The Fortunate Youth | Page 4

of exactly similar grimy little houses, and forming one of a hundred
similar streets in a northern manufacturing town. Mr. and Mrs. Button
worked in a factory and took in as lodgers grimy single men who also
worked in factories. They were not a model couple; they were rather, in
fact, the scandal of Budge Street, which did not itself enjoy, in
Bludston, a reputation for holiness. Neither was good to look upon. Mr.
Button, who was Lancashire bred and born, divided the yearnings of

his spirit between strong drink and dog-fights. Mrs. Button, a viperous
Londoner, yearned for noise. When Mr. Button came home drunk he
punched his wife about the head and kicked her about the body, while
they both exhausted the vocabulary of vituperation of North and South,
to the horror and edification of the neighbourhood. When Mr. Button
was sober Mrs. Button chastised little Paul. She would have done so
when Mr. Button was drunk, but she had not the time. The periods,
therefore, of his mother's martyrdom were those of Paul's
enfranchisement. If he saw his stepfather come down the street with
steady gait, he fled in terror; if he saw him reeling homeward he
lingered about with light and joyous heart.
The brood of young Buttons was fed spasmodically and clad at random,
but their meals were regular and their raiment well assorted compared
with Paul's. Naturally they came in for clouts and thumps like all the
children in Budge Street; it was only Paul who underwent organized
chastisement. The little Buttons often did wrong; but in the mother's
eyes Paul could never do right. In an animal way she was fond of the
children of Button, and in a way equally animal she bore a venomous
dislike to the child of Keg-worthy. Who and what Kegworthy had been
neither Paul nor any inhabitant of Bludston knew. Once the boy
inquired, and she broke a worn frying-pan over his head. Kegworthy,
whoever he might have been, was wrapt in mystery. She had appeared
in the town when Paul was a year old, giving herself out as a widow.
That she was by no means destitute was obvious from the fact that she
at once rented the house in Budge Street, took in lodgers, and lived at
her ease. Button, who was one of the lodgers, cast upon her the eyes of
desire and married her. Why she married Button she could never
determine. Perhaps she had a romantic idea--and there is romance even
in Budge Street-that Button would support her. He very soon shattered
any such illusion by appropriating the remainder of her fortune and
kicking her into the factory with hobnailed boots. It would be wrong to
say that Mrs. Button did not complain; she did. She tent the air of
Budge Street with horrible execration; but she went to the factory,
where, save for the intervals of retirement rendered necessary by the
births of the little Buttons, she was contented enough to stay.

If Paul Kegworthy had been of the same fibre as the little Buttons, he
would have felt, thought and acted as they, and this history would never
have been written. He would have grown up to man's estate in the
factory and have been merged an indistinguishable unit in the drab
mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the day, flood
the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of clanging and
shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather in clotted
greyness on the football ground. He might have been sober and
industrious-the proletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed of
Buttons-but he would have taken the colour of his environment, and the
world outside Bludston would never have heard of him. Paul, however,
differed greatly from the little Buttons. They, children of the grey cap
and the red shawl, resembled hundreds of thousands of little human
rabbits similarly parented. Only the trained eye could have identified
them among a score or two of their congeners. For the most part, they
were dingily fair, with snub noses, coarse mouths, and eyes of an
indeterminate blue. Of that type, once blowsily good-looking, was Mrs.
Button herself. But Paul wandered a changeling about the Bludston
streets. In the rows of urchins in the crowded Board School classroom
he sat as conspicuous as any little Martian who might have been
bundled down to earth. He had wavy black hair, of raven black, a dark
olive complexion, flushed, in spite of haphazard nourishment and
nights spent on the stone floor of the reeking scullery, with the warm
blood of health, great liquid black eyes, and the exquisitely delicate
features of a young Praxitelean god. It was this preposterous perfection
which, while redeeming him from ridiculous beauty by giving his
childish face a