Produced by Charles Aldarondo  HTML version by Al HainesTHE FORTUNATE YOUTHBYWILLIAM J LOCKECHAPTER IPAUL KEGWORTHY lived with his mother Mrs Button his stepfather MrButton and six little Buttons his half brothers and sisters His wasnot an ideal home it consisted in a bedroom a kitchen and a sculleryin a grimy little house in a grimy street made up of rows of exactlysimilar grimy little houses and forming one of a hundred similarstreets in a northern manufacturing town Mr and Mrs Button worked ina factory and took in as lodgers grimy single men who also worked infactories They were not a model couple they were rather in fact thescandal of Budge Street which did not itself enjoy in Bludston areputation for holiness Neither was good to look upon Mr Button whowas Lancashire bred and born divided the yearnings of his spiritbetween strong drink and dogfights Mrs Button a viperous Londoneryearned for noise When Mr Button came home drunk he punched his wifeabout the head and kicked her about the body while they both exhaustedthe vocabulary of vituperation of North and South to the horror andedification of the neighbourhood When Mr Button was sober Mrs Buttonchastised little Paul She would have done so when Mr Button wasdrunk but she had not the time The periods therefore of hismothers martyrdom were those of Pauls enfranchisement If he saw hisstepfather come down the street with steady gait he fled in terror ifhe saw him reeling homeward he lingered about with light and joyousheartThe brood of young Buttons was fed spasmodically and clad at randombut their meals were regular and their raiment well assorted comparedwith Pauls Naturally they came in for clouts and thumps like all thechildren in Budge Street it was only Paul who underwent organizedchastisement The little Buttons often did wrong but in the motherseyes Paul could never do right In an animal way she was fond of thechildren of Button and in a way equally animal she bore a venomousdislike to the child of Kegworthy Who and what Kegworthy had beenneither Paul nor any inhabitant of Bludston knew Once the boyinquired and she broke a worn fryingpan over his head Kegworthywhoever he might have been was wrapt in mystery She had appeared inthe town when Paul was a year old giving herself out as a widow Thatshe was by no means destitute was obvious from the fact that she atonce rented the house in Budge Street took in lodgers and lived ather ease Button who was one of the lodgers cast upon her the eyes ofdesire and married her Why she married Button she could neverdetermine Perhaps she had a romantic ideaand there is romance evenin Budge Streetthat Button would support her He very soon shatteredany such illusion by appropriating the remainder of her fortune andkicking her into the factory with hobnailed boots It would be wrong tosay that Mrs Button did not complain she did She tent the air ofBudge Street with horrible execration but she went to the factorywhere save for the intervals of retirement rendered necessary by thebirths of the little Buttons she was contented enough to stayIf Paul Kegworthy had been of the same fibre as the little Buttons hewould have felt thought and acted as they and this history wouldnever have been written He would have grown up to mans estate in thefactory and have been merged an indistinguishable unit in the drab massof clothcapped humans who at certain hours of the day flood thestreets of Bludston and swarm on the roofs of clanging and shriekingtramcars and on Saturday afternoons gather in clotted greyness on thefootball ground He might have been sober and industrioustheproletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed of Buttonsbut hewould have taken the colour of his environment and the world outsideBludston would never have heard of him Paul however differed greatlyfrom the little Buttons They children of the grey cap and the redshawl resembled hundreds of thousands of little human rabbitssimilarly parented Only the trained eye could have identified themamong a score or two of their congeners For the most part they weredingily fair with snub noses coarse mouths and eyes of anindeterminate blue Of that type once blowsily goodlooking was MrsButton herself But Paul wandered a changeling about the Bludstonstreets In the rows of urchins in the crowded Board School classroomhe sat as conspicuous as any little Martian who might have been bundleddown to earth He had wavy black hair of raven black a dark olivecomplexion flushed in spite of haphazard nourishment and nights spenton the stone floor of the reeking scullery with the warm blood ofhealth great liquid black eyes and the exquisitely delicate featuresof a young Praxitelean god It was this preposterous perfection whichwhile redeeming him from ridiculous beauty by giving his childish facea certain rigidity differentiated him outwardly from his fellows MrButton to whom the unusual was anathema declared that the sight ofthe monstrosity made him sick and rarely suffered him in his presenceand one day Mrs Button discovering him in front of the cracked mirrorin which Mr Button shaved when his hand was steady enough on Sundayafternoons smote him over the face with a pound of rump steak whichshe happened to be carrying instinctively desirous not only to correcther son for vanity but also to spoil the comeliness of which he mightbe vainUntil a wonderful and illuminating happening in his eleventh yearlittle Paul Kegworthy had taken existence with the fatalism of a childOf his stepfather who smelt lustily of sour beer bad tobacco andincidentally of other things undetected by Pauls nostrils and whom hesaw rarely he dwelt in mortal terror When he heard of the Devil atSunday school which he attended to his stepfathers disgust hepictured the Prince of Darkness not as a gentleman not even as apicturesque personage with horns and tail but as Mr Button Asregards his mother he had a confused idea that he was a living blighton her existence He was not sorry because it was not his fault butin his childish way he