. The attainment of his kingdom alone mattered. The intermediary
phases were of no account. It had been a period of struggle,
hardship and, as far as the stage itself was concerned, disillusion.
After the first year or so, the goddess Fortune, more fickle in
Theatreland, perhaps, than anywhere else, passed him by. London had
no use for his services, especially when it learned that he aspired
to play parts. It even refused him the privilege of walking on and
understudying. He drifted into the provinces, where, when he
obtained an engagement, he found more scope for his ambitions. Often
he was out, and purchased with his savings the bread of idleness. He
knew the desolation of the agent's dingy stairs; he knew the
heartache of the agent's dingy outer office.

He was familiar, too, with bleak rehearsals, hours of listless
waiting for his little scenes; with his powerlessness to get into
his simple words the particular intonation required by an overdriven
producer. Familiar, too, with long and hungry Sunday railway
journeys when pious refreshment rooms are shut; with little mean
towns like Bludston, where he and three or four of the company
shared the same mean theatrical lodgings; with the dirty, insanitary
theatres; with the ceaseless petty jealousies and bickerings of the
ill-paid itinerant troupe. The discomforts affected Paul but
little, he had never had experience of luxuries, and the life
itself was silken ease compared with what it would have been but for
Barney Bill's kidnapping. It never occurred to him to complain of
nubbly bed and ill-cooked steak and crowded and unventilated
dressing rooms; but it always struck him as being absurd that such
should continue to be the lot of one predestined to greatness. There
was some flaw in the working of destiny. It puzzled him.

Once indeed, being out, but having an engagement ahead, and waiting
for rehearsals to begin, he had found himself sufficiently
prosperous to take a third-class ticket to Paris, where he spent a
glorious month. But the prosperity never returned, and he had to
live on his memories of Paris.

During these years books were, as ever, his joy and his consolation.
He taught himself French and a little German. He read history,
philosophy, a smattering of science, and interested himself in
politics. So aristocratic a personage naturally had passionate Tory
sympathies. Now and again--but not often, for the theatrical
profession is generally Conservative--he came across a furious
Radical in the company and tasted the joy of fierce argument. Now
and again too, he came across a young woman of high modern
cultivation, and once or twice narrowly escaped wrecking his heart
on the Scylline rock of her intellect. It was only when he
discovered that she had lost her head over his romantic looks, and
not over his genius and his inherited right to leadership, that he
began to question her intellectual sincerity. And there is nothing
to send love scuttling away with his quiver between his legs like a
note of interrogation of that sort. The only touch of the morbid in
Paul was his resentment at owing anything to his mere personal
appearance. He could not escape the easy chaff of his fellows on his
"fatal beauty." He dreaded the horrible and hackneyed phrase which
every fresh intimacy either with man or woman would inevitably
evoke, and he hated it beyond reason. There was a tour during which
he longed for small-pox or a broken nose or facial paralysis, so
that no woman should ever look at him again and no man accuse him in
vulgar jest.

He played small utility parts and understudied the leading man. On
the rare occasions when he played the lead, he made no great hit.
The company did not, after the generous way of theatre folks,
surround him, when the performance was over, with a chorus of
congratulation. The manager would say, "Quite all' right, my boy, as
far as it goes, but still wooden. You must get more life into it."
And Paul, who knew himself to be a better man in every way than the
actor whose part he was playing, just as in his childhood days he
knew himself to be a better man than Billy Goodge, could not
understand the general lack of appreciation. Then he remembered the
early struggles of the great actors: Edmund Kean, who on the eve of
his first appearance at Drury Lane cried, "If I succeed I shall go
mad!"; of Henry Irving (then at his zenith) and the five hundred
parts he had played before he came to London; he recalled also the
failure of Disraeli's first speech in the House of Commons and his
triumphant prophecy. He had dreams of that manager on his bended
knees, imploring him, with prayerful hands and streaming eyes, to
play Hamlet at a salary of a thousand a week and of himself
haughtily snapping his fingers at the paltry fellow.

Well, which one of us who has ever dreamed at all has not had such
dreams at twenty? Let him cast at Paul the first stone.

And then, you must remember, Paul's faith in his vague but glorious
destiny was the dynamic force of his young life. Its essential
mystery kept him alert and buoyant. His keen, self-centred mind
realized that his search on the stage for the true expression of his
genius was only empirical. If he failed there, it was for him to try
a hundred other spheres until he found the right one. But just as in
his childish days he could not understand why he was not supreme in
everything, so now he could not appreciate the charge of wooden
inferiority brought against him by theatrical managers.

He had been on the stage about three years when for the first time
in his emancipated life something like a calamity befell him. He
lost Jane. Like most calamities it happened in a foolishly
accidental manner. He received a letter from Jane during the last
three weeks of a tour--they always kept up an affectionate but
desultory correspondence--giving a new address. The lease of her
aunt's house having fallen in, they were moving to the south side of
London. When he desired to answer the letter, he found he had lost
it and could not remember the suburb, much less the street and
number, whither Jane had migrated. A letter posted to the old
address was returned through the post. The tour over, and he being
again in London, he went on an errand of inquiry to Cricklewood,
found the house empty and the neighbours and tradespeople ignorant.
The poorer classes of London in their migrations seldom leave a
trail behind them. Their correspondence being rare, it is not within
their habits of life to fill up post-office forms with a view to
the forwarding of letters. He could not write to Jane because he did
not in the least know where she was.

He reflected with dismay that Jane could, for the same reason, no
longer write to him. Ironic chance had so arranged that the landlady
with whom he usually lodged in town, and whose house he used as a
permanent address, had given up letting lodgings at the beginning of
the tour, and had drifted into the limbo of London. Jane's only
guide to his whereabouts had been the tour card which he had sent
her as usual, giving dates and theatres. And the tour was over. On
the chance that Jane, not hearing from him, should address a letter
to the last theatre on the list, he communicated at once with the
local management. But as local managements of provincial theatres
shape their existences so as to avoid responsibilities of any kind
save the maintenance of their bars and the deduction of their
percentages from the box-office receipts, Paul knew that it was
ludicrous to expect it to interest itself in the correspondence of
an obscure member of a fourth-rate company which had once played to
tenth-rate business within its mildewed walls. Being young, he wrote
also to the human envelope containing the essence of stale beer,
tobacco and lethargy that was the stage doorkeeper. But he might
just as well have written to the station master or the municipal
gasworks. As a matter of fact Jane and he were as much lost to one
another as if the whole of England had been primaeval forest.

It was a calamity which he regarded with dismay. He had many friends
of the easy theatrical sort, who knew him as Paul Savelli, a
romantically visaged, bright-natured, charming, intellectual, and
execrably bad young actor. But there was only one Jane who knew him
as little Paul Kegworthy. No woman he had ever met--and in the
theatrical world one is thrown willy-nilly into close contact with
the whole gamut of the sex--gave him just the same close, intimate,
comforting companionship. From Jane he hid nothing. Before all
the others he was conscious of pose. Jane, with her cockney
common-sense, her shrewdness, her outspoken criticism of follies,
her unfailing sympathy in essentials, was welded into the very
structure of his being. Only when he had lost her did he realize
this. Amidst all the artificialities and pretences and
pseudo-emotionalities of his young actor's life, she was the one
thing that was real. She alone knew of Bludston, of Barney Bill, of
the model days the memory of which made him shiver. She alone (save
Barney Bill) knew of his high destiny--for Paul, quick to
recognize the cynical scepticism of an indifferent world, had not
revealed the Vision Splendid to any of his associates. To her he
could write; to her, when he was in London, he could talk; to her he
could outpour all the jumble of faith, vanity, romance, egotism and
poetry that was his very self, without thought of miscomprehension.
And of late she had mastered the silly splenetics of childhood. He
had an uncomfortable yet comforting impression that latterly she had
developed an odd, calm wisdom, just as she had developed a calm,
generous personality. The last time he had seen her, his quick
sensitiveness had noted the growth from girl to woman. She was
large, full-bosomed, wide-browed, clear-eyed. She had not worried
him about other girls. She had reproved him for confessed follies in
just the way that man loves to be reproved. She had mildly soared
with him into the empyrean of his dreams. She had enjoyed
whole-heartedly, from the back row of the dress-circle, the play to
which he had taken her--as a member of the profession he had, in
Jane's eyes, princely privileges--and on the top of the
Cricklewood omnibus she had eaten, with the laughter and gusto of
her twenty years, the exotic sandwiches he had bought at the
delicatessen shop in Leicester Square. She was the ideal sister.

And now she was gone, like a snow-flake on a river. For a long while
it seemed absurd, incredible. He went on all sorts of preposterous
adventures to find her. He walked through the city day after day at
the hours when girls and men pour out of their honeycombs of offices
into the streets. She had never told him where she was employed,
thinking the matter of little interest; and he, in his careless way,
had never inquired. Once he had suggested calling for her at her
office, and she had abruptly vetoed the suggestion. Paul was too
remarkable a young man to escape the notice of her associates; her
feelings towards him were too fine to be scratched by jocular
allusion. After a time, having failed to meet her in the human
torrents of Cheapside and Cannon Street, Paul gave up the search.
Jane was lost, absolutely lost--and, with her, Barney Bill. He
went on tour again, heavy-hearted. He felt that, in losing these
two, he had committed an act of base ingratitude.

He had been four years on the stage and had grown from youth into
manhood. But one day at three-and-twenty he found himself as poor in
pence, though as rich in dreams, as at thirteen.

Necessity had compelled him to take what he could get. This time it
was a leading part; but a leading part in a crude melodrama in a
fit-up company. They had played in halls and concert rooms, on pier
pavilions, in wretched little towns. It was glorious July Weather
and business was bad--so bad that the manager abruptly closed the
treasury and disappeared, leaving the company stranded a hundred and
fifty miles from London, with a couple of weeks' salary unpaid.

Paul was packing his clothes in the portmanteau that lay on the
narrow bed in his tiny back bedroom, watched disconsolately by a
sallow, careworn man who sat astride the one cane chair, his hat on
the back of his head, the discoloured end of a cigarette between his
lips.

"It's all very well for you to take it cheerfully," said the latter.
"You're young. You're strong. You're rich. You've no one but
yourself. You haven't a wife and kids depending on you."

"I know it makes a devil of a difference," replied Paul,
disregarding the allusion to his wealth. As the leading man, he was
the most highly paid member of the disastrous company, and he had
acquired sufficient worldly wisdom to know that to him who has but a
penny the possessor of a shilling appears arrogantly opulent. "But
still," said he, "what can we do? We must get back to London and try
again."

"If there was justice in this country that son of a thief would get
fifteen years for it. I never trusted the skunk. A fortnight's
salary gone and no railway fare to London. I wish to God I had never
taken it on. I could have gone with Garbutt in The White Woman--
he's straight enough--only this was a joint engagement. Oh, the
swine!"

He rose with a clatter, threw his cigarette on the floor and stamped
on it violently.

"He's a pretty bad wrong 'un," said Paul. "We hadn't been going a
fortnight before he asked me to accept half salary, swearing he
would make it up, with a rise, as soon as business got better. Like
an idiot, I consented."

His friend sat down again hopelessly. "I don't know what's going to
become of us. The missus has pawned everything she has got, poor old
girl! Oh, it's damned hard! We had been out six months."

"Poor old chap!" said Paul, sitting on the bed beside his
portmanteau. "How does Mrs. Wilmer take it?"

"She's knocked endways. You see," cried Wilmer desperately, "we've
had to send home everything we could scrape together to keep the
kids--there's five of them; and now--and now there's nothing
left. I'm wrong. There's that." He fished three or four coppers from
his pocket and held them out with a harsh laugh. "There's that after
twenty years' work in this profession."

"Poor old chap!" said Paul again. He liked Wilmer, a sober, earnest,
ineffectual man, and his haggard, kindly-natured wife. They had put
on a brave face all through the tour, letting no one suspect their
straits, and doing both him and other members of the company many
little acts of kindness and simple hospitality. In the lower
submerged world of the theatrical profession in which Paul found
himself he had met with many such instances of awful poverty. He had
brushed elbows with Need himself. That morning he had given, out of
his scanty resources, her railway fare to a tearful and despairing
girl who played the low-comedy part. But he had not yet come across
any position quite so untenable as that of Wilmer. Forty odd years
old, a wife, five children, all his life given honestly to his
calling--and threepence half-penny to his fortune.

"But, good God I" said he, after a pause, "your kiddies? If you have
nothing--what will happen to them?"

"Lord knows," groaned Wilmer, staring in front of him, his elbows on
the back of the chair and his head between his fists.

"And Mrs. Wilmer and yourself have got to get back to London."

"I've got the dress suit I wear in the last act. It's fairly new. I
can get enough on it."

"But that's part of your outfit--your line of business; you'll
want it again," said Paul.

Wilmer had played butlers up and down the land for many years. Now
and again, when the part did not need any special characterization,
he obtained London engagements. He was one of the known stage
butlers.

"I can hire if I'm pushed," said he. "It's hell, isn't it? Something
told me not to go out with a fit-up. We'd never come down to it
before. And I mistrusted Larkins--but we were out six months.
Paul, my boy, chuck it. You're young; you're clever; you've had a
swell education; you come of gentlefolk--my father kept a small
hardware shop in Leicester--you have"--the smitten and generally
inarticulate man hesitated--it well, you have extraordinary
personal beauty; you have charm; you could do anything you like in
the world, save act--and you can't act for toffee. Why the blazes
do you stick to it?"

"I've got to earn my living just like you," said Paul, greatly
flattered by the artless tribute to his aristocratic personality and
not offended by the professional censure which he knew to be just.
"I've tried all sorts of other things-music, painting, poetry,
novel-writing--but none of them has come off."

"Your people don't make you an allowance?"

"I've no people living," said Paul, with a smile--and when Paul
smiled it was as if Eros's feathers had brushed the cheek of a
Praxitelean Hermes; and then with an outburst half sincere, half
braggart--"I've been on my own ever since I was thirteen."

Wilmer regarded him wearily. "The missus and I have always thought
you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth."

"So I was," Paul declared from his innermost conviction. "But," he
laughed, "I lost it before my teeth came and I could get a grip on
it."

"Do you mean to say," exclaimed Wilmer, "that you're not doing this
for fun?"

"Fun?" cried Paul. "Fun? Do you call this comic?" He waved his hand
comprehensively, indicating the decayed pink-and-purple wall-paper,
the ragged oil-cloth on the floor, the dingy window with its dingier
outlook, the rickety deal wash-stand with the paint peeling off, a
horrible clothless tray on a horrible splotchy chest of drawers,
containing the horrible scraggy remains of a meal. "Do you think I
would have this if I could command silken sloth? I long like hell,
old chap, for silken sloth, and if I could get it, you wouldn't see
me here."

Wilmer rose and stretched out his hand. "I'm sorry, dear boy," said
he. "The wife and I thought it didn't very much matter to you. We
always thought you were a kind of young swell doing it for amusement
and experience--and because you never put on side, we liked you."

Paul rose from the bed and put his hand on Wilmer's shoulder. "And
now you're disappointed?"

He laughed and his eyes twinkled humorously. His vagabond life had
taught him some worldly wisdom. The sallow and ineffectual man
looked confused. His misery was beyond the relief of smiles.

"We're all in the same boat, old chap," said Paul, "except that I'm
alone and haven't got wife and kids to look after."

"Good-bye, my boy," said Wilmer. "Better luck next time. But chuck
it, if you can."

Paul held his hand for a while. Then his left hand dived into his
waistcoat pocket and, taking the place of his right, thrust three
sovereigns into Wilmer's palm. "For the kiddies," said he.

Wilmer looked at the coins in his palm, and then at Paul, and the
tears spurted. "I can't, my boy. You must be as broke as any of
us--you--half salary--no, my boy, I can't. I'm old enough to be
your father. It's damned good of you--but it's my one pride
left--the pride of both of us--the missus and me--that we've never
borrowed money--"

"But it isn't borrowed, you silly ass," cried Paul cheerfully. "It's
just your share of the spoils, such as they are. I wish to God it
was more." With both hands he clasped the thin, ineffectual fingers
over the coins and pushed the man' with his young strength out of
the door. "It's for the kiddies. Give them my love," he cried, and
slammed the door and locked it from the inside.

"Poor old chap!" said he.

Then he went through his pockets and laid the contents on the narrow
mantel-piece. These were a gold watch and chain, a cornelian heart
fixed to the free end of the chain, a silver cigarette case, a
couple of keys, one sovereign, four shillings, three pennies and two
half-pennies. A trunk already fastened and filled with books and
clothes, and the portmanteau on the bed, contained the rest of his
possessions. In current coin his whole fortune amounted to one
pound, four shillings and fourpence. Luckily he had paid his
landlady. One pound four and fourpence to begin again at
three-and-twenty the battle of life on which he had entered at
thirteen. He laughed because he was young and strong, and knew that
such reverses were foreordained chapters in the lives of those born
to a glorious destiny. They were also preordained chapters in the
lives of those born to failure, like poor old Wilmer. He was
conscious of the wide difference between Wilmer and himself. Good
Heavens! To face the world at forty-three, with wife and children
and threepence-halfpenny, and the once attendant hope replaced by
black-vestured doom! Poor Wilmer! He felt certain that Wilmer had
not been able to pay his landlady, and he felt that he had been mean
in keeping back the other sovereign.

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