The Fortunate Youth | Page 5

also to spoil the comeliness of which he might be vain.
Until a wonderful and illuminating happening in his eleventh year, little Paul Kegworthy had taken existence with the fatalism of a child. Of his stepfather, who smelt lustily of sour beer, bad tobacco and incidentally of other things undetected by Paul's nostrils, and whom he saw rarely, he dwelt in mortal terror. When he heard of the Devil, at Sunday school, which he attended, to his stepfather's disgust, he pictured the Prince of Darkness not as a gentleman, not even as a picturesque personage with horns and tail, but as Mr. Button. As regards his mother, he had a confused idea that he was a living blight on her existence. He was not sorry, because it was not his fault, but in his childish way he coldly excused her, and, more from a queer consciousness of blighterdom than from dread of her hand and tongue, he avoided her as much as possible. In the little Buttons his experience as scapegoat taught him to take but little interest. From his earliest memories they were the first to be fed, clothed and bedded; to his own share fell the exiguous scraps. As they were much younger than himself, he found no pleasure in their companionship. For society he sought such of the youth of Budge Street as would admit him into their raucous fellowship. But, for some reason which his immature mind could not fathom, he felt a pariah even among his coevals. He could run as fast as Billy Goodge, the undisputed leader of the gang; he could dribble the rag football past him any time he desired; once he had sent him home to his mother with a bleeding nose, and, even in that hour of triumph, popular sympathy had been with Billy, not with him. It was the only problem in existence to which his fatalism did not supply the key. He knew himself to be a better man than Billy Goodge. There was no doubt about it. At school, where Billy was the woodenest blockhead, he was top of his class. He knew things about troy weight and geography and Isaac and the Mariners of England of which Billy did not dream. To Billy the football news in the Saturday afternoon edition of The Bludston Herald was a cryptogram; to him it was an open book. He would stand, acknowledged scholar, at the street corner and read out from the soiled copy retrieved by Chunky, the newsboy, the enthralling story of the football day, never stumbling over a syllable, athrill with the joy of being the umbilicus of a tense world, and, when the recital was over, he would have the mortification of seeing the throng pass away from him with the remorselessness of a cloud scudding from the moon. And he would hear Billy Goodge say exultantly:
"Didn't Aw tell yo' the Wolves hadn't a dog's chance?"
And he would see the admiring gang slap Billy on the back, and hear "Good owd Billy!" and never a word of thanks to him. Then, knowing Billy to be a liar, he would tell him so, yelping shrilly, in Buttonesque vernacular (North and South):
"This morning tha said it was five to one on Sheffield United."
"Listen to Susie!"
The parasitic urchins would yell at the witticism--the eternal petitio principii of childhood, which Billy, secure in his cohort from bloody nose, felt justified in making. And Paul Kegworthy, the rag of a newspaper crumpled tight in his little hand, would watch them disappear and wonder at the paradox of life. In any sphere of human effort, so he dimly and childishly realized, he could wipe out Billy Goodge. He had a soul-reaching contempt for Billy Goodge, a passionate envy of him. Why did Billy hold his position instead of crumbling into dust before him? Assuredly he was a better man than Billy. When, Billy duce et auspice Billy, the gang played at pirates or Red Indians, it was pitiful to watch their ignorant endeavours. Paul, deeply read in the subject, gave them chapter and verse for his suggestions. But they heeded him so little that he would turn away contemptuously, disdaining the travesty of the noble game, and dream of a gang of brighter spirits whom he could lead to glory. Paul had many such dreams wherewith he sought to cheat the realities of existence: but until the Great Happening the dream was not better than the drink: after it came the Vision Splendid.
The wonderful thing happened all because Maisie Shepherd, a slip of a girl of nineteen, staying at St. Luke's Vicarage, spilled a bottle of scent over her f rock.
It was the morning of the St. Luke's annual Sunday-school treat. The waggonette was at the vicarage door. The vicar and his wife