The Fortunate Youth Part 2

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 cert.i.tude. 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 c.o.c.ked hat made out of newspaper and a wooden sword.

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

Paul folded his arms and looked at him contemptuously, as became one of his n.o.ble blood. "You could no' knock h.e.l.l out of a bug."

"What's that tha says?"

Paul repeated the insult.

"Say that agen!" bl.u.s.tered the c.o.c.ked-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-c.o.c.k was beaten. Paul, dramatically conscious of what the unrecognized prince would do in such a circ.u.mstance, advanced, smacked his face, plucked the c.o.c.ked 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 Kegworthy, 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, c.o.c.ked 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, ign.o.ble 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 c.o.c.ked 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 circ.u.mstances, 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. b.u.t.ton 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. b.u.t.ton drank, and beat Mrs.

b.u.t.ton, and Mrs. b.u.t.ton 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 compet.i.tion 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ddess'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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.suredly 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 cla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sionate 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 b.u.t.tons, who now had reached years of comparative discretion, and strove to interest her in his dreams, veiling his ident.i.ty under a fict.i.tious 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?"

"I think tha art nowt but a fool," said the elderly child of ten, "and, if mother heard thee, she'd lamm the life out of thee."

Paul had the sickening sensation of the man who has confided the high secrets of his soul to coa.r.s.efibred woman. He turned away, darkly conscious of having magnanimously given Ada a chance to mount with him into the upper air, which opportunity she, daughter of earth, had, in her purblind manner, refused. Thenceforward Ada was to him an unnoticeable item in the cosmos.

One hopeless month succeeded another, until a cloud seemed to close round Paul's brain, rendering him automatic in his actions, merely animal in his half-satisfied appet.i.tes. Fines and curses were his portion at the factory; curses and beatings--deserved if Justice held a hurried scale at home. Paul, who had read of suicide in The Bludston Herald, turned his thoughts morbidly to death. But his dramatic imagination always carried him beyond' his own demise to the scene in the household when his waxlike corpse should be discovered dangling from a rope fixed to the hook in the kitchen ceiling. He posed cadaverous before a shocked Budge Street, before a conscience-stricken factory; and he wept on his sack bed in the scullery because the prince and the princess, his august parents, would never know that he had died. A whit less gloomy were his imaginings of the said prince and princess rushing into the house, in the nick of time, just before life was extinct, and cutting him down. How they were to find him he did not know. This side-track exploration of possibilities was a symptom of sanity.

Yet, Heaven knows what would have happened to Paul, after a year or so at the factory, if Barney Bill, a grotesque G.o.d from the wide and breezy s.p.a.ces of the world, had not limped into his life.

Barney Bill wore the cloth cap and conventional and unpicturesque, though shapeless and weather-stained, garment of the late nineteenth century. Neither horns nor goat's feet were visible; nor was the pipe of reed on which he played. Yet he played, in Paul's ear, the comforting melody of Pan, and the glory of the Vision once more flooded Paul's senses, and the factory and Budge Street and the b.u.t.tons and the scullery faded away like an evil dream.

CHAPTER III

THE Fates arranged Barney Bill's entrance late on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon in August. It was not dramatic. It was merely casual. They laid the scene in the brickfield.

It had rained all day, and now there was sullen clearance. Paul, who had been bathing with some factory boys in the not very savoury ca.n.a.l a mile or so distant, had wandered mechanically to his brickfield library, which, by means of some scavenging process, he managed to keep meagrely replenished. Here he had settled himself with a dilapidated book on his knees for an hour's intellectual enjoyment. It was not a cheerful evening. The ground was sodden, and rank emanations rose from the refuse. From where he sat he could see an angry sunset like a black-winged dragon with belly of flame brooding over the town. The place wore an especial air of desolation. Paul felt depressed. Bathing in the pouring wet is a chilly sport, and his midday meal of cold potatoes had not been invigorating. These he had grabbed, and, having done them up hastily in newspaper, had bolted with them out of the house. He had been fined heavily for slackness during the week, and Mr.

b.u.t.ton's inevitable wrath at docked wages he desired to undergo as late as possible. Then, the sun had blazed furiously during the last six imprisoned days, and now the long-looked for hours of freedom were disfigured by rain and blight. He resented the malice of things. He also resented the invasion of his brickfield by an alien van, a gaudy vehicle, yellow and red, to the exterior of which clinging wicker chairs, brooms, brushes and jute mats gave the impression of a lunatic's idea of decoration. An old horse, hobbled a few feet away, philosophically cropped the abominable gra.s.s. On the front of the van a man squatted with food and drink. Paul hated him as a trespa.s.ser and a gormandizer.

Presently the man, shading his eyes with his hand, scrutinized the small, melancholy figure, and then, hopping from his perch, sped toward him with a nimble and curiously tortuous gait.

He approached, a wiry, almost wizened, little man of fifty, tanned to gipsy brown. He had a shrewd thin face, with an oddly flattened nose, and little round moist dark eyes that glittered like diamonds. He wore cloth cap on the back of his head, showing in front a thick ma.s.s of closely cropped hair. His collarless shirt was open at the neck and his sleeves were rolled up above the elbow.

"You're Polly Kegworthy's kid, ain't you?" he asked.

"Ay," said Paul.

"Seen you afore, haven't I?" Then Paul remembered. Three or four times during his life, at long, long intervals, the van had pa.s.sed down Budge Street, stopping at houses here and there. About two years ago, coming home, he had met it at his own door. His mother and the little man were talking together. The man had taken him under the chin and twisted his face up. "Is that the nipper?" he had asked.

His mother had nodded, and, releasing Paul with a clumsy gesture of simulated affection, had sent him with twopence for a pint of beer to the public-house at the end of the street. He recalled how the man had winked his little bright eye at his mother before putting the jug to his lips.

"I browt th' beer for yo'," said Paul.

"You did. It was the worst beer, bar none, I've ever had. I can taste it now." He made a wry face. Then he c.o.c.ked his head on one side. "I suppose you're wondering who I am?" said he.

"Ay," said Paul. "Who art tha?"

"I'm Barney Bill," replied the man. "Did you never hear of me? I'm known on the road from Taunton to Newcastle and from Hereford to Lowestoft. You can tell yer mother that you seed me."

A smile curled round Paul's lips at the comic idea of giving his mother unsolicited information. "Barney Bill?" said he.

"Yuss," said the man. Then, after a pause, "What are you doing of there?"

"Reading," said Paul.

"Let's have a look at it."

Paul regarded him suspiciously; but there was kindliness in the twinkling glance. He handed him the sorry apology for a book.

Barney Bill turned it over. 'Why, said he, "it ain't got no beginning and no end. It's all middle. 'Kenilworth.' Do yer like it?"

"Ay!" said Paul. "It's foine."

"Who do yer think wrote it?"

As both cover and a hundred pages at the beginning, including the t.i.tle-page, to say nothing of a hundred pages at the end, were missing, Paul had no clue to the authorship.