"Oh? What's your father?" The young man motioned with his head toward the inn.

"Yon's not my father," said Paul. "It's only Barney Bill."

"Only Barney Bill?" echoed the other, amused. "Well, who is your father?"

"Dunno," said Paul.

"And your mother?"

"Dunno, either," said Paul, in a mysterious tone. "I dunno if my parents are living or dead. I think they're living."

"That's interesting. What are you doing with what's-his-name Bill?"

"I'm just travelling wi' him to London."

"And what are you going to do in London?"

"I'll see when I get there," said Paul.

"So you're out for adventure?"

"Ay," said the boy, a gleam of the Vision dancing before his eyes. "That's it. I'm going on an adventure."

"There, keep like that," cried the artist. "Don't stir. I do believe I'm getting you. Holy Moses, it will be great! If only I could catch the expression! There's nothing like adventure, is there? The glorious uncertainty of it! To wake up in the morning and know that the unexpected is bound to happen during the day. Exciting, isn't it?"

"Ay," said Paul, his face aglow.

The young man worked tense and quick at the luminous eyes. He broke a long silence by asking, "What's your name?"

"Paul Kegworthy."

"Paul? That's odd." In the sphere of life to which the ragged urchin belonged Toms and Bills and Jims were as thick as blackberries, but Pauls were rare.

"What's odd?" said Paul.

"Your name. How did you get it? It's uncommon."

"I suppose it is," said Paul. "I never thowt of it. I never knew anybody of that name afore."

Here was another sign and token of romantic origin suddenly revealed. Paul felt the thrill of it. He resisted a temptation to ask his new friend whether it was an appellation generally reserved for princes.

"Look here, joking apart," said the artist, putting in the waves of the thick black hair, "are you really going to be dumped down in London to seek your fortune? Don't you know anybody there?"

"No," said Paul.

"How are you going to live?"

Paul dived a hand into his breeches pocket and jingled coins. "I've got th' brass," said he.

"How much?"

"Three shillings and sevenpence-ha'penny," said Paul, with an opulent air. "And yo'r shilling will make it four and sevenpence-ha'penny."

"Good God!" said-the young man. He went on drawing for some time in silence. Then he said: "My brother is a painter—rather a swell—a Royal Academician. He would love to paint you. So would other fellows. You could easily earn your living as a model—doing as a business, you know, what you're doing now for fun, more or less."

"How much could I earn?"

"It all depends. Say a pound to thirty shillings a week."

Paul gasped and sat paralyzed. Artist, dusty road, gaudy van, distant cornfields and uplands were blotted from his senses. The cool waves of Pactolus lapped his feet.

"Come and look me up when you get to London," continued the friendly voice. "My name is Rowlatt-W. W. Rowlatt, 4, Gray's Inn Square. Can you remember it?"

"Ay," said Paul.

"Shall I write it down?"

"Nay. 'W. W. Rowlatt, 4, Gray's Inn Square.' I'm noan likely to forget it. I never forget nowt," said Paul, life returning through a vein of boastfulness.

"Tell me all you remember," said Mr. Rowlatt, with a laugh.

"I can say all the Kings of England, with their dates, and the counties and chief towns of Great Britain and Ireland, and all the weights and measures, and 'The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold—'"

"Holy Moses!" cried Rowlatt. "Anything else?"

"Ay. Lots more," said Paul, anxious to stamp vividly the impression he saw that he was making. "I know the Plagues of Egypt."

"I bet you don't."

"Rivers of Blood, Frogs, Lice, Flies, Murrain, Boils, Hails, Locusts, Darkness and Death of Firstborn," said Paul, in a breath.

"Jehosaphat!" cried Rowlatt. "I suppose now you'd have no difficulty in reciting the Thirty-nine Articles."

Paul puckered his forehead in thought. "D'yo' mean," he asked after a pause, "the Thirty-nine Articles o' Religion, as is in th' Prayerbuk? I ha' tried to read 'em, but couldno' understand 'em reet."

Rowlatt, who had not expected his facetious query to be so answered, stopped his drawing for a moment. "What in the name of goodness attracted you to the Thirty-nine Articles?"

"I wanted to learn about things," said Paul.

The young man looked at him and smiled. "Self-education is a jolly good thing," said he. "Learn all you can, and you'll be a famous fellow one of these days. But you must cultivate a sense of humour."

Paul was about to seek enlightenment as to this counsel when Barney Bill appeared, cool and refreshed, from the inn door, and lifted a cheery voice. "Let's be getting along, sonny."

Rowlatt held up a detaining hand. "Just a couple of minutes, if you can spare them. I've nearly finished."

"All right, sir," said Barney Bill, limping across the yard. "Taking a picture of him?"

The artist nodded. Barney Bill looked over his shoulder. "By Gosh!" he cried in admiration. "By Gosh!"

"It has come out rather well, hasn't it?" said the artist, complacently.

"It's the living image of 'im," said Barney Bill.

"He tells me he's going up to London to seek his fortune," said Rowlatt, putting in the finishing touches.

"And his 'igh-born parents," said Barney Bill, winking at Paul.

Paul flushed and wriggled uncomfortably. Instinct deprecated crude revelation of the mystery of his birth to the man of refinement. He felt that Barney Bill was betraying confidence. Gutter-bred though he was, he accused his vagrant protector of a lack of good taste. Of such a breach he himself, son of princes, could not have been guilty. Luckily, and, as Paul thought, with admirable tact, Mr. Rowlatt did not demand explanation.

"A young Japhet in search of a father. Well, I hope he'll find him. There's nothing like romance. Without it life is flat and dead. It's what atmosphere is to a picture."

"And onions to a stew," said Barney Bill.

"Quite right," said Rowlatt. "Paul, my boy, I think after all you'd better stick to Mr.—?"

"Barney Bill, sir, at your service. And, if you want a comfortable chair, or an elegant mat, or a hearth brush at a ridiculous cheap price"—he waved toward the van. Rowlatt turned his head and, laughing, looked into the twinkling black eyes. "I don't for a moment expect you to buy, sir, but I was only a-satisfying of my artistic conscience."

Rowlatt shut his sketch-book with a snap, and rose. "Let us have a drink," said he. "Artists should be better acquainted."

He whispered a message to Paul, who sped to the inn and presently returned with a couple of the famous blue and white mugs frothing deliciously at the brims. The men, their lips to the bubbles, nodded to each other. The still beat of the August noon enveloped their bodies, but a streak of heavenly coolness trickled through their souls. Paul, looking at them enviously, longed to be grown up.

Then followed a pleasant half-hour of desultory talk. Although the men did not make him, save for here and there a casual reference, the subject of their conversation, Paul, with the Vision shimmering before his eyes, was sensitive enough to perceive in a dim and elusive way that he was at the back of each man's thoughts and that, for his sake, each was trying to obtain the measure of the other. At last Barney Bill, cocking at the sun the skilled eye of the dweller in the wilderness, called the time for departure.

"Could I see th' picture?" asked Paul.

Rowlatt passed him the sketch-book. The sudden sight of oneself as one appears in another's eyes is always a shock, even to the most sophisticated sitter. To Paul it was uncanny. He had often seen his own reflection and was familiar with his own appearance, but this was the first time that he had looked at himself impersonally. The sketch was vivid, the likeness excellent; the motive, the picturesque and romantic.

A proud lift of the chin, an eager glance in the eye, a sensitive curve of the lip attracted his boyish egotism. The portrait was an ideal, something to live up to. Involuntarily he composed his features.

Barney Bill again called time. Paul surrendered the sketch-book reluctantly. Rowlatt, with a cheery word, handed him the shilling fee. Paul, than whom none better knew the magic quality of money, hesitated for a second. The boy in the sketch would have refused. Paul drew himself up. "Nay, I'll take noan. I liked doing it."

Rowlatt laughed and pocketed the coin. "All right," said he, with a playful bow. "I'm exceedingly indebted to your courtesy."

Barney Bill gave Paul an approving glance. "Good for you, boy. Never take money you've not earned. Good day to you, sir"—he touched his cap. "And"—with a motion toward the empty mugs—"thank you kindly."

Rowlatt strolled with them to the van, Barney Bill limping a pace or two ahead. "Remember what I told you, my young friend," said he in a low voice. "I don't go back upon my word. I'll help you. But if you're a wise boy and know what's good for you, you'll stick to Mr. Barney Bill and the freedom of the high-road and the light heart of the vagabond. You'll have a devilish sight more happiness in the end."

But Paul, who already looked upon his gipsy self as dead as his Bludston self, and these dead selves as stepping-stones to higher things, turned a deaf ear to his new friend's paradoxical philosophy. "I'll remember," said he. "Mr. W. W. Rowlatt, 4, Gray's Inn Square."

The young architect watched the van with its swinging, creaking excrescences lumber away down the hot and dusty road, and turned with a puzzled expression to his easel. Joy in the Little Bear Inn had for the moment departed. Presently he found himself scribbling a letter in pencil to his brother, the Royal Academician.

"So you see, my dear fellow," he wrote toward the end of the epistle, "I am in a quandary. That the little beggar is of startling beauty is undeniable. That he has got his bill agape, like a young bird, for whatever food of beauty and emotion and knowledge comes his way is obvious to any fool. But whether, in what I propose, I'm giving a helping hand to a kind of wild genius, or whether I'm starting a vain boy along the primrose path in the direction of everlasting bonfire, I'm damned if I know."

But Paul jogged along by the side of Barney Bill in no such state of dubiety. God was in His Heaven, arranging everything for his especial benefit. All was well with the world where dazzling destinies like his were bound to be fulfilled.

"I've heard of such things," said Barney Bill with a reflective twist of his head, when Paul had told him of Mr. Rowlatt's suggestion. "A cousin of mine married a man who knew a gal who used to stand in her birthday suit in front of a lot of young painter chaps-and I'm bound to say he used to declare she was as good a gal as his own wife, especially seeing as how she supported an old father what had got a stroke, and a houseful of young brothers and sisters. So I'm not saying there's any harm in it. And I wouldn't stand in your way, sonny, seeing as how you want to get to your 'igh-born parents. You might find 'em on the road, and then again you mightn't. And thirty bob a week at fourteen-no-it would be flying in the face of Providence to say 'don't do it! But what licks me is: what the blazes do they want with a little varmint like you? Why shouldn't they pay thirty bob a week to paint me?"

Paul did not reply, being instinctively averse from wounding susceptibilities. But in his heart rose a high pity for the common though kindly clay that was Barney Bill.



CHAPTER V

WHEN they reached London in November, after circuitous wanderings, Barney Bill said to Paul: "You've seed enough of me, matey, to know that I wish yer good and not harm. I've fed yer and I've housed yer-I can't say as how I've done much toward clothing yer-and three months on the road has knocked corners off the swell toggery yer came to me in; but I ain't beat yer or cussed yer more than yer deserved"—whereat Paul grinned-"and I've spent a lot of valuable time, when I might have been profitably doing nothing, a-larning yer of things and, so to speak, completing yer eddication. Is that the truth, or am I a bloomin' liar?"

Paul, thus challenged, confirmed the absolute veracity of Barney Bill's statement. The latter continued, bending forward, his lean brown hand on the boy's shoulder, and looking at him earnestly: "I took yer away from your 'appy 'ome because, though the 'ome might have been 'appy in its own sweet way, you wasn't. I wanted to set yer on the track of yer 'ighborn parents. I wanted to make a man of yer. I want to do the best for yer now, so I put it to yer straight: If yer likes to come along of me altogether, I'll pay yer wages on the next round, and when yer gets a little older I'll take yer into partnership and leave yer the business when I die. It's a man's life and a free life, and I think yer likes it, don't yer?"

"Ay," said Paul, "it's foine."

"On the other hand, as I said afore, I won't stand in yer way, and if yer thinks you'll get nearer to your 'igh-born parents by hitching up with Mr. Architect, well—you're old enough to choose. I leave it to you."

But Paul had already chosen. The Road had its magical fascination, to which he would have surrendered all his boyish soul, had not the call of his destiny been more insistent. The Road led nowhither. Princes and princesses were as rare as hips and haws in summer-time. Their glittering equipages did not stop the van, nor did they stand at the emblazoned gateways of great parks waiting patiently for long-lost sons. He knew that he must seek them in their own social world, and to this he would surely be raised by his phantasmagorial income of thirty shillings a week.

"You won't object to my keeping a friendly eye on yer for the next year or two?" asked Barney Bill, with twisted mouth and a kindly, satirical glance.

Paul flushed. He had the consciousness of being a selfish, self-centered little beast, not half enough grateful to Barney Bill for delivering him out of the House of Bondage and leading him into the Land of Milk and Honey. He was as much stung by the delicately implied rebuke as touched by the solicitude as to his future welfare. Romantic words, such as he had read in the story-books, surged vaguely in his head, but he could find none to utter. He kept silent for a few moments, his hand in his breeches pocket. Presently he drew it forth rather slowly, and held out the precious cornelian heart to his benefactor.

"I 'ud like to give it thee," said Paul.

Barney Bill took it. "Thank 'ee, sonny. I'll remember that you gave it to me. But I won't keep yer talisman. 'Ere, see—" he made a pretence to spit on it—"that's for luck. Barney Bill's luck, and good wishes."

So Paul pocketed the heart again, immensely relieved by his friend's magnanimity, and the little sentimental episode was over.

A month later, when Barney Bill started on his solitary winter pilgrimage in the South of England, he left behind him a transmogrified Paul, a Paul, thanks to his munificence, arrayed in decent garments, including collar and tie (insignia of caste) and an overcoat (symbol of luxury), for which Paul was to repay him out of his future earnings; a Paul lodged in a small but comfortable third-floor-back, a bedroom all to himself, with a real bed, mattress, pillow, sheets, and blankets all complete, and a looking-glass, and a stand with ewer and basin so beautiful that, at first, Paul did not dare wash for fear of making the water dirty; a Paul already engaged for a series of sittings by Mr. Cyrus Rowlatt, R.A., his head swimming with the wonder of the fashionable painter's studio; a Paul standing in radiant confidence upon the brink of life.

"Sonny," said Barney Bill, when he said good-bye, "d'yer see them there lovely lace-up boots you've got on?"

"Ay," said Paul, regarding them complacently.

"Well, they've got to take yer all the way up the hill, like the young man what's his name?—Excelsure—in the piece of poetry you recite; but they'll only do it if they continues to fit. Don't get too big for 'em. At any rate, wait till they're worn out and yer can buy another pair with yer own money."

Paul grinned, because he did not know what else to do, so as to show his intellectual appreciation of the parable; but in his heart, for all his gratitude, he thought Barney bill rather a prosy moralizer. It was one of the disabilities of advanced old age. Alas! what can bridge the gulf between fourteen and fifty?

"Anyhow, you've got a friend at the back of yer, sonny, and don't make no mistake about it. If you're in trouble let me know. I can't say fairer than that, can I?"

That, for a season, was the end of Barney Bill, and Paul found himself thrillingly alone in London. At first its labyrinthine vastness overwhelmed him, causing him to feel an unimportant atom, which may have been good for his soul, but was not agreeable to his vanity. By degrees, however, he learned the lay of the great thoroughfares, especially those leading to the quarters where artists congregate, and, conscious of purpose and of money jingling in his pocket, he began to hold his head high in the crowded streets. In the house in Barn Street, off the Euston Road, where he lodged, he was called "Mr. Paul" by his landlady, Mrs. Seddon, and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Jane, which was comforting and stimulating. Jane, a lanky, fair, blue-eyed girl, who gave promise of good looks, attended to his modest wants with a zeal somewhat out of proportion to the payment received. Paul had the novel sensation of finding some one at his beck and call. He beckoned and called often, for the sheer pleasure of it. So great was the change in his life that, in these early days, it seemed as if he had already come into his kingdom. He strutted about, poor child, like the prince in a fairy tale, and, in spite of Barney Bill's precepts-lie outgrew his boots immediately. Mrs. Seddon, an old friend of Barney Bill, whom she addressed and spoke as Mr. William, kept a small shop in which she sold newspapers and twine and penny bottles of ink. In the little back-parlour Mrs. Seddon and Tane and Paul had their meals, while the shop boy, an inconsiderable creature with a perpetual cold in his head, attended to the unexpected customer. To Paul, this boy, with whom a few months ago he would have joyously changed places, was as the dust beneath his feet. He sent him on errands in a lordly way, treating him as, indeed, he had treated the youth of Budge Street after his triumph over Billy Goodge, and the boy obeyed meekly. Paul believed in himself; the boy didn't. Almost from the beginning he usurped an ascendancy over the little household. For all their having lived in the great maelstrom of London, he found his superficial experience of life larger than that of mother and daughter. They had never seen machinery at work, did not know the difference between an elm and a beech and had never read Sir Walter Scott. Mrs. Seddon, thin, careworn and slackly good-natured, ever lamented the loss of an astonishingly brilliant husband; Jane was markedly the more competent of the two. She had character, and, even while slaving for the romantic youth, made it clear to him that for no other man alive would she so demean herself. Paul resolved to undertake her education.

The months slipped by golden with fulfilment. News of the beautiful boy model went the round of the studios. Those were simpler times (although not so very long ago) in British art than the present, and the pretty picture was still in vogue. As Mr. Rowlatt, the young architect, had foretold, Paul had no difficulty in obtaining work. Indeed, it was fatally easy. Mr. Cyrus Rowlatt, R.A., had launched him. Being fabulously paid, he thought his new profession the most aristocratic calling in the world. In a remarkably short time he was able to repay Barney Bill. The day when he purchased the postal order was the proudest in his life. The transaction gave him a princely feeling. He alone of boys, by special virtue of his origin, was capable of such a thing. Again, his welcome in the painting world confirmed him in the belief that he was a personage, born to great things. Posed on the model throne, the object of the painter's intense scrutiny, he swelled ingenuously with the conviction of his supreme importance. The lazy luxury of the model's life appealed to his sensuous temperament. He loved the warmth, the artistic setting of the studios; the pictures, the oriental rugs, the bits of armour, the old brocade, the rich cushions. If he had not been born to it, why had he not remained, like all 'the youth of Bludston, amid the filth and clatter of the factory? He loved, too, to hear the studio talk, though at first he comprehended little of it. The men and women for whom he sat possessed the same quality as his never-forgotten goddess and Lady Chudley and the young architect—a quality which he recognized keenly, but for which his limited vocabulary could find no definition. Afterward he realized that it was refinement in manner and speech and person. This quality he felt it essential to acquire. Accordingly he played the young ape to those who aroused his admiration.

One day when Jane entered the back-parlour he sprang from his seat and advanced with outstretched hand to meet her: "My dear Lady Jane, how good of you to come! Do let me clear a chair for you."

"What are you playing at?" asked Jane.

"That's the way to receive a lady when she calls on you.

"Oh!" said Jane.

He practised on her each newly learned social accomplishment. He minced his broad Lancashire, when he spoke to her, in such a way as to be grotesquely unintelligible. By listening to conversations he learned many amazing social facts; among them that the gentry had a bath every morning of their lives. This stirred his imagination to such a pitch that he commanded Jane to bring up the matutinal washtub to his bedroom. By instinct refined he revelled in the resultant sensation of cleanliness. He paid great attention to his attire, modelling himself, as far as he could, on young Rowlatt, the architect, on whom he occasionally called to report progress. He bought such neckties and collars as Rowlatt wore and submitted them for Jane's approval. She thought them vastly genteel. He also entertained her with whatever jargon of art talk he managed to pick up. Thus, though the urchin gave himself airs and invested himself with affectations, which rendered him intolerable to all of his own social status, except the placid Mrs. Seddon and the adoring Jane, he was under the continuous influence of a high ambition. It made him ridiculous, but it preserved him from vicious and vulgar things. If you are conscious of being a prince in disguise qualifying for butterfly entrance into your kingdom, it behoves you to behave in a princely manner, not to consort with lewd fellows and not to neglect opportunities for education. You owe to yourself all the good that you can extract from the world. Acting from this point of view, and guided by the practical advice of young Rowlatt, he attended evening classes, where he gulped down knowledge hungrily. So, what with sitting and studying and backward and forward journeying, and educating Jane, and practising the accomplishments of a prince, and sleeping the long sound sleep of a tired youngster, Paul had no time to think of evil. He was far too much absorbed in himself.

Meanwhile, of Bludston not a sign. For all that he had heard of search being made for him, he might have been a runaway kitten. Sometimes he wondered what steps the Buttons had taken in order to find him. If they had communicated with the police, surely, at some stage of their journey, Barney Bill would have been held up and questioned. But had they even troubled to call in the police? Barney Bill thought not, and Paul agreed. The police were very unpopular in Budge Street—almost as unpopular as Paul. In all probability the Buttons were only too glad to be rid of him. If he found no favour in the eyes of Mrs. Button, in the eyes of Button he was detestable. Occasionally he spoke of them to Barney Bill on his rare appearances in London, but for prudential motives the latter had struck Bludston out of his itinerary and could give no information. At last Paul ceased altogether to think of them. They belonged to a far-distant past already becoming blurred in his memory.

So Paul lived his queer sedulous life, month after month, year after year, known among the studios as a quaint oddity, drawn out indulgently by the men, somewhat petted, monkey-fashion, by the women, forgotten by both when out of their presence, but developing imperceptibly day by day along the self-centring line. A kindly adviser suggested a gymnasium to keep him in condition for professional purposes. He took the advice, and in the course of time became a splendid young animal, a being so physically perfect as to be what the good vicar of Bludston had called him in tired jest—a lusus naturae. But though proud of his body as any finely formed human may honorably be, a far higher arrogance saved him from Narcissus vanity. It was the inner and essential Paul and not the outer investiture that was born to great things.

In his eighteenth year he gradually awoke to consciousness of change. One of his classmates at the Polytechnic institute, with whom he had picked a slight acquaintance, said one evening as they were walking homeward together: "I shan't be coming here after next week. I've got a good clerkship in the city. What are you doing?"

"I'm an artist's model," said Paul.

The other, a pale and perky youth, sniffed. His name was Higgins. "Good Lord! What do you mean?"

"I'm a model in the life class of the Royal Academy School," said Paul, proudly.

"You stand up naked in front of all kinds of people for them to paint you?"

"Of course," said Paul.

"How beastly!" said Higgins.

"What do you mean?"

"Just that," said Higgins. "It's beastly!"

A minute or two afterward he jumped on a passing the omnibus, and thenceforward avoided Paul at the Polytechnic Institute.

This uncompromising pronouncement on the part of Higgins was a shock; but together with other incidents, chiefly psychological, vague, intangible phenomena of his spiritual development, it showed Paul the possibility of another point of view. He took stock of himself. From the picturesque boy he had grown into the physically perfect man. As a model he was no longer sought after for subject pieces. He was in clamorous demand at Life Schools, where he drew a higher rate of pay, but where he was as impersonal to the intently working students as the cast of the Greek torso which other students were copying in the next room. The intimacy of the studio, the warmth and the colour and the meretricious luxury were gone from his life. On the other hand he was making money. He had fifty pounds in the Savings Bank, the maximum of petty thrift which an incomprehensive British Government encourages, and a fair, though unknown, sum in an iron money-box hidden behind his washstand. Up to now he had had no time to learn how to spend money. When he took to smoking cigarettes, which he had done quite recently, he regarded himself as a man.

Higgins's "How beastly!" rang in his head. Although he could not quite understand the full meaning of the brutal judgment, it brought him disquiet and discontent. For one thing, like the high-road, his profession led nowhither. The thrill of adventure had gone from it. It was static, and Paul's temperament was dynamic. He had also lost his boyish sense of importance, of being the central figure in the little stage. Disillusion began to creep over him. Would he do nothing else but this all his life? Old Erricone, the patriarchal, white-bearded Italian, the doyen of the models of London, came before his mind, a senile posturer, mumbling dreary tales of his inglorious achievements: how he was the Roman Emperor in this picture and Father Abraham in the other; how painters could not get on without him; how once he had been summoned from Rome to London; how Rossetti had shaken hands with him. Paul shivered at the thought of himself as the Erricone of a future generation.

The next day was Saturday, and he had no sitting. The morning he spent in his small bedroom in the soothing throes of literary composition. Some time ago he had thought it would be a mighty fine thing to be a poet, and had tried his hand at verse. Finding he possessed some facility, he decided that he was a poet, and at once started an epic poem in rhyme on the Life of Nelson, the material being supplied by Southey. This morning he did the Battle of the Baltic.

He put the glass to his blind eye, And said "No signals do I spy,"

wrote Paul. Poetry taken at the gallop like this was a very simple affair, and Paul covered an amazing amount of ground.

In the afternoon he walked abroad with Jane, who, having lengthened her skirts and put up her hair, was now a young woman looking older than her years. She too had developed. Her lank figure had rounded into pretty curves. Her sharp little Cockney face had filled out. She had a pleasant smile and a capable brow, and, correcting a tendency to fluffiness of hair of which she disapproved, and dressing herself neatly, made herself by no means unattractive. Constant association with Paul had fired her ambitions. Like him, she might have a destiny, though not such a majestic one, Accordingly she had studied stenography and typewriting, with a view to earning her livelihood away from the little shop, which did not offer the prospect of a dazzling career. At the back of her girlish mind was the desire to keep pace with Paul in his upward flight, so that he should not be ashamed of her when he sat upon the clouds in glory. In awful secrecy she practised the social accomplishments which Paul brought home. She loved her Saturday and Sunday excursions with Paul—of late they had gone far afield: the Tower, Greenwich, Ricmond—exploring London and making splendid discoveries such as Westminster Abbey and a fourpenny tea garden at Putney. She scarcely knew whether she cared for these things for themselves; but she saw them through Paul coloured by his vivid personality. Once on Chelsea Bridge he had pointed out a peculiarly ugly stretch of low-tide mud, and said: "Look at that." She, by unprecedented chance, mistaking his tone, had replied: "How lovely!" And she had thought it lovely, until his stare of rebuke and wonderment brought disillusion and spurting tears, which for the life of him he could not understand. It is very foolish, and often suicidal, of men to correct women for going into rapture over mud flats. On that occasion, however, the only resultant harm was the conviction in the girl's heart that the presence of Paul turned mud flats into beds of asphodel. Then, just as she saw outer things through his eyes, she felt herself regarded by outer eyes through him. His rare and absurd beauty made him a cynosure whithersoever he went. London, vast and seething, could produce no such perfect Apollo. When she caught the admiring glances of others of her sex, little Jane drew herself up proudly and threw back insolent glances of triumph. "You would like to be where I am, wouldn't you?" the glance would say, with the words almost formulated in her mind. "But you won't. You never will be. I've got him. He's walking out with me and not with you. I like to see you squirm, you envious little cat." Jane was not a princess, she was merely a child of the people; but I am willing to eat my boots if it can be satisfactorily proved that there is a princess living on the face of the earth who would not be delighted at seeing another woman cast covetous eyes on the man she loved, and would not call her a cat (or its homonym) for doing so.

On this mild March afternoon Paul and Jane walked in the Euston Road, he in a loose blue serge suit, floppy black tie, low collar and black soft felt hat (this was in the last century, please remember—epoch almost romantic, so fast does time fly), she in neat black braided jacket and sailor hat. They looked pathetically young.

"Where shall we go?" asked Jane.

Paul, in no mood for high adventure, suggested Regent's Park. "At least we can breathe there," said he.

Jane sniffed up the fresh spring air, unconscious of the London taint, and laughed. "Why, what's the matter with the Euston Road?"

"It's vulgar," said Paul. "In the Park the hyacinths and the daffodils will be out."

What he meant he scarcely knew. When one is very young and out of tune with life, one is apt to speak discordantly.

They mounted a westward omnibus. Paul lit a cigarette and smoked almost in silence until they alighted by the Park gates. As they entered, he turned to her suddenly. "Look here, Jane, I want to ask you something. The other night I told a man I was an artist's model, and he said 'How beastly!' and turned away as if I wasn't fit for him to associate with. What was he driving at?"

"He was a nasty cad," said Jane promptly.

"Of course he was," said Paul. "But why did he say it? Do you think there's anything beastly in being a model?"

"Certainly not." She added in modification: "That is if you like it."

"Well, supposing I don't like it?"

She did not reply for a minute or two. Then: "If you really don't like it, I should be rather glad."

"Why?" asked Paul.

She raised a piteous face.

"Yes, tell me," he insisted. "Tell me why you agree with that cad Higgins?"

"I don't agree with him."

"You must."

They fenced for a while. At last he pinned her down.

"Well, if you want to know," she declared, with a flushed cheek, "I don't think it's a man's job."

He bit his lip. He had asked for the truth and he had got it. His own dark suspicions were confirmed. Jane glanced at him fearful of offence. When they had walked some yards he spoke. "What would you call a man's job?"

Jane hesitated for an answer. Her life had been passed in a sphere where men carpentered or drove horses or sold things in shops. Deeply impressed by the knowledge of Paul's romantic birth and high destiny she could not suggest any such lowly avocations, and she did not know what men's jobs were usually executed by scions of the nobility. A clerk's work was certainly genteel; but even that would be lowering to the hero. She glanced at him again, swiftly. No, he was too beautiful to be penned up in an office from nine to six-thirty every day of his life. On the other hand her feminine intuition appreciated keenly the withering criticism of Higgins. Ever since Paul had first told her of his engagements at the Life Schools she had shrunk from the idea. It was all very well for the boy; but for the man—and being younger than he, she regarded him now as a man—there was something in it that offended her nice sense of human dignity.

"Well," he said. "Tell me, what do you call a man's job?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said in distress; "something you do with your hands or your brain."

"You think being a model is undignified."

"Yes."

"So do I," said Paul. "But I'm doing things with my brain, too, you know," he added quickly, anxious to be seen again on his pedestal. "I am getting on with my epic poem. I've done a lot since you last heard it. I'll read you the rest when we get home."

"That will be lovely," said Jane, to whom the faculty of rhyming was a never-ceasing wonder. She would sit bemused by the jingling lines and wrapt in awe at the minstrel.

They sat on a bench by the flower-beds, gay in their spring charm of belated crocus and hyacinth and daffodil, with here and there a precocious tulip. Paul, sensitive to beauty, discoursed on flowers. Max Field had a studio in St. John's Wood opening out into a garden, which last summer was a dream of delight. He described it. When he came into his kingdom he intended to have such a garden.

"You'll let me have a peep at it sometimes, won't you?" said Jane.

"Of course," said Paul.

The lack of enthusiasm in his tone chilled the girl's heart. But she did not protest. In these days, in spite of occasional outspokenness she was still a humble little girl worshipping her brilliant companion from afar.

"How often could I come?" she asked.

"That," said he, in his boyish pashadom, "would depend on how good you were."

Obedient to the thought processes of her sex, she made a bee line to the particular.

"Oh, Paul, I hope you're not angry."

"At what?"

"At what I said about your being a model."

"Not a bit," said he. "If I hadn't wanted to know your opinion, I wouldn't have asked you."

She brightened. "You really wanted to know what I thought?"

"Naturally," said Paul. "You're the most commonsense girl I've ever met."

Paul walked soberly home. Jane accompanied him—on wings.

On Monday Paul went to the Life School and stripped with a heavy heart. Jane was right. It was not a man's job. The fact, too, of his doing it lowered him in her esteem, and though he had no romantic thoughts whatever with regard to Jane, he enjoyed being Lord Paramount in her eyes. He went into the studio and took up his pose; and as he stood on the model throne, conspicuous, glaring, the one startling central object, Higgins's "How beastly!" came like a material echo and smote him in the face. He felt like Adam when he first proceeded to his primitive tailoring. A wave of shame ran through him. He looked around the great silent room, at the rows of students, each in front of an easel, using his naked body for their purposes. A phrase flashed across his mind—in three years his reading had brought vocabulary—they were using his physical body for their spiritual purposes. For the moment he hated them all fiercely. They were a band of vampires. Habit and discipline alone saved him from breaking his pose and fleeing headlong. But there he was fixed, like marble, in an athlete's attitude, showing rippling muscles of neck and chest and arms and thighs all developed by the gymnasium into the perfection of Greek beauty, and all useless, more useless even, as far as the world's work was concerned, than the muscles of a racehorse. There he was fixed, with outstretched limbs and strained loins, a human being far more alive than the peering, measuring throng, far more important, called by a destiny infinitely higher than theirs. And none of them suspected it. For the first time he saw himself as they saw him. They admired him as a thing, an animal trained especially for them, a prize bullock. As a human being they disregarded him. Nay, in the depth of their hearts they despised him. Not one of them would have stood where he did. He would have considered it—rightly—as degrading to his manhood.

The head of the school snapped his fingers impatiently and fussed up to the model-stand. "What's the matter? Tired already? Take it easy for a minute, if you like."

"No," said Paul, instinctively stiffening himself. "I'm never tired."

It was his boast that he could stand longer in a given pose than any other model, and thereby he had earned reputation.

"Then don't go to pieces, my boy," said the head of the school, not unkindly. "You're supposed to be a Greek athlete and not Venus rising from the sea or a jelly at a children's party."

Paul flushed all over, and insane anger shook him. How dared the man speak to him like that? He kept the pose, thinking wild thoughts. Every moment the strain grew less bearable, the consciousness of his degradation more intense. He longed for something to happen, something dramatic, something that would show the vampires what manner of man he was. He was histrionic in his anguish.

A fly settled on his back—a damp, sluggish fly that had survived the winter—and it crawled horribly up his spine. He bore it for a few moments, and then his over-excited nerves gave way and he dashed his hand behind him. Somebody laughed. He raised his clenched fists and glared at the class.

"Ay, yo' can laugh—you can laugh till yo' bust!" he cried, falling back into his Lancashire accent. "But yo'll never see me, here agen. Never, never, never, so help me God!"

He rushed away. The head of the school followed him and, while he was dressing, reasoned with him.

"Nay," said Paul. "Never agen. Aw'm doan wi' th' whole business."

And as Paul walked home through the hurrying streets, he thought regretfully of twenty speeches which would have more adequately signified his indignant retirement from the profession.



CHAPTER VI

PAUL'S model-self being dead, he regarded it with complacency and set his foot on it, little doubting that it was another stepping-stone.

He spoke loftily of his independence.

"But how are you going to earn your living?" asked Jane, the practical.

"I shall follow one of the arts," Paul replied. "I think I am a poet, but I might be a painter or a musician."

"You do sing and play lovely," said Jane.

He had recently purchased from a pawnshop a second-hand mandoline, which he had mastered by the aid of a sixpenny handbook, and he would play on it accompaniments to sentimental ballads which he sang in a high baritone.

"I'll not choose yet awhile," said Paul, disregarding the tribute. "Something will happen. The 'moving finger' will point—"

"What moving finger?"

"The finger of Destiny," said Paul.

And, as the superb youth predicted, something did happen a day or two afterwards.

They were walking in Regent Street, and stopped, as was their wont, before a photographer's window where portraits of celebrities were exposed to view. Paul loved this window, bad loved it from the moment of discovery, a couple of years before. It was a Temple of Fame. The fact of your portrait being exhibited, with your style and title printed below, marked you as one of the great ones of the earth. Often he had said to Jane: "When I am there you'll be proud, won't you?"

And she had looked up to him adoringly and wondered why he was not there already.

It was Paul's habit to scrutinize the faces of those who had achieved greatness, Archbishops, Field-Marshals, Cabinet Ministers, and to speculate on the quality of mind that had raised them to their high estate; and often he would shift his position, so as to obtain a glimpse of his own features in the plate-glass window, and compare them with those of the famous. Thus he would determine that he had the brow of the divine, the nose of the statesman and the firm lips of the soldier. It was a stimulating pastime. He was born to great things; but to what great things he knew not. The sphere in which his glory should be fulfilled was as yet hidden in the mists of time.

But this morning, instead of roving over the illustrious gallery, his eye caught and was fascinated by a single portrait. He stood staring at it for a long time, lost in the thrill of thought.

At last Jane touched his arm. "What are you looking at?"

He pointed. "Do you see that?"

"Yes. It's—" She named an eminent actor, then in the heyday of his fame, of whom legend hath it that his photographs were bought in thousands by love-lorn maidens who slept with them beneath their pillows.

Paul drew her away from the little knot of idlers clustered round the window. "There's nothing that man can do that I can't do," said Paul.

"You're twenty times better looking," said Jane.

"I have more intelligence," said Paul.

"Of course," said Jane.

"I'm going to be an actor," said Paul.

"Oh!" cried Jane in sudden rapture. Then her sturdy common-sense asserted itself. "But can you act?"

"I'm sure I could, if I tried. You've only got to have the genius to start with and the rest is easy."

As she did not dare question his genius, she remained silent.

"I'm going to be an actor," said he, "and when I'm not acting I shall be a poet."

In spite of her adoration Jane could not forbear a shaft of raillery. "You'll leave yourself some time to be a musician, won't you?"

He laughed. His alert and retentive mind had seized, long ago, on Rowlatt's recommendation at the Little Bear Inn, and he had developed, perhaps half consciously, a half sense of humour. A whole sense, however, is not congruous with the fervid beliefs and soaring ambitions of eighteen. Your sense of humour, that delicate percipience of proportion, that subrident check on impulse, that touch of the divine fellowship with human frailty, is a thing of mellower growth. It is a solvent and not an excitant. It does not stimulate to sublime effort; but it can cool raging passion. It can take the salt from tears, the bitterness from judgment, the keenness from despair; but in its universal manifestation it would effectually stop a naval engagement.

Paul laughed. "You mustn't think I brag too much, Jane," said he. "For anybody else I know what I say would be ridiculous. But for me it's different. I'm going to be a great man. I know it. If I'm not going to be a great actor, I shall be a great something else. God doesn't put such things into people's heads for nothing. He didn't take me from the factory in Bludston and set me here with you, walking up Regent Street, like a gentleman, just to throw me back into the gutter."

"But who said you were going back to the gutter?" asked Jane.

"Nobody. I wanted to get right with myself. But—that getting right with oneself—do you think it egotistic?"

"I don't quite know what that is."

He defined the term.

"No," she said seriously. "I don't think it is. Everybody has got a self to consider. I don't look on it as ego-what-d'-you-call-it to strike out for myself instead of going on helping mother to mind the shop. So why should you?"

"Besides, I owe a duty to my parents, don't I?" he asked eagerly.

But here Jane took her own line. "I can't see that you do, considering that they've done nothing for you."

"They've done everything for me," he protested vehemently. "They've made me what I am."

"They didn't take much trouble about it," said Jane.

They squabbled for a while after the manner of boy and girl. At last she cried: "Don't you see I'm proud of you for yourself and not for your silly old parents? What have they got to do with me? And besides, you'll never find them."

"I don't think you know what you're talking about," he said loftily. "It is time we were getting home."

He walked on for some time stiffly, his head in the air, not condescending to speak. She had uttered blasphemy. He would find his parents, he vowed to himself, if only to spite Jane. Presently his ear caught a little sniff, and looking down, saw her dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief. His heart softened at once. "Never mind," said he. "You didn't mean it."

"It's only because I love you, Paul," she murmured wretchedly.

"That's all right," he said. "Let us go in here"—they were passing a confectioner's—"and we'll have some jam-puffs."

Paul went to his friend Rowlatt, who had already heard, through one of his assistants who had a friend in the Life School, of the dramatic end of the model's career.

"I quite sympathize with you," Rowlatt laughed. "I've wondered how you stuck it so long. What are you going to do now?"

"I'm going on the stage."

"How are you going to get there?"

"I don't know," said Paul, "but if I knew an actor, he would be able to tell me. I thought perhaps you might know an actor."

"I do—one or two," replied Rowlatt; "but they're just ordinary actors—not managers; and I shouldn't think they'd be able to do anything for you."

"Except what I say," Paul persisted. "They'll tell me how one sets about being an actor."

Rowlatt scribbled a couple of introductions on visiting cards, and Paul went away satisfied. He called on the two actors. The first, in atrabiliar mood, advised him to sweep crossings, black shoes, break stones by the roadside, cart manure, sell tripe or stocks and shares, blow out his brains rather than enter a profession over whose portals was inscribed the legend, Lasciate ogni speranza—he snapped his finger and thumb to summon memory as if it were a dog.

"Voi che intrate," continued Paul, delighted at showing off the one Italian tag he had picked up from his reading. And filled with one of the purest joys of the young literary life and therefore untouched by pessimistic counsel, he left the despairing actor.

The second, a brighter and more successful man, talked with Paul for a long time about all manner of things. Having no notion of his antecedents, he assumed him to be a friend of Rowlatt and met him on terms of social equality. Paul expanded like a flower to the sun. It was the first time he had spoken with an educated man on common ground—a man to whom the great imaginative English writers were familiar friends, who ran from Chaucer to Lamb and from Dryden to Browning with amazing facility. The strong wine of allusive talk mounted to Paul's brain. Tingling with excitement, he brought out all his small artillery of scholarship and acquitted himself so well that his host sent him off with a cordial letter to a manager of his acquaintance.

The letter opened the difficult door of the theatre. His absurd beauty of face and figure, a far greater recommendation in the eyes of the manager who had begun rehearsals for an elaborate romantic production than a knowledge of The Faerie Queene, obtained for him an immediate engagement—to walk on as a gilded youth of Italy in two or three scenes at a salary of thirty shillings a week. Paul went home and spread himself like a young peacock before Jane, and said: "I am an actor."

The girl's eyes glowed. "You are wonderful."

"No, not I," replied Paul modestly. "It is my star."

"Have you got a big part?" asked Jane.

He laughed pityingly, sweeping back his black curls. "No, you silly, I haven't any lines to speak"—he had at once caught up the phrase—"I must begin at the beginning. Every actor has to do it."

"You'll get mother and me orders to come and see you, won't you?"

"You shall have a box," declared Paul the magnificent.

Thus began a new phase in the career of Paul Kegworthy. After the first few days of bewilderment on the bare, bleak stage, where oddments of dilapidated furniture served to indicate thrones and staircases and palace doors and mossy banks; where men and women in ordinary costume behaved towards one another in the most ridiculous way and went through unintelligible actions with phantom properties; where the actor-manager would pause in the breath of an impassioned utterance and cry out, "Oh, my God! stop that hammering!" where nothing looked the least bit in the world like the lovely ordered picture he had been accustomed to delight in from the shilling gallery—after the first few days he began to focus this strange world and to suffer its fascination. And he was proud of the silent part allotted to him, a lazy lute-player in attendance on the great lady, who lounged about on terrace steps in picturesque attitudes. He was glad that he was not an unimportant member of the crowd of courtiers who came on in a bunch and bowed and nodded and pretended to talk to one another and went off again. He realized that he would be in sight of the audience all the time. It did not strike him that the manager was using him merely as a piece of decoration.

One day, however, at rehearsal the leading lady said: "If my lute-player could play a few chords here—or the orchestra for him-it would help me tremendously. I've got all this long cross with nothing to say."

Paul seized his opportunity. "I can play the mandoline," said he.

"Oh, can you?" said the manager, and Paul was handed over to the musical director, and the next day rehearsed with a real instrument which he twanged in the manner prescribed. He did not fail to announce himself to Jane as a musician.

Gradually he found his feet among the heterogeneous band who walk on at London theatres. Some were frankly vulgar, some were pretentiously genteel, a good many were young men of gentle birth from the public schools and universities. Paul's infallible instinct drew him into timid companionship with the last. He knew little of the things they talked about, golf and cricket prospects, and the then brain-baffling Ibsen, but he listened modestly, hoping to learn. He reaped the advantage of having played "the sedulous ape" to his patrons of the studios. His tricks were somewhat exaggerated; his sweep of the hat when ladies passed him at the stage door entrance was lower than custom deems necessary; he was quicker in courteous gesture than the young men from the universities; he bowed more deferentially to an interlocutor than is customary outside Court circles; but they were all the tricks of good breeding. More than one girl asked if he were of foreign extraction. He remembered Rowlatt's question of years ago, and, as then, he felt curiously pleased. He confessed to an exotic strain: to Italian origin. Italy was romantic. When he obtained a line part and he appeared on the bill, he took the opportunity of changing a name linked with unpleasant associations which he did not regard as his own. Kegworthy was cast into the limbo of common things, and he became Paul Savelli. But this was later.

He made friends at the theatre. Some of the women, by petting and flattery, did their best to spoil him; but Paul was too ambitious, too much absorbed in his dream of greatness and his dilettante literary and musical pursuits, too much yet of a boy to be greatly affected. What he prized far more highly than feminine blandishments was the new comradeship with his own sex. Instinctively he sought them, as a sick dog seeks grass, unconsciously feeling the need of them in his mental and moral development. Besides, the attitude of the women reminded him of that of the women painters in his younger days. He had no intention of playing the pet monkey again. His masculinity revolted. The young barbarian clamoured. A hard day on the river he found much more to his taste than sporting in the shade of a Kensington flat over tea and sandwiches with no matter how sentimental an Amaryllis. Jane, who had seen the performance, though not from a box, a couple of upper-circle seats being all that Paul could obtain from the acting-manager, and had been vastly impressed by Paul's dominating position in the stage fairy-world, said to him, with a sniff that choked a sigh: "Now that you've got all those pretty girls around you, I suppose you soon won't think of me any longer?"

Paul waved the dreaded houris away as though they were midges. "I'm sick of girls," he replied in a tone of such sincerity that Jane tossed her head.

"Oh? Then I suppose you lump me with the rest and are sick of me too?"

"Don't worry a fellow," said Paul. "You're not a girl-not in that sense, I mean. You're a pal."

"Anyway, they're lots prettier than what I am," she said defiantly.

He looked at her critically, after the brutal manner of obtuse boyhood, and beheld an object quite agreeable to the sight. Her Londoner's ordinarily colourless checks were flushed, her blue eyes shone bright, her little chin was in the air and her parted lips showed a flash of white teeth. She wore a neat simple blouse and skirt and held her slim, half-developed figure taut. Paul shook his head. "Jolly few of them—without grease-paint on."

"But you see them all painted up."

He burst into laughter. "Then they're beastly, near by! You silly kid, don't you know? We've got to make up, otherwise no one in front would be able to see our mouths and noses and eyes. From the front we look lovely; but close to we're horrors."

"Well, how should I know that?" asked Jane.

"You couldn't unless you saw us—or were told. But now you know."

"Do you look beastly too?"

"Vile," he laughed.

"I'm glad I didn't think of going on the stage,"' she said, childish yet very feminine unreason combining with atavistic puritanism. "I shouldn't like to paint my face."

"You get used to it," said Paul, the experienced.

"I think it horrid to paint your face."

He swung to the door—they were in the little parlour behind the shop—a flash of anger in his eyes. "If you think everything I do horrid, I can't talk to you."

He marched out. Jane suddenly realized that she had behaved badly. She whipped herself. She had behaved atrociously. Of course she had been jealous of the theatre girls; but had he not been proving to her all the time in what small account he held them? And now he had gone. At seventeen a beloved gone for an hour is a beloved gone for ever. She rushed to the foot of the stairs on which his ascending steps still creaked.

"Paul!"

"Yes."

"Come back! Do come back!"

Paul came back and followed her into the parlour.

"I'm sorry," she said.

He graciously forgave her, having already arrived at the mature conclusion that females were unaccountable folk whose excursions into unreason should be regarded by man with pitying indulgence. And, in spite of the seriousness with which he took himself, he was a sunny-tempered youth.

Barney Bill, putting into the Port of London, so to speak, in order to take in cargo, also visited the theatre towards the end of the run of the piece. He waited, by arrangement, for Paul outside the stage door, and Paul, coming out, linked arms and took him to a blazing bar in Piccadilly Circus and ministered to his thirst, with a princely air.

"It seems rum," said Bill, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, after a mighty pull at the pint tankard—"it seems rum that you should be standing me drinks at a swell place like this. It seems only yesterday that you was a two-penn'orth of nothing jogging along o' me in the old 'bus."

"I've moved a bit since then, haven't I?" said Paul.

"You have, sonny," said Barney Bill. "But"-he sighed and looked around the noisy glittering place, at the smart barmaids, the well-clad throng of loungers, some in evening dress, the half-dozen gorgeous ladies sitting with men at little tables by the window—"I thinks as how you gets more real happiness in a quiet village pub, and the beer is cheaper, and—gorblimey!"

He ran his finger between his stringy neck and the frayed stand-up collar that would have sawn his head off but for the toughness of his hide. To do Paul honour he had arrayed himself in his best—a wondrously cut and heavily-braided morning coat and lavender-coloured trousers of eccentric shape, and a funny little billycock hat too small for him, and a thunder-and-lightning necktie, all of which he had purchased nearly twenty years ago to grace a certain, wedding a. which he had been best man. Since then he had worn the Nessus shirt of a costume not more than half-a-dozen times. The twisted, bright-eyed little man, so obviously ill at ease in his amazing garb, and the beautiful youth, debonair in his well-fitting blue serge, formed a queer contrast.

"Don't you never long for the wind of God and the smell of the rain?" asked Barney Bill.

"I haven't the time," said Paul. "I'm busy all day long."

"Well, well," said Barney Bill, "the fellow wasn't far wrong who said it takes all sorts to make a world. There are some as likes electric light and some as likes the stars. Gimme the stars." And in his countryman's way he set the beer in his tankard swirling round and round before he put it again to his lips.

Paul sipped his beer reflectively. "You may find happiness and peace of soul under the stars," said he, sagely, "and if I were a free agent I'd join you tomorrow. But you can't find fame. You can't rise to great things. I want to—well, I don't quite know what I want to do," he laughed, "but it's something big."

"Yuss, my boy," said Barney Bill. "I understand. You was always like that. You haven't come any nearer finding your 'igh-born parents?"—there was a twinkle in his eyes—"'ave yer?"

"I'm not going to bother any more about them, whoever they are," said Paul, lighting a cigarette. "When I was a kid I used to dream that they would find me and do everything for me. Now I'm a man with experience of life, I find that I've got to do everything for myself. And by George!"—he thumped the bar and smiled the radiant smile of the young Apollo—"I'm going to do it."

Barney Bill took off his Luke's iron crown of a billycock hat and scratched his cropped and grizzled head. "How old are you, sonny?"

"Nearly nineteen," said Paul.

"By Gosh!" said Barney Bill.

He put on his hat at a comfortable but rakish angle. He looked like a music-hall humourist. A couple of the gorgeous ladies giggled.

"Yuss," said he, "you're a man with an experience of life—and nobody can do nothing for you but yerself. Poor old Barney Bill has been past helping you this many a year."

"But I owe everything to you!" cried Paul, boyishly. "If it hadn't been for you, I should still be working in that factory at Bludston."

Bill winked and nodded acquiescence as he finished his tankard.

"I've often wondered—since I've grown up—what induced you to take me away. What was it?"

Bill cocked his head on one side and regarded him queerly. "Now you're arsking," said he.

Paul persisted. "You must have had some reason."

"I suppose I was interested in them parents of yours," said Barney Bill.

And that was all he would say on the subject.

The days went on. The piece had run through the summer and autumn, and Paul, a favourite with the management, was engaged for the next production. At rehearsal one day the author put in a couple of lines, of which he was given one to speak. He now was in very truth an actor. Jane could no longer taunt him in her naughty moods (invariably followed by bitter repentance) with playing a dumb part like a trained dog. He had a real part, typewritten and done up in a brown-paper cover, which was handed to him, with lack of humour, by the assistant stage manager.

In view of his own instantaneous success he tried to persuade Jane to go on the stage; but Jane had no artistic ambitions, to say nothing of her disinclination to paint her face. She preferred the prosaic reality of stenography and typewriting. No sphere could be too dazzling for Paul; he was born to great things, the consciousness of his high destiny being at once her glory and her despair; but, as regards herself, her outlook on life was cool and sober. Paul was peacock born; it was for him to strut about in iridescent plumage. She was a humble daw and knew her station. It must be said that Paul held out the stage as a career more on account of the social status that it would give to Jane than through a belief in her histrionic possibilities. He too, fond as he was of the girl with whom he had grown up, recognized the essential difference between them. She was as pretty, as sensible, as helpful a little daw as ever chattered; but the young peacock never for an instant forgot her daw-dom.

Jane's profound common-sense reaped its reward the following spring when she found herself obliged to earn her livelihood. 'Her mother died, and the shop was sold, and an aunt in Cricklewood offered Jane a home, on condition that she paid for her keep. This she was soon able to do when she obtained a situation with a business firm in the city. The work was hard and the salary small; but Jane had a brave heart and held her head high. In her simple philosophy life was work, and dreaming an occasional luxury. Her mother's death grieved her deeply, for she was a girl of strong affections, and the breaking up of her life with Paul seemed an irremediable catastrophe.

"It's just as well," said her aunt, "that there's an end of it, or you'd be making a fool of yourself over that young actor chap with his pretty face. I don't hold with any of them."

But Jane was too proud to reply.

On their last night together in the Barn Street house they sat alone in the little back-parlour as they had done for the last six years—all their impressionable childish days. It was the only home that Paul had known, and he felt the tragedy of its dissolution. They sat on the old horsehair sofa, behind the table, very tearful, very close together in spirit, holding each other's hands. They talked as the young talk—and the old, for the matter of that. She trembled at his wants unministered to in his new lodgings. He waved away prospective discomfort: what did it matter? He was a man and could rough it. It was she herself whose loss would be irreparable. She sighed; he would soon forget her. He vowed undying remembrance by all his gods. Some beautiful creature of the theatre would carry him off. He laughed at such an absurdity. Jane would always be his confidante, his intimate. Even though they lived under different roofs, they would meet and have their long happy jaunts together. Jane said dolefully that it could only be on Sundays, as their respective working hours would never correspond—"And you haven't given me your Sundays for a year," she added. Paul slid from the dark theme and, to comfort her, spoke glowingly of the future, when he should have achieved his greatness. He would give her a beautiful house with carriages and servants, and she would not have to work.

"But if you are not there, what's the good of anything?" she said.

"I'll come to see you, silly dear," he replied ingenuously.

Before they parted for the night she threw her arms round his neck impulsively. "Don't quite forget me, Paul. It would break my heart. I've only you left now poor mother's gone."

Paul kissed her and vowed again. He did not vow that he would be a mother to her, though to the girl's heart it seemed as if he did. The little girl was aching for a note in his voice that never came. Now, ninety-nine youths in a hundred who held, at such a sentimental moment, a comely and not uncared-for maiden in their arms, would have lost their heads (and their hearts) and vowed in the desired manner. But Paul was different, and Jane knew it, to her sorrow. He was by no means temperamentally cold; far from it. But, you see, he lived intensely in his dream, and only on its outer fringe had Jane her place. In the heart of it, hidden in amethystine mist, from which only flashed the diadem on her hair, dwelt the exquisite, the incomparable lady, the princess who should share his kingdom, while he knelt at her feet and worshipped her and kissed the rosy tips of her calm fingers. So, as it never entered his head to kiss the finger tips of poor Jane, it never entered his head to fancy himself in love with her. Therefore, when she threw herself into his arms, he hugged her in a very sincere and brotherly way, but kissed her with a pair of cast lips of Adonis. Of course he would never forget her. Jane went to bed and sobbed her heart out. Paul slept but little. The breaking up of the home meant the end of many precious and gentle things, and without them he knew that his life would be the poorer. And he vowed once more, to himself, that he would never prove disloyal to Jane.

While he remained in London he saw what he could of her, sacrificing many a Sunday's outing with the theatre folk. Jane, instinctively aware of this, and finding in his demeanour, after examining it with femininely jealous, microscopic eyes, nothing perfunctory, was duly grateful, and gave him of her girlish best. She developed very quickly after her entrance into the world of struggle. Very soon it was the woman and not the child who listened to the marvellous youth's story of the wonders that would be. She never again threw herself into his arms, and he never again called her a "little silly." She was dimly aware of change, though she knew that the world could hold no other man for her. But Paul was not.

And then Paul went on tour.



CHAPTER VII

PAUL had been four years on the stage. Save as a memory they had as little influence on the colour of his after-life as his years at Bludston or his years in the studios. He was the man born to be king. The attainment of his kingdom alone mattered. The intermediary phases were of no account. It had been a period of struggle, hardship and, as far as the stage itself was concerned, disillusion. After the first year or so, the goddess Fortune, more fickle in Theatreland, perhaps, than anywhere else, passed him by. London had no use for his services, especially when it learned that he aspired to play parts. It even refused him the privilege of walking on and understudying. He drifted into the provinces, where, when he obtained an engagement, he found more scope for his ambitions. Often he was out, and purchased with his savings the bread of idleness. He knew the desolation of the agent's dingy stairs; he knew the heartache of the agent's dingy outer office.

He was familiar, too, with bleak rehearsals, hours of listless waiting for his little scenes; with his powerlessness to get into his simple words the particular intonation required by an overdriven producer. Familiar, too, with long and hungry Sunday railway journeys when pious refreshment rooms are shut; with little mean towns like Bludston, where he and three or four of the company shared the same mean theatrical lodgings; with the dirty, insanitary theatres; with the ceaseless petty jealousies and bickerings of the ill-paid itinerant troupe. The discomforts affected Paul but little, he had never had experience of luxuries, and the life itself was silken ease compared with what it would have been but for Barney Bill's kidnapping. It never occurred to him to complain of nubbly bed and ill-cooked steak and crowded and unventilated dressing rooms; but it always struck him as being absurd that such should continue to be the lot of one predestined to greatness. There was some flaw in the working of destiny. It puzzled him.

Once indeed, being out, but having an engagement ahead, and waiting for rehearsals to begin, he had found himself sufficiently prosperous to take a third-class ticket to Paris, where he spent a glorious month. But the prosperity never returned, and he had to live on his memories of Paris.

During these years books were, as ever, his joy and his consolation. He taught himself French and a little German. He read history, philosophy, a smattering of science, and interested himself in politics. So aristocratic a personage naturally had passionate Tory sympathies. Now and again—but not often, for the theatrical profession is generally Conservative—he came across a furious Radical in the company and tasted the joy of fierce argument. Now and again too, he came across a young woman of high modern cultivation, and once or twice narrowly escaped wrecking his heart on the Scylline rock of her intellect. It was only when he discovered that she had lost her head over his romantic looks, and not over his genius and his inherited right to leadership, that he began to question her intellectual sincerity. And there is nothing to send love scuttling away with his quiver between his legs like a note of interrogation of that sort. The only touch of the morbid in Paul was his resentment at owing anything to his mere personal appearance. He could not escape the easy chaff of his fellows on his "fatal beauty." He dreaded the horrible and hackneyed phrase which every fresh intimacy either with man or woman would inevitably evoke, and he hated it beyond reason. There was a tour during which he longed for small-pox or a broken nose or facial paralysis, so that no woman should ever look at him again and no man accuse him in vulgar jest.

He played small utility parts and understudied the leading man. On the rare occasions when he played the lead, he made no great hit. The company did not, after the generous way of theatre folks, surround him, when the performance was over, with a chorus of congratulation. The manager would say, "Quite all' right, my boy, as far as it goes, but still wooden. You must get more life into it." And Paul, who knew himself to be a better man in every way than the actor whose part he was playing, just as in his childhood days he knew himself to be a better man than Billy Goodge, could not understand the general lack of appreciation. Then he remembered the early struggles of the great actors: Edmund Kean, who on the eve of his first appearance at Drury Lane cried, "If I succeed I shall go mad!"; of Henry Irving (then at his zenith) and the five hundred parts he had played before he came to London; he recalled also the failure of Disraeli's first speech in the House of Commons and his triumphant prophecy. He had dreams of that manager on his bended knees, imploring him, with prayerful hands and streaming eyes, to play Hamlet at a salary of a thousand a week and of himself haughtily snapping his fingers at the paltry fellow.

Well, which one of us who has ever dreamed at all has not had such dreams at twenty? Let him cast at Paul the first stone.

And then, you must remember, Paul's faith in his vague but glorious destiny was the dynamic force of his young life. Its essential mystery kept him alert and buoyant. His keen, self-centred mind realized that his search on the stage for the true expression of his genius was only empirical. If he failed there, it was for him to try a hundred other spheres until he found the right one. But just as in his childish days he could not understand why he was not supreme in everything, so now he could not appreciate the charge of wooden inferiority brought against him by theatrical managers.

He had been on the stage about three years when for the first time in his emancipated life something like a calamity befell him. He lost Jane. Like most calamities it happened in a foolishly accidental manner. He received a letter from Jane during the last three weeks of a tour—they always kept up an affectionate but desultory correspondence—giving a new address. The lease of her aunt's house having fallen in, they were moving to the south side of London. When he desired to answer the letter, he found he had lost it and could not remember the suburb, much less the street and number, whither Jane had migrated. A letter posted to the old address was returned through the post. The tour over, and he being again in London, he went on an errand of inquiry to Cricklewood, found the house empty and the neighbours and tradespeople ignorant. The poorer classes of London in their migrations seldom leave a trail behind them. Their correspondence being rare, it is not within their habits of life to fill up post-office forms with a view to the forwarding of letters. He could not write to Jane because he did not in the least know where she was.

He reflected with dismay that Jane could, for the same reason, no longer write to him. Ironic chance had so arranged that the landlady with whom he usually lodged in town, and whose house he used as a permanent address, had given up letting lodgings at the beginning of the tour, and had drifted into the limbo of London. Jane's only guide to his whereabouts had been the tour card which he had sent her as usual, giving dates and theatres. And the tour was over. On the chance that Jane, not hearing from him, should address a letter to the last theatre on the list, he communicated at once with the local management. But as local managements of provincial theatres shape their existences so as to avoid responsibilities of any kind save the maintenance of their bars and the deduction of their percentages from the box-office receipts, Paul knew that it was ludicrous to expect it to interest itself in the correspondence of an obscure member of a fourth-rate company which had once played to tenth-rate business within its mildewed walls. Being young, he wrote also to the human envelope containing the essence of stale beer, tobacco and lethargy that was the stage doorkeeper. But he might just as well have written to the station master or the municipal gasworks. As a matter of fact Jane and he were as much lost to one another as if the whole of England had been primaeval forest.

It was a calamity which he regarded with dismay. He had many friends of the easy theatrical sort, who knew him as Paul Savelli, a romantically visaged, bright-natured, charming, intellectual, and execrably bad young actor. But there was only one Jane who knew him as little Paul Kegworthy. No woman he had ever met—and in the theatrical world one is thrown willy-nilly into close contact with the whole gamut of the sex—gave him just the same close, intimate, comforting companionship. From Jane he hid nothing. Before all the others he was conscious of pose. Jane, with her cockney common-sense, her shrewdness, her outspoken criticism of follies, her unfailing sympathy in essentials, was welded into the very structure of his being. Only when he had lost her did he realize this. Amidst all the artificialities and pretences and pseudo-emotionalities of his young actor's life, she was the one thing that was real. She alone knew of Bludston, of Barney Bill, of the model days the memory of which made him shiver. She alone (save Barney Bill) knew of his high destiny—for Paul, quick to recognize the cynical scepticism of an indifferent world, had not revealed the Vision Splendid to any of his associates. To her he could write; to her, when he was in London, he could talk; to her he could outpour all the jumble of faith, vanity, romance, egotism and poetry that was his very self, without thought of miscomprehension. And of late she had mastered the silly splenetics of childhood. He had an uncomfortable yet comforting impression that latterly she had developed an odd, calm wisdom, just as she had developed a calm, generous personality. The last time he had seen her, his quick sensitiveness had noted the growth from girl to woman. She was large, full-bosomed, wide-browed, clear-eyed. She had not worried him about other girls. She had reproved him for confessed follies in just the way that man loves to be reproved. She had mildly soared with him into the empyrean of his dreams. She had enjoyed whole-heartedly, from the back row of the dress-circle, the play to which he had taken her—as a member of the profession he had, in Jane's eyes, princely privileges—and on the top of the Cricklewood omnibus she had eaten, with the laughter and gusto of her twenty years, the exotic sandwiches he had bought at the delicatessen shop in Leicester Square. She was the ideal sister.

And now she was gone, like a snow-flake on a river. For a long while it seemed absurd, incredible. He went on all sorts of preposterous adventures to find her. He walked through the city day after day at the hours when girls and men pour out of their honeycombs of offices into the streets. She had never told him where she was employed, thinking the matter of little interest; and he, in his careless way, had never inquired. Once he had suggested calling for her at her office, and she had abruptly vetoed the suggestion. Paul was too remarkable a young man to escape the notice of her associates; her feelings towards him were too fine to be scratched by jocular allusion. After a time, having failed to meet her in the human torrents of Cheapside and Cannon Street, Paul gave up the search. Jane was lost, absolutely lost—and, with her, Barney Bill. He went on tour again, heavy-hearted. He felt that, in losing these two, he had committed an act of base ingratitude.

He had been four years on the stage and had grown from youth into manhood. But one day at three-and-twenty he found himself as poor in pence, though as rich in dreams, as at thirteen.

Necessity had compelled him to take what he could get. This time it was a leading part; but a leading part in a crude melodrama in a fit-up company. They had played in halls and concert rooms, on pier pavilions, in wretched little towns. It was glorious July Weather and business was bad—so bad that the manager abruptly closed the treasury and disappeared, leaving the company stranded a hundred and fifty miles from London, with a couple of weeks' salary unpaid.

Paul was packing his clothes in the portmanteau that lay on the narrow bed in his tiny back bedroom, watched disconsolately by a sallow, careworn man who sat astride the one cane chair, his hat on the back of his head, the discoloured end of a cigarette between his lips.

"It's all very well for you to take it cheerfully," said the latter. "You're young. You're strong. You're rich. You've no one but yourself. You haven't a wife and kids depending on you."

"I know it makes a devil of a difference," replied Paul, disregarding the allusion to his wealth. As the leading man, he was the most highly paid member of the disastrous company, and he had acquired sufficient worldly wisdom to know that to him who has but a penny the possessor of a shilling appears arrogantly opulent. "But still," said he, "what can we do? We must get back to London and try again."

"If there was justice in this country that son of a thief would get fifteen years for it. I never trusted the skunk. A fortnight's salary gone and no railway fare to London. I wish to God I had never taken it on. I could have gone with Garbutt in The White Woman—he's straight enough—only this was a joint engagement. Oh, the swine!"

He rose with a clatter, threw his cigarette on the floor and stamped on it violently.

"He's a pretty bad wrong 'un," said Paul. "We hadn't been going a fortnight before he asked me to accept half salary, swearing he would make it up, with a rise, as soon as business got better. Like an idiot, I consented."

His friend sat down again hopelessly. "I don't know what's going to become of us. The missus has pawned everything she has got, poor old girl! Oh, it's damned hard! We had been out six months."

"Poor old chap!" said Paul, sitting on the bed beside his portmanteau. "How does Mrs. Wilmer take it?"

"She's knocked endways. You see," cried Wilmer desperately, "we've had to send home everything we could scrape together to keep the kids—there's five of them; and now—and now there's nothing left. I'm wrong. There's that." He fished three or four coppers from his pocket and held them out with a harsh laugh. "There's that after twenty years' work in this profession."

"Poor old chap!" said Paul again. He liked Wilmer, a sober, earnest, ineffectual man, and his haggard, kindly-natured wife. They had put on a brave face all through the tour, letting no one suspect their straits, and doing both him and other members of the company many little acts of kindness and simple hospitality. In the lower submerged world of the theatrical profession in which Paul found himself he had met with many such instances of awful poverty. He had brushed elbows with Need himself. That morning he had given, out of his scanty resources, her railway fare to a tearful and despairing girl who played the low-comedy part. But he had not yet come across any position quite so untenable as that of Wilmer. Forty odd years old, a wife, five children, all his life given honestly to his calling—and threepence half-penny to his fortune.

"But, good God!" said he, after a pause, "your kiddies? If you have nothing—what will happen to them?"

"Lord knows," groaned Wilmer, staring in front of him, his elbows on the back of the chair and his head between his fists.

"And Mrs. Wilmer and yourself have got to get back to London."

"I've got the dress suit I wear in the last act. It's fairly new. I can get enough on it."

"But that's part of your outfit—your line of business; you'll want it again," said Paul.

Wilmer had played butlers up and down the land for many years. Now and again, when the part did not need any special characterization, he obtained London engagements. He was one of the known stage butlers.

"I can hire if I'm pushed," said he. "It's hell, isn't it? Something told me not to go out with a fit-up. We'd never come down to it before. And I mistrusted Larkins—but we were out six months. Paul, my boy, chuck it. You're young; you're clever; you've had a swell education; you come of gentlefolk—my father kept a small hardware shop in Leicester—you have"—the smitten and generally inarticulate man hesitated—"well, you have extraordinary personal beauty; you have charm; you could do anything you like in the world, save act—and you can't act for toffee. Why the blazes do you stick to it?"

"I've got to earn my living just like you," said Paul, greatly flattered by the artless tribute to his aristocratic personality and not offended by the professional censure which he knew to be just. "I've tried all sorts of other things-music, painting, poetry, novel-writing—but none of them has come off."

"Your people don't make you an allowance?"

"I've no people living," said Paul, with a smile—and when Paul smiled it was as if Eros's feathers had brushed the cheek of a Praxitelean Hermes; and then with an outburst half sincere, half braggart—"I've been on my own ever since I was thirteen."

Wilmer regarded him wearily. "The missus and I have always thought you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth."

"So I was," Paul declared from his innermost conviction. "But," he laughed, "I lost it before my teeth came and I could get a grip on it."

"Do you mean to say," exclaimed Wilmer, "that you're not doing this for fun?"

"Fun?" cried Paul. "Fun? Do you call this comic?" He waved his hand comprehensively, indicating the decayed pink-and-purple wall-paper, the ragged oil-cloth on the floor, the dingy window with its dingier outlook, the rickety deal wash-stand with the paint peeling off, a horrible clothless tray on a horrible splotchy chest of drawers, containing the horrible scraggy remains of a meal. "Do you think I would have this if I could command silken sloth? I long like hell, old chap, for silken sloth, and if I could get it, you wouldn't see me here."

Wilmer rose and stretched out his hand. "I'm sorry, dear boy," said he. "The wife and I thought it didn't very much matter to you. We always thought you were a kind of young swell doing it for amusement and experience—and because you never put on side, we liked you."