d 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 pe