THE FORTUNATE YOUTH

CHAPTER I

PAUL KEGWORTHY lived with his mother, Mrs. Button, his stepfather, Mr.
Button, and six little Buttons, his half brothers and sisters. His was
not an ideal home; it consisted in a bedroom, a kitchen and a scullery
in a grimy little house in a grimy street made up of rows of exactly
similar grimy little houses, and forming one of a hundred similar
streets in a northern manufacturing town. Mr. and Mrs. Button worked in
a factory and took in as lodgers grimy single men who also worked in
factories. They were not a model couple; they were rather, in fact, the
scandal of Budge Street, which did not itself enjoy, in Bludston, a
reputation for holiness. Neither was good to look upon. Mr. Button, who
was Lancashire bred and born, divided the yearnings of his spirit
between strong drink and dog-fights. Mrs. Button, a viperous Londoner,
yearned for noise. When Mr. Button came home drunk he punched his wife
about the head and kicked her about the body, while they both exhausted
the vocabulary of vituperation of North and South, to the horror and
edification of the neighbourhood. When Mr. Button was sober Mrs. Button
chastised little Paul. She would have done so when Mr. Button was
drunk, but she had not the time. The periods, therefore, of his
mother's martyrdom were those of Paul's enfranchisement. If he saw his
stepfather come down the street with steady gait, he fled in terror; if
he saw him reeling homeward he lingered about with light and joyous
heart.

The brood of young Buttons was fed spasmodically and clad at random,
but their meals were regular and their raiment well assorted compared
with Paul's. Naturally they came in for clouts and thumps like all the
children in Budge Street; it was only Paul who underwent organized
chastisement. The little Buttons often did wrong; but in the mother's
eyes Paul could never do right. In an animal way she was fond of the
children of Button, and in a way equally animal she bore a venomous
dislike to the child of Kegworthy. Who and what Kegworthy had been
neither Paul nor any inhabitant of Bludston knew. Once the boy
inquired, and she broke a worn frying-pan over his head. Kegworthy,
whoever he might have been, was wrapt in mystery. She had appeared in
the town when Paul was a year old, giving herself out as a widow. That
she was by no means destitute was obvious from the fact that she at
once rented the house in Budge Street, took in lodgers, and lived at
her ease. Button, who was one of the lodgers, cast upon her the eyes of
desire and married her. Why she married Button she could never
determine. Perhaps she had a romantic idea--and there is romance even
in Budge Street-that Button would support her. He very soon shattered
any such illusion by appropriating the remainder of her fortune and
kicking her into the factory with hobnailed boots. It would be wrong to
say that Mrs. Button did not complain; she did. She rent the air of
Budge Street with horrible execration; but she went to the factory,
where, save for the intervals of retirement rendered necessary by the
births of the little Buttons, she was contented enough to stay.