The Fortunate Youth | Page 6

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 and
daughter waited fussily for Maisie, an unpunctual damsel. The vicar
looked at his watch. They were three minutes late, He tut-tutted

impatiently. The vicar's daughter ran indoors in search of Maisie and
pounced upon her as she sat on the edge of the bed in the act of
perfuming a handkerchief. The shock caused the bottle to slip mouth
downward from her hand and empty the contents into her lap. She cried
out in dismay.
"Never mind," said the vicar's daughter. "Come along. Dad and mother
are prancing about downstairs."
"But I must change my dress!"
"You've no time."
"I'm wet through. This is the strongest scent known. It's twenty-six
shillings a bottle, and one little drop is enough. I shall be a walking
pestilence."
The vicar's daughter laughed heartlessly. "You do smell strong. But
you'll disinfect Bludston, and that will be a good thing." Whereupon
she dragged the tearful and redolent damsel from the room.
In the hard-featured yard of the schoolhouse the children were
assembled-the girls on one side, the boys on the other. Curates and
teachers hovered about the intervening space. Almost every child wore
its Sunday best. Even the shabbiest little girls had a clean white
pinafore to hide deficiencies beneath, and the untidiest little boy
showed a scrubbed face. The majority of the boys wore clean collars;
some grinned over gaudy neckties. The only one who appeared in his
week-day grime and tatterdemalion outfit was little Paul Kegworthy.
He had not changed his clothes, because he had no others; and he had
not washed his face, because it had not occurred to him to do so.
Moreover, Mrs. Button had made no attempt to improve his forlorn
aspect, for the simple reason that she had never heard of the
Sunday-school treat. It was part of Paul's philosophy to dispense, as far
as he could, with parental control. On Sunday afternoons the little
Buttons played in the streets, where Paul, had he so chosen, might have
played also: but he put himself, so to speak, to Sunday school, where,
besides learning lots of queer things about God and Jesus Christ which

interested him keenly, he could shine above his fellows by recitations
of collects and bits of Catechism, which did not interest him at all.
Then he won scores of good-conduct cards, gaudy treasures, with
pictures of Daniel in the Lions' Den and the Marriage of Cana and such
like, which he secreted preciously beneath a loose slab in the scullery
floor. He did not show them to his mother, knowing that she would tear
them up and bang him over the head; and for similar reasons he
refrained from telling her of the Sunday-school treat. If she came to
hear of it, as possibly she would through one of the little Buttons, who
might pick up the news in the street, he would be soundly beaten. But
there was a chance of her not hearing, and he desired to be no more of a
blight than he could help. So Paul, vagabond and self-reliant from his
babyhood, turned up at the Sunday-school treat, hatless and coatless,
his dirty little toes visible through the holes in his boots, and his
shapeless and tattered breeches secured to his person by a single brace.
The better-dressed urchins moved away from him and made rude
remarks, after the generous manner of their kind; but Paul did not care.
Pariahdom was his accustomed portion. He was there for his own
pleasure. They were going to ride in a train. They were going to have a
wonderful afternoon in a nobleman's park, a place all grass and trees,
elusive to the imagination. There was a stupefying prospect of
wondrous things in profusion to eat and drink-jam, ginger-beer, cake!
So rumour had it; and to unsophisticated Paul rumour was gospel truth.
With all these unexperienced joys before him, what cared he for the
blankety little blanks who gibed at him? If you imagine that little Paul
Kegworthy formulated his thoughts as would the angel choir-boy in the
pictures, you are mistaken. The baby language of Bludston would
petrify the foc'sle of a tramp, steamer. The North of England is justly
proud of its virility.
The Sunday school, marshalled by