NG PHYSICIAN 
 
 [CIS BRETT YOUNG

 
 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN
 
 I 
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE CRESCENT MOON 
 THE IRON AGE 
 THE DARK TOWEH 
 DEEP SEA 
 
 UNDERGROWTH 
 
 (with E. Brett Young) 
 
 MARCHING ON TANGA 
 POEMS 1916-1918. 
 
 E. P. DTJTTON & COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK
 
 THE 
 YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG 
 
 AUTHOR OF "MABCHING ON TANGA," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 681 FIFTH AVENUE
 
 Copyright, 1920, 
 By E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 First printing March, 19SO 
 
 Second printing March, 1920 
 
 Third printing. . .September, 1920 
 
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 To 
 
 THOMAS BRETT YOUNG, M.D. 
 
 WITH THE LOVE AND ADMIRATION 
 OF HIS SON 
 
 2139016
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 CHAPTEB PAQB 
 
 i. MURDERER'S CROSS 1 
 
 II. GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY 16 
 
 m. THE GREEN TREES 27 
 
 IV. MIDSUMMER 42 
 
 V. AIRS AND GRACES 57 
 
 VI. THUNDER WEATHER 69 
 
 VII. IMPURITY 86 
 
 VIII. HOMEWARDS 107 
 
 EX. THE DARK HOUSE ... . . 124 
 
 X. THRENODY 153 
 
 XI. THE THRESHOLD 184 
 
 XII. THE HILLS 211 
 
 BOOK II 
 
 I. THE CITY OF IRON 249 
 
 II. MORTALITY BEHOLD 272 
 
 III. CARNIVAL . , v . 296 
 
 IV. SCIENCE - . 324 
 
 
 
 vu
 
 via CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 V. ROMANCE . 346 
 
 VI. THE DRESSER 372 
 
 VII. THE CLERK 403 
 
 Vin. LOWER SPARKDALE 435 
 
 IX. EASY ROW 460 
 
 X. WHITE ROSES . 487
 
 BOOK I
 
 The green trees, when I saw them 
 first through one of the gates, trans- 
 ported and ravished me; their sweet- 
 ness and unusual beauty made my 
 heart to leap and almost mad with 
 ecstasy, they were such strange 
 and wonderful things. The skies 
 were mine, and so were the sun and 
 moon and stars, and all the world 
 was mine, and I the only spectator 
 and enjoyer of it. 
 
 THOMAS TRAHEBNB.
 
 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 MURDERER'S CROSS 
 
 ABOVE and beyond the zone of villas, some still 
 white with newly-mixed mortar and the latest 
 unadorned by more than twelve-foot tendrils of 
 ampelopsis or rambling roses, the downs bent their 
 bow to the sky. The horizon loomed so smooth 
 and vast that the plantations of pine and beech 
 which fringed the summits were powerless to break 
 the nobility and purpose of its contour, etched gray- 
 black against the hem of a thunder-cloud that was 
 of the colour of ink. Between the banks a chalk 
 road climbed: an aspiring road, felted in the 
 trodden parts with dust but cross-veined with flinty 
 gutters through which rain poured, like London 
 milk, in stormy weather. A smell of hot earth was 
 in the air. The turf at the wayside was parched 
 and slippery, so that Edwin Ingleby, plodding up 
 the slope, was forced to keep to the white roadway 
 by the slipperiness of his boot-leather. A rather 
 pitiful figure he made, this small boy in an Eton 
 jacket, his waistcoat now unbuttoned and his 
 school cap crumpled in his hot hands. He walked 
 and ran straight upward, as though the devil were
 
 2 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 at his heels; sometimes looking behind him to see 
 if there were any one in pursuit, sometimes wiping 
 the sweat from his forehead with the crumpled cap. 
 
 A wagonette, drawn by a pair of horses and 
 burdened with trippers, jolted past him, throwing 
 up a cloud of chalk-dust that made his eyes smart. 
 Inside it swayed seven fat women in black bodices. 
 The guard, who was sufficiently sober, in his own 
 opinion, to ride on the step, was seen to laugh at 
 the dust-smothered boy in the road. 
 
 "Poor lamb," said the most motherly of the seven. 
 "Wouldn't 'e like a lift?" 
 
 "Gowing the hopposite way, mem," said the 
 guard. "One of them College lads." 
 
 " 'Ot 'e looks !" said the lady. "Going to rine 
 kets and dorgs, too." 
 
 Edwin Ingleby rubbed the dust out of, or into, 
 his eyes and went plugging on to the top of the 
 ridge where the road dipped through a belt of 
 beeches into the trough between two billows of 
 down, losing itself within high banks of turf which 
 bordered the plough-land, satiny now with bearded 
 wheat and infinitely restful. He sat down on the 
 bank with his feet in the gutter and began to mop 
 up tears with the cap that he had lately used for 
 mopping up sweat. All the time that he was crying, 
 his heart was really full of almost incontinent 
 valour, and that was why his tears made him angry. 
 He began talking to himself : 
 
 "Damned beast . . . great beefy beast. ... If 
 only the men could see what a damned beast he is. 
 If Lay ton or some one could give him what he 
 wants. Only no one could fight him. . . . He's got
 
 MURDERER'S CROSS 3 
 
 a weak heart, and it might kill him. I suppose that 
 would be murder. ..." 
 
 The word suddenly got a new significance. They 
 called this road Murderer's Cross Road. High up 
 in the grassy bank some pious person had cut a St. 
 Andrew's cross to commemorate the murder of a 
 postman who had been relieved of his bags and 
 his life on a dark night a century ago. The col- 
 lege tradition said that it was haunted. Certainly 
 it had an ugly sound. Murderer's Cross Road: a 
 name to be whispered. 
 
 "Funny . . ." said Edwin. "There's nothing 
 very awful about it. I could understand a chap 
 wanting to murder a chap. Quite easily. Only he 
 might be sorry about it afterwards. I wouldn't 
 mind murdering Griffin." 
 
 He took a silver watch out of his pocket and 
 laid it on the bank beside him. He could see that 
 there was a full hour to spare before the bell in 
 the water tower would jangle for the evening roll- 
 call in the corner of the Quad ; and so he lay back 
 easily on the bank, stretching out his legs and 
 arms in the form of the St. Andrew's cross scored 
 in the hedge a little farther on. Lying thus he 
 could watch the shimmer on the bearded wheat. 
 He had always loved the softness of this dip in 
 the downs. He had loved it on winter mornings 
 delicately dusted with rime, in November when 
 flints lay like a bloom on the pale fallow, in March 
 when the bloom turned green. Now the thunder- 
 clouds had rolled away, rumbling, from the south, 
 and a breath of cooler air was moving through the 
 valley, throwing the surface of that green sea into
 
 4 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 wave-like motion ; the waves shuddered faintly and 
 the sound came to his ears as though re-echoed from 
 the heavy woods which stood still in the heat, 
 bounding the green ripples; and lying there, with 
 his eyes half-closed, Edwin was already afloat, 
 bearing westward with the set of the tide in the 
 track of Cortes and Columbus and Pizarro and 
 other adventurous voyagers. It was not really very 
 difficult for him to forget his tears. Although the 
 fear of Griffin, that had first driven him afield, was 
 a cruel obsession to which he was liable by night 
 ajid day, he had long ago discovered that silence 
 and solitude could make him free of any wonder 
 which he chose to imagine. It had been like that 
 even when he was quite little; he had always 
 possessed the faculty of day-dreaming; and now 
 that his imagination was beginning to flush at the 
 sound of great names, and the pomps of chivalry 
 and legend were slowly unfolding before him with 
 their subtle suggestiveness unhampered by such 
 knowledge of detail as would be alive to incongrui- 
 ties, his idleness became daily more precious. He 
 suddenly remembered that Achaean assembly 
 stirred by Agamemnon's words "as when the West 
 wind eometh to stir a deep cornfield with violent 
 blast, and the ears bow down. . . ." And now the 
 wind-moved wheat bent like a stricken army before 
 knightly lances, and the roll of retreating thunder 
 awoke echoes of the guns of Waterloo. ... * 
 
 n 
 
 It was nearly three years since Edwin had first 
 seen Griffin, oddly enough on the very first day of
 
 MURDERER'S CROSS 5 
 
 his life at St. Luke's. Mrs. Ingleby had come down 
 from the Midlands with him, a little anxious, for 
 there were pitfalls in public school life (it was 
 in ninety-five), but immensely proud of Edwin's 
 entrance scholarship. They had crossed London 
 together in a hansom, and on the smoky platform at 
 Victoria, she had bidden him a good-bye which cost 
 her some pangs, for the poor boy was half dead 
 with train-sickness. Edwin was her only child, 
 and some smouldering ethic decreed that he must 
 not be pampered, but when she raised her veil to 
 kiss him, tears escaped beneath its rim. Those tears 
 were very unsettling; they gave him a sudden 
 glimpse of his mother in a new light; but he felt 
 too ill even to watch her hurrying to the end of 
 the platform. His head ached so violently in the 
 sulphurous station air that he wouldn't have minded 
 much if some one, say his next-door neighbour in 
 the train, a city clerk who smoked the most manly 
 tobacco, had relieved him of the half-sovereign, the 
 last gift of all, that he clutched mechanically in 
 his left-hand trouser pocket or if the porters, in 
 the fine free way they have, had smashed all the 
 jampots in the playbox so obstrusively white and 
 new, with 
 
 E. INGLEBY 
 115 
 
 in black lettering on the lid. 
 
 The rest of that journey he had been too prostrate 
 and lethargic to realise. Somewhere the shouting 
 of a familiar word had bundled him out of his
 
 6 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 corner; a porter whom he had tipped fumblingly 
 had bundled him into a cab which smelt of straw, 
 and at last the martial-looking personage who re- 
 ceived him at the grand entrance had conveyed 
 him up a broad flight of stone stairs and along a 
 corridor that echoed their two pairs of foot-steps, 
 to the housemaster's room, where, in an atmosphere 
 of mellow honeydew, Mr. Selby sat at his desk, 
 trifling with a bath-list of the big dormitory. 
 Ingleby sat at one end of a luxurious sofa, feeling 
 very sick. It seemed as though he could never 
 escape from the smell of tobacco. At the other end 
 of the sofa sat another boy, perhaps three years 
 older than Edwin. He was tall for his age and 
 inclined to be fat. His feet were small and shapely, 
 and their smallness accentuated the heavy build 
 of his shoulders, so that the whole boy seemed to 
 taper downwards on the lines of a peg-top. He 
 had a broad face, covered with freckles, regular but 
 undistinguished features, and eyes, rather wide 
 apart, of a peculiar cold and light blue. His hair 
 was crisp and sandy; his whole get-up a little 
 dandiacal within the limits of black and gray. He 
 kept on fingering silver coins, that jingled together 
 faintly in the depths of his pocket ; perhaps he was 
 counting them in the dark ; perhaps he was merely 
 fidgeting. 
 
 Mr. Selby looked up from his bath-list. 
 
 "Well, Griffin, and what is your pleasure?" 
 
 "Letter from father, sir." 
 
 A letter from father would need an answer. Mr. 
 Selby, although an expert in the tortuous psy- 
 chology of parents, was a lazy man. He sighed as
 
 MURDERER'S CROSS 7 
 
 he opened it. "H'm . . . No games? You don't look 
 particularly ill, Griffin." 
 
 "Doctor said I was growing too fast, sir ... 
 something about my heart." Griffin's manners were 
 irreproachable. 
 
 Mr. Selby smiled. 
 
 "Very well, Griffin, very well. I will speak to 
 the head-master about you. And who is this 
 miserable weed?" 
 
 There had been no break in the drawl of Mr. 
 Selby's voice with this change of subject, and Edwin 
 did not hear, or heard without understanding. 
 Griffin shook him by the shoulder. He lurched for- 
 ward like a creature coming out of a cellar into 
 day light. 
 
 "Ingleby, sir," he said. 
 
 "Ingleby . . . Oh, yes. Let me see. You won't 
 need to take the placing exam, to-morrow because 
 of your scholarship papers. You'll be in the lower 
 fourth. So Griffin will look after you. Do you 
 hear, Griffin? I think Ingleby will be in your 
 form. You are not overwhelmingly likely to get a 
 move, are you?" 
 
 Griffin murmured "No, sir." 
 
 "Then you can conduct this Ingleby to D dormi- 
 tory, Griffin." 
 
 Griffin whispered "Come on," and walked ahead 
 down the length of the corridor and another flight 
 of stairs to a room of immense length, with white- 
 washed walls, along which were ranged as many 
 as thirty red-blanketed beds. Down the centre of 
 the dormitory a trastled table of well-scoured wood
 
 8 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 held a double row of wash-hand basins and soap- 
 dishes. 
 
 "There you are," said Griffin, in a very off-hand 
 way. "You'd better bag a bed." 
 
 "Which one is mine, please?" Edwin asked. His 
 head was aching so furiously that he could have 
 lain down on the floor. 
 
 "I've told you, you've got to bag one. Don't you 
 hear? You'd better go and ask that man over there. 
 Try the next one to his." 
 
 That man over there was a stumpy boy with the 
 face of a hyena and a shock of black hair, who 
 scowled at Ingleby's approach. 
 
 "Here, get away. You can't come here. I don't 
 want any new kids near me. Keep him to yourself, 
 Griffin." 
 
 Ingleby was thrown violently into Griffin's arms, 
 and then buffeted backwards and forwards like a 
 shuttlecock between them. This game proved to 
 be such excellent fun that wherever he sought a 
 bed on which to lay his things it was continued by 
 his immediate neighbours. He was. greenly pale 
 and beginning to cry when a tall, dark boy, wear- 
 ing glasses, arrived and made straight for the group 
 that surrounded him. 
 
 "Here's Layton," whispered some one. 
 
 "What's this?" he asked. "A new boy? What's 
 your name?" 
 
 "Ingleby." 
 
 "What's the matter?" 
 
 "They won't let me find a bed." 
 
 "Come along down this end, then." He moved 
 majestically to the end of the dormitory nearest
 
 MURDERER'S CROSS 9- 
 
 to the door and pointed to a vacant bedstead.. 
 "There you are," he said. He was kindly without 
 the least trace of unbending. Ingleby took him for 
 a prefect ; already he had received the canonisation, 
 of heroism. He stood and watched Edwin spread 
 out his nightshirt on the bed. At this moment the 
 climax of his migraine arrived. Edwin was sick. 
 
 Layton's lips curled. "Dirty little skunk," he- 
 said as he hurried away. 
 
 A slipper, cleverly aimed from the other end of 
 the room, caught Ingleby full on his burning cheek.. 
 The pain seemed to blind him. 
 
 And a skunk, in spite of himself, he remained, 
 for small boys are as persistently unintelligent as> 
 parrots in their memory for names. Ingleby's. 
 "skunkhood" became a tradition that he never 
 wholly lived down during his first years at St. 
 Luke's. In them he experienced all the inevitable- 
 qualms of homesickness, although even these were 
 more tolerable than the physical qualms which had 
 complicated his arrival, for they passed quickly 
 in the excitement of a new life, the adoption of 
 new standards, the spring of new ambitions. It 
 was a thousand times unfortunate that he should 
 have made such a sensational debut, that chance 
 should have included such circumstances as Griffin 
 and a sick-headache in his first day; for all that 
 was instinct in the boy rebelled against the 
 category in which he found himself placed, the 
 definition of his status that had been hastily formu- 
 lated by a few small boys, and almost tacitly ac- 
 cepted by the masters. 
 
 To begin with, he had very few of the attributes
 
 io THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 of the skunk. He was neither dirty nor under- 
 sized : indeed he had a nice instinct for personal 
 cleanliness, and all the slim, balanced beauty of 
 a young boy's figure. He was far from unintelli- 
 gent though this counts for little enough in the 
 schedules of precedence at school. It amounted to 
 this : he was not used to the company of other boys ; 
 he had never played games; he had made himself 
 objectionable on his first night in the dormitory 
 and Layton had called him a skunk. Griffin saw 
 to the rest, seconded by the lad with the hyena face, 
 who bore the illustrious name of Douglas. Strange- 
 ly enough no one but Ingleby seemed to have tapped 
 the romance in the hyena-faced's name. Setting 
 out to find any tokens of Chevy Chase beneath the 
 black mop, he was caught staring in Hall, and as 
 a proper retribution for such insolence, subjected 
 to the pain and indignity of a "tight six" with a 
 gym shoe, his head wedged in two stocks of Mr. 
 Griffin's thighs. New boys of his own age, and 
 smaller, seeing this exhibition, formed a very low 
 estimate of Ingleby. They shuddered also at the 
 knowledge that he had been heard to ask the dif- 
 ference between a drop-kick and a punt. 
 
 This isolation, except for purposes of chastise- 
 ment, weighed heavily on Edwin. He didn't wish 
 to be different from others, although he felt that 
 his mind was somehow of a painfully foreign text- 
 ure. He knew that things somehow struck him 
 differently ... but he was so far from taking this 
 as a mark of superiority that he was heartily 
 ashamed of it. His whole ambition was towards 
 the normal ; he tried vigorously to suppress imagi-
 
 MURDERER'S CROSS u 
 
 nation, humour, all the inconvenient things with 
 which he had been cursed ; to starve them, to destroy 
 them. He became studious of the ways of normal- 
 ity. Griffin and the noble Douglas were handy 
 exemplars; Layton, the head of the house, an un- 
 attainable ideal. Layton, indeed, was something of 
 a variant ; but Layton, by means of his slim skull's 
 capacity for retaining facts and an ingratiating 
 piety, had passed beyond the pale of everyday en- 
 deavour. Edwin longed to be normal, and they 
 wouldn't let him. He cultivated assiduously the 
 use of the fashionable slang; and that, of course, 
 was easy. He whipped up an interest in outdoor 
 games; played his very hardest in the ordinary 
 house football, and even volunteered to take part 
 in the Soccer games organised on fag-days for small 
 boys by Mr. Selby, who nursed a lazy grudge 
 against the Rugby Code. "The Miserable Weeds," 
 they were called, enshrining his favourite epithet. 
 But though he plunged out of school every morning 
 to practise place-kicking in the fields before din- 
 ner, Ingleby was not destined to shine in sport. 
 His habit of dropping off to sleep between fitful 
 bursts of brilliance almost caused him to be up- 
 rooted from Mr. Selby's plantation of weeds. This 
 didn't worry him much, because Soccer was not 
 popular; but after two trials in the house third, 
 which the baleful Douglas captained, he was de- 
 graded to the scratch side known as Small Boys; 
 and even here the scrum extinguished a talent that 
 might have shone in the three-quarter line. 
 
 And since he failed in every endeavour to attain 
 normality, whether by devotion to games or by
 
 12 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 those attempts which he made to prove that he 
 was neither "coxy" nor "pi," by a retiring manner 
 and a foul tongue, he began to crawl back into his 
 shell, nursing a passionate hatred, not unmixed 
 with envy, for all those people whom he couldn't 
 hope to be like. And so, in a little time, this danger- 
 ous humiliation turned to a sort of pride. It pleased 
 him to count himself their superior even when he 
 was most downtrodden. His form master had re- 
 cently been boring the class with a little disserta- 
 tion on Marcus Aurelius. Edwin became a Stoic, 
 spending his days in far corners of the box-room, 
 munching a slowly dwindling store of biscuits. 
 Once Griffin caught him with his locker door open 
 and pinioned him against the benches while 
 Douglas made free with his Petits-Beurres to the 
 rest of the box-room. For such contingencies as 
 this the Emperor's system of philosophy seemed 
 hardly adequate. 
 
 Most of all he dreaded the dormitory; for here 
 the abandonment of clothes laid him open to partic- 
 ularly painful forms of oppression; the shock and 
 horror of bedclothes ragged just as he was falling 
 off to sleep; the numbing swing of a pillow, the 
 lancinating flick of wet towels; Oh! a hell of a 
 life, only to be terminated by the arrival of Layton, 
 who had the privilege of sitting up till eleven, with 
 black rings round his spectacled eyes. He was read- 
 ing for a scholarship at Cambridge. Then Ingleby 
 would really get off to sleep, or sometimes, if he 
 were too excited, watch the moonlight, broken by 
 the stone mullions of the windows, whiten the long 
 washing-table and cast blue shadows so intense that
 
 MURDERER'S CROSS 13 
 
 they heightened the bareness of the dormitory; or 
 else he would listen to the harsh breathing of 
 Douglas, who slept with his mouth open, and won- 
 der what all those heavy sleepers were dreaming 
 of, or if they dreamed at all. And then his own 
 magic casements were opened. 
 
 At St. Luke's he had discovered the trick quite 
 a new thing for him of historical dreaming. His 
 form were busy with the age of the Stuarts, under 
 the direction of a master named Leeming, a mild- 
 eyed cleric, rather shy of boys and feverishly grate- 
 ful whenever he sprung a response to his own en- 
 thusiasms. 
 
 Ingleby drank deep of the period's romance, and 
 this heady wine coloured his dreams. He would 
 dream sometimes of the tenanted oak of Boscobel, 
 watching with agony the movements of the Round- 
 head searchers; sometimes he would stand elbow- 
 ing in the crowd about that scaffold at Whitehall, 
 when the martyr king stepped out. The man at 
 his left hand had been eating garlic. Ha! a 
 Frenchman. One of those musketeers! . . . He 
 would tremble with delight. He wished that he 
 could tell Mr. Leeming of his dreams, but they were 
 far too precious to risk being bruised by laughter 
 or unconcern. All night long this queer panoramic 
 rubbish would go seething through his brain, until, 
 at six-fifteen, one of the waiters swung a harsh bell 
 outside the dormitory door and he would turn over, 
 trying to piece together the thin stuff that ita 
 clangour had so suddenly broken, until the ten-foil 
 rang, and the rush for early school began. He
 
 14 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 greV to love the winter terms because the darkness 
 lasted longer. 
 
 But he did write to his mother about it. Always 
 on Sunday mornings the sergeant would come in 
 with a letter from her, full of the strangely remote 
 news of home; how the garden was looking, what 
 Aunt Laura was doing, and how they talked of 
 felling the elm-trees in the lane. Sometimes, with 
 the lavishness of an angel, she would put a couple 
 of penny stamps inside for his reply. The odd 
 stamp would buy a stick of chocolate or a packet 
 of nougat at the tuck shop. And in these letters 
 she rose, quite unexpectedly, to the recitation of 
 his dreams. "How lovely it must be for you," she 
 wrote. "When you come home for the holidays at 
 Christmas we will read some of Scott's novels aloud 
 Waverley and Nigel, and that will give you some- 
 thing more to dream about." He began to realise 
 what he hadn't seen before: that his mother was 
 really a wonderful playfellow much better, when 
 he came to think of it, than any of the boys. He 
 would have so much to explain to her. . . . "Oh, 
 you dear, you are lovely !" he wrote in reply. 
 
 And then one day, that sneak Douglas, fooling 
 about in the dormitory with Edwin's toothbrush, 
 happened to see the words that were faintly printed 
 on the ivory handle: 
 
 INGLBBY, CHEMIST, HALESBY. 
 
 "Oho," he said. 
 
 At breakfast, after a propitiatory but futile help- 
 ing of jam from Edwin's pot, he broke the glad 
 news to Griffin.
 
 MURDERER'S CROSS 15 
 
 "Ingleby's father's a chemist, Griff." 
 
 "Then that's why he's such a skunk, Duggy. Is 
 it true, Ingleby?" 
 
 "Yes. He's a chemist." 
 
 "Then he isn't a gentleman." 
 
 "Of course he's a gentleman." 
 
 "Not if he's in trade. They oughtn't to have sent 
 you to school here. It's a bally shame." 
 
 That same afternoon Edwin was poring over a 
 letter at his desk in Big School. His mother al- 
 ways told him to keep her letters. "Some day you 
 may like to look at them," she said. He was read- 
 ing this letter for the tenth time to see if he could 
 extract some last scrapings of the atmosphere of 
 home which it had brought him. 
 
 "Who's that letter from? . . . Girl?" said Griffin 
 rudely. 
 
 "A lady." 
 
 "What!" 
 
 "My mother." 
 
 "Christ! Your mother isn't a lady, or she 
 wouldn't have married a chemist ... or be your 
 mother." 
 
 And then Edwin jumped up, overturning the 
 form on which he had been sitting, and lashed out 
 at Griffin's face. He wanted to smash the freckled 
 thing. He only caught the boy's cheek with the flat 
 of his hand, and then, after a second of dazed won- 
 der at his own achievement, he rushed out of Big 
 School, across the Quad, and up that white, dust- 
 felted road to the downs.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 GOLJ)EN MEDIOCRITY 
 
 OF course he got his thrashing in return ; but, in 
 the end, he found himself the gainer by that 
 unthinkable outburst. The incident had been noted, 
 and there were those who relished the blow to 
 Griffin's prestige, a blow which no recriminatory 
 lickings could efface. Edwin assured himself that 
 he had that day lighted such a candle in England 
 as should never be put out. It seemed, indeed, as 
 though the affair had revealed to some of his own 
 classmates that intellectual superiority which they 
 had overlooked before ; and, in particular, it made 
 the basis of a friendship between himself and one 
 of his rivals, a boy named Widdup, who combined 
 with a head for mathematics Edwin's blank 
 despair a certain proficiency in games. Widdup 
 disliked Griffin. 
 
 "Great beefy beast," he said. "If they'd make 
 him play footer and sweat some of the fat off him 
 he'd have been a bit quicker on you. He wasn't 
 half waxy about it. He hates being laughed 
 at. . . 
 
 And so, as the terms slipped by, St. Luke's ceased 
 to be a purgatory. Edwin contracted certain timid 
 
 16
 
 GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY 17 
 
 friendships as this with Widdup and adored a 
 series of perfectly ordinary prefects. He shook 
 down into his proper place in the scheme of things, 
 and after that nobody took much notice of him. 
 Even the Griffin-Douglas coalition, who never for- 
 gave, troubled him very little. Certain outbursts 
 of persecution he took as a matter of course; such 
 was the teaching of history ; but the ways of these 
 two were now widely divergent from those in which 
 he trod. The dormitory was the only place in 
 which they inevitably met, for he had managed to 
 move his seat in Hall some way from that of Griffin ; 
 and in chapel, the only other place they had in 
 common, he was safe. 
 
 The friendship with Widdup notably ripened. 
 They were both members of the same branch of the 
 Natural History Society, the one that was labelled 
 astronomical. The subject was unpopular, for its 
 pursuit was nocturnal and made no exciting appeal 
 to the hunting instinct of boys. The section met 
 every fortnight in the room of one of the mathe- 
 matical masters. And since they met at night, they 
 managed to escape second Prep. Their president, 
 Mr. Heal, was a rather melancholy performer on 
 the flute, and Edwin, generally contriving to turn 
 up some minutes before the meeting began, would 
 stand at the door listening to the innocent gentle- 
 man playing to himself unaccompanied folk-tunes 
 that he had collected in the holidays. At the first 
 sound of a door-knock Heal would unscrew his flute 
 and pack it into a case lined with puce-coloured 
 plush ; but it seemed as though an afterglow of 
 tenderness still lingered on his unusually dull fea-
 
 'i8 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 ii 
 tures. As for astronomy, they never got much 
 
 farther than the mere names of constellations and 
 their figures, although Widdup often asked ques- 
 tions which almost tapped the mathematical mas- 
 iter's subject. These adventures were discouraged, 
 for Mr. Heal had grown to hate mathematics. But 
 they did learn to find their way about the paths 
 of the sky, and often, on frosty winter evenings, 
 when the clear vault above the downs was like jet, 
 Edwin and Widdup would walk up and down the 
 Quad and imagine that they could feel the heave 
 of the spinning world, while they watched Capella 
 scale the dome of sky. And once, when he had 
 come to the master's room a little early on the night 
 of the section meeting, Mr. Heal cleared his throat 
 and, taking Edwin by the ear, began to read from 
 an olive-green book that he held in his hand. He 
 read atrociously. "How do you like this?" he said. 
 "H'm?" He said "H'm" with a little snarl in it. 
 i "The Dog Star and Aldebaran, pointing to the 
 restless Pleiades, were half up the southern sky, 
 and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous con- 
 stellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it 
 swung itself forth above the rim of the landscape ; 
 Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were al- 
 most on the meridian: the barren and gloomy 
 square of Pegasus was creeping round to the North- 
 West; far away through the plantation Vega 
 sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless 
 trees, and Cassiopeia's chair stood daintily poised 
 in the uppermost boughs." 
 
 Edwin thought it was "fine." 
 
 "Better than the Story of the Heavens f" asked
 
 GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY 19 
 
 Mr. Heal. "Come, come, Ingleby . . . surely not?" 
 
 "Bather, sir," said Edwin. 
 
 Mr. Heal shut the book. "The barren and gloomy 
 square of Pegasus," he murmured to himself. And 
 all the rest of that evening Edwin found himself 
 remembering the phrase. The bareness and the 
 gloom of Pegasus had never struck him before ; and 
 now, at a sudden suggestion, the whole atmosphere 
 of the sky had changed ; the vague heavens became 
 habitable to his fancy; new and immense territory 
 opened before him. . . . 
 
 He told Widdup what he remembered of the pas- 
 sage that Heal had read. 
 
 "Poor old Tommy," said Widdup compassionate- 
 ly. "It isn't an exact square at all. It's an irregular 
 quadrilateral, and I don't see anything gloomy 
 about it. Stars aren't gloomy anyway. Look how 
 they sparkle. Look at Vega." 
 
 Above the gable of the swimming bath that won- 
 derful star throbbed white. 
 
 n 
 
 In the Lent term they both had measles and woke 
 with swollen eyes to find each other side by side. 
 In the same ward at the Sanatorium was Layton's 
 successor, Payne, a thawed, thin, almost unfamiliar 
 Payne ; and while they swam upon the first buoyant 
 spirits of convalescence, the sheer hulk of Griffin 
 was hove in, in the snivelling misery of the early 
 stages. Edwin thought that Griffin had never 
 looked so beastly, and rejoiced in the pig's humilia- 
 tion ; but when, at last, Griffin recovered he found 
 his ancient victim a handy plaything, and for want
 
 20 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 of anything better to do attempted to seduce Wid- 
 dup from Edwin's friendship. Edwin never quite 
 forgave Widdup his defection ; and when they were 
 all better and back in school again he found that 
 he still had to avoid Griffin on whom the habit of 
 persecution had been regrafted. It seemed such a 
 pity ... he thought he had outgrown all that sort 
 of thing. 
 
 And now he hated Griffin for a new reason. 
 While they were together in the Sanatorium, after 
 the departure of Payne, Griffin had spoken boast- 
 fully of his relations with one of the "Skivvies" 
 whose morning task was the making of beds in D 
 dormitory. It appeared that Griffin had met her 
 first by accident, and later by appointment, and 
 he himself described her as "very hot pastry." He 
 was familiar with certain shops in the neighbour- 
 hood of Shaftesbury Avenue, which made per- 
 suasion easy. To Edwin, whose life at home had 
 kept him in ignorance of all that a boy of fifteen 
 ought to know, everything sounded horrible, and 
 he said so. He remembered the look of the girl 
 quite well : rather anaemic with black hair and a 
 pretty oval face. Griffin and Widdup howled over 
 Ms innocence, and began to instruct him in the 
 "origins of life." All these things came as a great 
 shock to Edwin. He felt a passionate conviction 
 that the other two were fooling him. Unfortunately 
 his father had never employed a coachman. 
 
 "I don't believe a bit of it," he said with tears 
 in his eyes. 
 
 "You silly kid," said Widdup. "Everybody 
 knows it's true."
 
 GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY 21 
 
 "I don't believe my father would do a thing like 
 that," cried Edwin. 
 
 It seemed suddenly as if the world had become a 
 gross and horrible planet. The fetters of earth 
 were galling his limbs. He felt a sudden immense 
 yearning for the coolness and cleanliness of stellar 
 space. If only he could pass the rest of his life in 
 the great square of Pegasus ! . . . And he was con- 
 soled by the assurance that in heaven, at any rate, 
 there was no marrying or giving in marriage. . . . 
 
 m 
 
 Next term, to his great joy, he was moved up 
 into the Upper Fourth, and had for his form-master 
 the gentle Mr. Leeming, a fat and cheerful cleric 
 with clean-shaven cheeks that shone like those of 
 a trumpet-blowing cherub. He was very short- 
 sighted, rather lazy, and intensely grateful for the 
 least spark of intelligence to be found in his class. 
 Edwin soon attracted him by his history and essays. 
 His mother had fulfilled her promise of reading 
 The Fortunes of Nigel aloud in the holidays, and, 
 as luck would have it again, the Upper Fourth 
 were supposed to be concentrating on the early 
 Stuarts. To the bulk of the form the period was a 
 vast and almost empty chamber like the big school- 
 room, inhabited by one or two stiff figures, devital- 
 ised by dates a very dreary place. But to Edwin 
 it was crowded with the swaggerers of Alsatia, the 
 bravoes of Whitehall, with prentices, and penniless 
 Scotchmen, and all the rest of Scott's gallant com- 
 pany.
 
 22 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Have any of you read Nigel?" Mr. Leeming 
 asked the class. 
 
 "I have, sir," said. Edwin shyly. 
 
 "I have already gathered so, Ingleby. Has any- 
 body else read, it?" 
 
 Silence. "I think I shall ask the head master 
 to set it to the Middle School as a holiday task," 
 said Mr. Leeming. 
 
 Thus narrowly did Edwin escape the disaster of 
 having Scott spoiled for him. 
 
 Mr. Leeming was the master in charge of the 
 library, and Edwin began to spend the long winter 
 lock-ups in this room. Most of the boys who fre- 
 quented it came there for the bound volumes of the 
 Illustrated London News, with their pictures of the 
 Franco-Prussian War, Irish evictions, the launch- 
 ing of the Great Eastern, and mild excitements of 
 that kind. Edwin found himself drawn early to 
 the bookcase that held the poets. To his great joy 
 he discovered that the key of his playbox fitted the 
 case; and so he would sometimes sneak into the 
 room at odd moments in the day and carry away 
 with him certain slim green volumes from the top 
 shelf. These were Johnson's Lives of the Poets, 
 together with their Complete Works. He had been 
 attracted to them in the first place by the memory 
 of a polished urn, about as graceful in contour as 
 a carpenter's baluster, that stood in a neglected 
 corner of the parish church at home. This urn was 
 encircled by a scroll which bore these directions : 
 
 "O smite thy breast and drop a tear 
 For know thy Shenstone's dust lies here."
 
 GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY 23 
 
 A palpable falsehood; for Edwin had already dis- 
 covered the tomb of the elegist in another part of 
 the churchyard, elbowed almost into the path by 
 that of a Victorian ironmonger. 
 
 But it was something to have been born in the 
 same parish as a poet ; and Edwin, at an age when 
 everything is a matter of taking sides, ranged him- 
 self boldly with Shenstone and pitted his judgment 
 against that of Johnson, who rather sniffed at the 
 poet's unreality, and quoted Gray's letters in his 
 despite. The crook and the pipe and the kid were 
 to Edwin very real things, as one supposes they 
 were almost real to the age of the pastoral ballad; 
 and the atmosphere was the more vital to him be- 
 cause he dimly remembered the sight of the poet's 
 lawns frosted on misty mornings of winter, the 
 sighing of the Leasowes beeches, and the damp 
 drippings of the winter woods. Thus he absorbed 
 not only Shenstone but Shenstone's contempora- 
 ries: men like Dyer and Lyttleton and Akenside, 
 and since he had no other standard than that of 
 Johnson he classed them by the same lights as their 
 contemporaries. Brooding among Augustan poet- 
 asters in the library Mr. Leeming found him. 
 
 "Poetry, Ingleby?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Let me see? Prior? Ah, that was a little age, 
 Ingleby ! The Augustans were not great men, and 
 some of them were very coarse, too. Have you 
 read the Idylls of the King?" 
 
 Mr. Leeming introduced Ingleby to the great 
 Victorian, for he himself was an ardent believer in 
 all the Galahad nonsense, and was astonished at
 
 24 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Ingleby's ignorance of the school in which those 
 cherubic cheeks had expanded. He was very fond 
 of talking about purity and conceived it his duty 
 to keep his class spotless. In the Lent Term, when 
 the form were working through the catechism, his 
 glosses were most apparent. The explanation of 
 some passages troubled him. "From fornication 
 . . . that's a bad thing," he would mutter. 
 
 And once having put Edwin in the way of per- 
 fection he was not going to look back. A week or 
 two later he asked him how he was getting on with 
 Tennyson. "Who is your favourite character in 
 the Idylls?" he asked. 
 
 Edwin glowed. "Oh, sir, Launcelot or Bors." 
 
 "But what about Sir Percivale? 'Sir Percivale 
 whom Arthur and his knighthood called "The 
 Pure," ' " he quoted in the Oxford variety of 
 Cockney. 
 
 "I don't know, sir," stammered Edwin. r< They 
 seem somehow made differently from me." 
 
 "Arthur," said Mr. Leeming impressively, "has 
 a great and wonderful prototype whom we should 
 all try to imitate no matter how distantly." 
 
 Edwin, who had read the dedication, wondered 
 why Mr. Leeming lowered his voice like that in 
 speaking of the Prince Consort. 
 
 In some ways he was grateful to Mr. Leeming 
 for superintending his literary diet, but he soon 
 detected a sameness in the fare. One day he had 
 got hold of a big Maroon edition of George Gordon, 
 Lord Byron, with romantic engravings of the New- 
 stead ruins and the poet's own handsome head, and 
 Mr. Leeming had swooped down on him, faintly
 
 GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY 25 
 
 flushed. "Lord Byron," he had said, "was not a 
 good man. Have you read Hiawatha f" And he 
 reached down Longfellow . . . Longfellow in green 
 boards decorated with a geometrical design in gold, 
 and irritating to the touch. 
 
 At last Edwin was almost driven from the library 
 by Mr. Leeming's attentions. He never read Byron 
 because the books were too big to be sneaked out of 
 the room beneath a buttoned coat; but he did read, 
 without distinction, nearly every volume of poetry 
 that he could smuggle out in this way. He read 
 these books in second "prep" when Layton was por- 
 ing over Plato at his high desk, when Widdup was 
 working out the cricket averages of the second 
 eleven, and Griffin was looking for spicy bits in the 
 Bible. And as second prep was generally a period 
 of great sleepiness since the boys had risen so- 
 early, and by that time of evening the air of the 
 house classroom had been breathed and rebreathed 
 so many times as to be almost narcotic, the poetry 
 that he read became interwoven with the strands 
 of his dreams. Dreamy and exalted, poppy- 
 drenched, all poetry seemed at this time; and it 
 was to intensify this feeling of sensuous languor 
 that he so often chose the poems of Keats. 
 
 In an introduction to the volume he had dis- 
 covered that Keats had been an apothecary, and 
 this filled him with a strange glow; for since the 
 unforgettable incident of the toothbrush he had 
 been (against his will) diffident about his father. 
 He determined never again to be ashamed of the 
 shop. When he read of "rich lucent syrops tinct 
 with cinnamon," he remembered a great cut-glass
 
 26 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 bottle of some cough linctus that glowed like a ruby 
 in the shop window when the gas was lit at night. 
 In other ways he tapped a good deal of the romance 
 of his father's calling. He remembered a drawer 
 labelled "Dragon's blood" . . . the very next best 
 thing to a dragon's teeth with their steely harvest. 
 He recalled a whole pomander-full of provocative 
 scents; he shuddered at the remembered names of 
 poisons, and other names that suggested alchemy. 
 He almost wanted to tell Mr. Leeming when next 
 they spoke together, of his father's trade, but he 
 wasn't quite sure if Mr. Leeming approved of Keats. 
 It was not likely that he would see very much more 
 of this master, for he was high up in his form and 
 certain to get a move into the Lower Fifth at the 
 end of the term. In some ways he was not sorry; 
 for the signs of Mr. Leeming's affection, the warm 
 encircling arm, the pervading scent of honeydew, 
 and the na'ive glances of those watery eyes were 
 embarrassing. Before they parted Mr. Leeming 
 showed his intentions more clearly. 
 
 "Would you like to learn Hebrew, Ingleby?" he 
 said. 
 
 Edwin would have liked to learn Hebrew but 
 not out of school hours. He hesitated. 
 
 "I thought you might some day wish to take Holy 
 Orders, and I should be glad to teach you." 
 
 "I will ask my father, sir," said Edwin modestly. 
 
 That was one of the penalties of having interest- 
 ing eyes.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE GREEN TREES . 
 
 THE holidays that followed this term were the 
 most marvellous. From first to last they were 
 bathed in the atmosphere of mellow gold that 
 makes beautiful some evenings of spring, all tender 
 and bird-haunted; and his mother, too, was more 
 wonderful than she had ever been before. On the 
 very first evening when she had come upstairs to 
 tuck him in and to kiss him good-night, she sat on 
 the bedstead leaning over him with both her arms 
 round his neck and whispering secrets to him. Very 
 extraordinary they were; and as she told him, her 
 lips were soft on his cheek. She said that only a 
 month before she had expected to have a baby sister 
 for him she had always longed so much to have a 
 baby girl and before the first jealousy that had 
 flamed up into his mind had died away, she told 
 him how the baby had been born dead, and how 
 terribly she had felt the disappointment. He won- 
 dered, in the dark, if she were crying. 
 
 "But now that I've got my other baby again," 
 she said, "I am going to forget all about it. We'll 
 be ever so happy by ourselves, Eddie, won't we? 
 In the evenings when father is down at business 
 
 27
 
 28 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 we will read together. This time we'll take turns 
 reading, for you're growing such a big boy. And 
 we'll go wonderful walks, only not very far, because 
 Dr. Thornhouse says I'm not strong enough yet. 
 I want you to tell me everything everything you 
 do and think about at school, because you're all I've 
 got now. And you're part of me, Eddie, really." 
 At this she clutched him passionately. 
 
 For a moment Edwin was nearly crying, and 
 then, suddenly, he saw another side of it: her ex- 
 pressed feelings were somehow foreign to him and 
 made him ashamed, as did Mr. Leeming's watery 
 eyes when he talked about Arthur's prototype. In 
 the face of this eager emotion he felt himself un- 
 responsive and a little consciously superior and 
 male. He didn't want to feel superior to his mother 
 1 but there it was! Even at breakfast next morn- 
 ing he was shy, and it surprised him when he saw 
 her clear gray-green eyes wholly free from any an- 
 swering shame. So unconscious was she of his 
 scrutiny that he went on looking at her really 
 looked at her for the first time in his life. And 
 looking, he began to differentiate this new being, 
 so fragile and eager and girlish, from the old tra- 
 ditional mother whom he had loved and accepted 
 as unquestionably as the miles of blue sky above 
 him. He discovered that she was a woman, remem- 
 bered Griffin, and blushed. 
 
 "What a colour you've got, boy," said his father. 
 
 And it struck him also that she was smaller than 
 she used to be. 
 
 "Isn't mother rather thin?" he asked his father. 
 
 Mr. Ingleby smiled, and in his grave, shy way
 
 THE GREEN TREES ... 29 
 
 put out his hand to touch hers as it lay on the 
 table. 
 
 "You silly boy," said his mother. 
 
 But her denials did not satisfy him. He knew, 
 for certain, that she was different from the mother 
 whom he had known. He noticed, too, that she 
 was not allowed to eat the same food as the rest 
 of them. Sometimes she would forget their rules 
 and taste things that were forbidden, and then 
 his father would gravely reprove her. Instead of 
 bread she was ordered to eat a sort of biscuit which 
 Edwin's curiosity made him anxious to taste. He 
 was disappointed; for they had no taste at all. 
 "What are they made of?" he asked; and they told 
 him "Gluten. . . . That's the sticky part of wheat 
 without starch." 
 
 And yet, in spite of her illness, they had never 
 been happier together. The new intimacy, that 
 had begun with her painful confidences of the first 
 evening, continued. In particular she told him of 
 the difficulties which she was having with his 
 Aunt Laura, her sister, who had lately married 
 a small manufacturer and come to live near 
 Halesby. The story was an old one and rather 
 unhappy. It began years and years ago in the 
 days of his mother's childhood, days that she re- 
 membered so unhappily that she never really 
 wanted to recall them. He had never before known 
 anything about his mother's childhood. He had 
 just taken her for granted in her present surround- 
 ings. Kow, in the long firelight evenings, she told 
 him how her forefathers and his had once been 
 great people, living in a stone border castle high
 
 30 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 above the Monmouth marches, and how, with the 
 lapse of time and the decay of the bloody age in 
 which their violence had prospered, the family had 
 fallen from its estate and lost its lands; how the 
 tower of the castle had been broken and under its 
 shadow a farmhouse had arisen in which they had 
 lived and scraped what income they could make 
 from a little valley-land and many acres of moun- 
 tain pasture. Now there were none of them left 
 there; but still, where the tracks grew stony and 
 the orchards began to thin away, the walls of the 
 house crumbled patiently under the shadow of over- 
 hanging mountain-ridges. "Your grandfather was 
 the last of them, Eddie," she said. "He was a farm- 
 er." And for a moment consciousness of Griffin 
 and his social prejudices invaded the picture. She 
 told him of spring days, when the clouds would 
 come sweeping out of England on the back of the 
 east wind and be hurried like the frothy comb of 
 a wave against the mountains, and how they would 
 then break asunder on the darens and fall back in 
 a drenching mist over the-lonely house by Felindre, 
 and for days the farm would be islanded in fog. 
 But on the summit above them, the sheep were 
 grazing in the sunlight and the buzzards hunting, 
 and in the misty lowlands beneath lay orchards 
 full of faint-scented apple blossom. "We were not 
 the only decayed family there," she said. "There 
 were others, and greater such as the Grosmonts 
 of Trecastel. But old Mr. Grosmont had two sons, 
 and father only had three daughters. I was a sort 
 of ugly duckling, Eddie; they never really liked 
 me. And I was never happy there."
 
 THE GREEN TREES ... 31 
 
 "I think I must be like you, darling," said Edwin. 
 "I had a rotten time at St. Luke's at first. Even 
 now I don't quite seem to be ... I don't know 
 . . . ordinary." 
 
 She smiled and kissed him. 
 
 "My father was a dear," she said, "but mother 
 really hated me. Your Aunt Carrie was much 
 cleverer and better-looking than me, and so they 
 always made a fuss of her and left me to myself. 
 She had all the advantages. You see, I suppose 
 they thought she was worth it. She was a beautiful, 
 selfish creature, with the most lovely hair." 
 
 "I'm sure it wasn't lovelier than yours, darling," 
 said Edwin. 
 
 "Then she went and threw herself away, as 
 mother called it, on a man she met at a hunt ball 
 in Hereford. And she died, poor thing, with her 
 first baby. It was an awful blow to mother. It 
 made her more horrid to me than ever. I suppose 
 she found me such a poor substitute. If it had 
 been me it wouldn't have mattered. I went to 
 keep house for your great-uncle in North Brom- 
 wich; and there I met your father. I have never 
 been really happy. You see, nobody had ever taken 
 any notice of me before that. Then mother began 
 to put all the hopes that had been disappointed in 
 Carrie on Aunt Laura. Nothing was too good for 
 her. They spoiled her, and spoiled her. It was 
 worse when father died and mother was left to do 
 what she liked with the money. And when your 
 Aunt Laura came here and met Mr. Fellows and 
 married him, your grandmother blamed me. I 
 couldn't help it ... and in any case Mr. Fellows
 
 32 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 is an awfully nice, quiet man. I did all I could 
 for her, too, getting her house ready and that sort 
 of thing, and now she's so dreadfully difficult. I 
 suppose she's really annoyed to think that she 
 hasn't done better for herself with all her ad- 
 vantages of education, and just lets it off on me. It's 
 dreadfully awkward, Eddie. I think she's even 
 jealous that their house isn't as big as ours. I 
 simply daren't tell your father the sort of things 
 she's said. If he knew one of them he'd never for- 
 give her. He's like that about anything that affects 
 me." 
 
 "I should be, too," said Edwin. 
 
 "Would you?" she smiled. 
 
 "Yes. . . . You've made me hate Aunt Laura 
 already." 
 
 "You mustn't feel like that, Eddie. She's young, 
 and she's been spoilt. It isn't all her fault, prob- 
 ably." 
 
 "If it were any one but you I wouldn't mind. 
 But you're so wonderful." He loved to look into 
 her eyes when she loved him. 
 
 n 
 
 After this they had wonderful times together. 
 In the mornings Edwin would indulge his glorious 
 idleness among the books of the dining-room 
 shelves, and after middle-day dinner, when hia 
 father had gone back to the shop, he would set 
 out with his mother up the lane under the tall 
 elms and through the sloping field that led to the 
 mill pond. They did not walk very far because she 
 must not be over- tired ; but the field was so crowded
 
 THE GREEN TREES ... 33 
 
 with wonders that they were tempted further. 
 Cowslips steeped the meadows in their vinous per- 
 fume; and between the saplings of the hazel copse 
 they saw the sheeted hyacinths gleaming like pools 
 that mirror the sky in open places. Beyond the 
 land of meadows and copses they came to a belt of 
 the old forest, through which they could see up a 
 broad green lane to the very shoulders of the hills : 
 Pen Beacon heaving its fleece of black firs, and the 
 domed head of Uffdown. 
 
 His mother would sigh a little when she saw 
 the hills. In weather that threatened rain from 
 the west they would seem so near, with their con- 
 tour hard against the watery sky and the cloud 
 shadows all prussian blue. 
 
 "Oh, I should love to be there, Edwin," she would 
 say. 
 
 "Can't we walk there some day, dearest?" 
 
 "It's such a terrible drag up. We should both 
 be dreadfully tired." 
 
 "Oh, I wish we could, mother; I do wish we 
 could." 
 
 The day of their last walk together, when they 
 came to the end of the green lane and were sitting 
 on the gate, she jumped down on the far side and 
 set off walking up the track. 
 
 "Come along, Eddie," she said, "I'm going up to 
 Uffdown." 
 
 "Oh, mother," he cried. "Isn't it too far? I 
 should like to carry you !" 
 
 And half-doubting, but fearfully eager for ad- 
 venture, they set off together. As they climbed up- 
 ward it seemed that the air grew sweeter every
 
 34 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 moment, and when they had left the wood behind 
 them they came out on to a stony lane with a sur- 
 face of grit veined by the tracks of storm-water, 
 and on either side banks of tufted grass along 
 which gorse was swaying in the breeze. And here 
 the clouds seemed to be racing close above their 
 heads, all dazzling white, and the blue in which 
 they moved was deep and limpid. Mrs. Ingleby's 
 gray-green eyes were full of laughter and her face 
 flushed with the climb. 
 
 "Oh, mother," Edwin panted, "what an awful 
 lick you go ! Hadn't we better sit down a bit?" 
 
 "And catch cold! You careless boy. We'll get 
 to the top soon now." 
 
 "But you mustn't tire yourself." 
 
 She laughed at him. 
 
 "Oh, this air is wonderful," she said. "Just as if 
 it had come straight out of the blue, all washed 
 and clean." 
 
 On the top of Uffdown where the cloak of pine 
 droops to a hollow between the two peaks, they 
 sat on a dry, yielding hedge-side, where the grass 
 was thick as the fleece of a mountain sheep, and 
 four lovely counties dreamed below them. 
 
 "Eddie," she asked, half joking, "where does the 
 west wind come from?" 
 
 Edwin was willing to instruct. 
 
 "Oh, I don't know, dearest from Wales and the 
 sea, I suppose." 
 
 "Put your head close to mine and I'll show you. 
 . . . Those hills that look like mountains cut out 
 of blue cardboard are the Malverns, and far, ever 
 so far beyond them yes, just to the left you see
 
 THE GREEN TREES ... 35 
 
 / 
 
 a level ridge that drops suddenly in the west. You 
 don't know what that is, Eddie, do yon?" 
 
 "No I don't like to look at single things. I like 
 to feel it's all what d'you call it? all dreamy 
 underneath one." 
 
 "But you must look at that. It's the mountain, 
 Eddie, close to where I was born." 
 
 "Felindre?" he asked. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "But I never knew that you could see it from 
 here. You never told me." 
 
 "You know why. I told you that I was never 
 happy there. And now, you see, since the old peo- 
 ple died and the land was sold, it really has nothing 
 to do with us." 
 
 "Still, it's rather wonderful to be looking into 
 into another country. It is Wales, isn't it?" 
 
 "Yes part of it's in Wales. Felindre is in Eng- 
 land." 
 
 Edwin pondered for a moment. 
 
 "I'm rather glad I'm not half- Welsh, anyway," 
 he said. "But I wish I'd been there." 
 
 "Do 3 r ou?" she answered dreamily. "Yes I wish 
 we had been there together. It was a different sort 
 of life. I thought I just thought I should like 
 to see it again." 
 
 He was a little alarmed at the wistf ulness in her 
 voice. 
 
 "Mother what do you mean?" he cried. 
 
 "Nothing, Eddie, nothing. It was another life." 
 
 She put her arms round his neck and pulled him 
 gently to her. He was content to lie there, with 
 his head on her breast, while she talked in a low
 
 36 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 voice of that distant place and of her own child- 
 hood. He listened in a dream and did not speak at 
 all until she began to tell him a long story which 
 the Felindre shepherd, Morgan, had told her when 
 she was a child. Then Edwin opened his eyes and 
 stopped her. 
 
 "Dearest, I know that story," he said. "Oh, go 
 on, it's wonderful. . . ." 
 
 "Perhaps I've told it to you before: perhaps I 
 told you when you were a baby I used to talk 
 to you a great deal in your cradle. Perhaps . . . 
 I was rather lonely when you came, Eddie." 
 
 "Oh, no, I'm sure you haven't. . . ." 
 
 "Look, the cloud is blotting out my mountain 
 now," she said. "It is time we were going." The 
 counties were asleep already. 
 
 Over the brow of the hill they stepped into a 
 different world, for where the smoke of the black 
 country had blotted the fading skyline a hundred 
 pit fires were beginning to blink out, and nearer 
 still a pillar of flame shot up into the sky. 
 
 "Oh, look, mother," Edwin cried. 
 
 "They're puddling the iron at the great Mawne 
 furnaces. Stand still a moment, we might almost 
 hear their roar." 
 
 But no sound came to them but the clear tinkle 
 of a stream plunging into its mossy cup, and thia 
 seemed to bring them back into touch with the 
 lands that they had left. They hurried down 
 through the dark woodland paths, and when they 
 reached the little town lights had bloomed in all 
 the ugly cottage windows, and the streets seemed 
 deserted, for the children were indoors.
 
 THE GREEN TREES ... 37 
 
 in 
 
 She told him that she was rather tired, and would 
 like to lie down and rest for a little time before 
 supper; and with the glow of the hill air still on 
 his cheeks and his limbs full of a delicious lassitude 
 he strolled down the lane and into the ill-lighted 
 street of the town. He passed through the little 
 passage at the side of the shop and through the 
 dark bottle-room where he had to pick his way 
 among drug hampers and empty acid-carboys. 
 Through the upper part of the glass door he could 
 see his father sitting on a high stool at the desk, 
 his spectacles half-way down his nose, dreaming 
 among the bad debts in his ledger. Edwin stood 
 there for several minutes, for the picture fascinated 
 him. 
 
 Mr. Ingleby had now reached the indeterminate 
 period of middle age: his hair was gray, rather 
 thin about the crown, and wanted cutting. In the 
 shop he always wore a black alpaca jacket, and 
 this, by reason of its thinness, made his chest look 
 mean and skimpy. In this state of comparative 
 repose he was not impressive. From time to time 
 he raised his hand to scratch his shoulder. A cus- 
 tomer came in to buy a ca~ke of soap and Mr. 
 Ingleby climbed down from his stool to attend to 
 her. He opened a glass case, and, groping for this 
 particular soap, upset at least half a dozen others. 
 Edwin noticed his hands, which were clumsy and 
 heavily veined on the back, and felt sorry for him 
 when he stooped to pick up the cakes of soap that 
 he had upset. It all seemed so inelastic, so different
 
 38 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 from the eager youth of his mother. Examining 
 his father from a physical standpoint he recalled 
 the day on which Widdup had begun his sexual 
 education and had laughed at his innocent ideals. 
 Now Edwin laughed at himself; and the laugh 
 made Mr. Ingleby look up as if a flying beetle had 
 banged against his ear. 
 
 "Hallo, boy," he said. "You were late for tea, 
 you two !" 
 
 "Oh, we had a lovely walk right on to Uff- 
 down." 
 
 "I hope you didn't tire your mother. You must 
 be careful, Eddie. Do you want me to give you 
 something to do? You shall weigh these powders 
 then : Phenacetin, five grains in each. Only try to 
 be quiet; I have to get on with these Lady-day 
 bills." 
 
 Mr. Ingleby yawned and Edwin started to weigh 
 powders. 
 
 "Father, what is Dragon's Blood?" 
 
 "It isn't the blood of dragons, Edwin. . . ." Mr. 
 Ingleby smiled under his glasses. 
 
 "Oh, father, don't rot." 
 
 "Dragon's Blood is a resin. It's prepared from 
 Dracwna Draco, and it's used for mahogany var- 
 nishes." 
 
 "O-oh." 
 
 "I'm sorry to disappoint you, Edwin." 
 
 Silence for five minutes. 
 
 "Father . . . Keats was a chemist." 
 
 "Keats?" Mr. Ingleby pronounced the word in 
 the same tone as he would have used if he had been 
 saying "Kea tings, madam?"
 
 THE GREEN TREES ... 39 
 
 "The poet." 
 
 "Oh Keats. Yes, of course he was. He was 
 consumptive, too. Died in Italy." 
 
 "Yes, father." Edwin was thankful to leave it 
 at that ; thankful that his father knew just so much, 
 even if he didn't know any more. It would be 
 terrible to know more than your father, to feel 
 that he was a sort of intellectual inferior to you 
 a boy of fifteen. He would not talk of these things 
 any more. 
 
 They walked home in silence. It seemed as if 
 Mr. Ingleby were still worrying about his wife's 
 tiredness, for when she tried to joke with him at 
 the supper table he was moody and restrained. 
 
 "I'm not really a bit overdone," she protested, 
 kissing his forehead. 
 
 "You're like a pair of children, the two of you," 
 he said, and indeed his gray seriousness seemed 
 to isolate him from all the joy of youth that was in 
 them. 
 
 That night Edwin's mother sat for a long time 
 on the bed talking to him in a low voice. She 
 would not tell him any more about the mountain 
 farmstead that had once been a castle, even when 
 he begged her to do so. She wanted to talk, she 
 said, about all that he was to do during the term, 
 to make wonderful plans for the holidays, when 
 the days would be longer and they would be able 
 to sit out under the limes on the lawn in the 
 twilight. 
 
 "I am going to plant evening stock," she said, 
 "all along the lawn border in between the irises. 
 Besides, I shall be stronger then and we will often
 
 40 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 take our tea with us to Uffdown." And at last 
 she said, "Eddie, you bad boy, you must really go 
 to sleep now, darling. You've got such a big 
 journey before you to-morrow, and you're sure to 
 get a headache if you don't have a good night's 
 sleep." She kissed him many times. 
 
 IV 
 
 And when she had passed downstairs to the din- 
 ing-room where her husband sat before the fire in 
 a plush arm-chair, lightly dozing, she kissed him, 
 too. She was feeling queerly flushed and emotional, 
 and somehow the atmosphere of that little room 
 felt stuffy to her after the air of the open spaces. 
 
 "I'm restless to-night, dear," she said. "I hate 
 Eddie going back to school. It's dreadful to be 
 parted from your baby just when he's beginning 
 to be more and more part of you." 
 
 "Come close to me, by the fire, child," he said. 
 
 "No ... I want some music, I think." 
 
 She went into the drawing-room and lit the 
 candles on the piano. Sitting there, in the pale 
 light, with a shawl thrown over her muslin tea- 
 gown, she looked very frail and pathetic, against 
 the piano's ebony. She played the Sonata Appas- 
 sionata of Beethoven, and the rather tawdry little 
 knick-knacks on the piano danced as if they were 
 made uncomfortable by the rugged passion. The 
 whole room seemed a little bit artificial and thread- 
 bare, ministering to her discontent. When the 
 Sonata was finished she still sat at the piano, con- 
 scious of her own reflection in its polished panels, 
 and wanting to cry. She could not bear the taunt-
 
 THE GREEN TREES ... 41 
 
 ing of that image, and so she snuffed the candles 
 and sat in the dark. 
 
 Edwin tossing on the verge of sleep was conscious 
 of the music ceasing, and, in the silence that fol- 
 lowed, the cool cries of the owls.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 MIDSUMMER 
 
 EDWIN had expected that the wrench of going 
 back to school after these holidays would be 
 unbearable: but when he returned to St. Luke's 
 next day he was almost astonished at his own ac- 
 ceptance of the change. It was evening when he 
 arrived, and boys who had come from a greater 
 distance than he were already unpacking their 
 play-boxes in the long box-room. Edwin sniffed 
 the smell which he had once found so alien that 
 mingled odour of cricket flannels, biscuits, bat-oil, 
 and faint mustiness, with relish. He passed 
 through the swing-doorway into the library, dark 
 and echoing and groped his way towards the poetry 
 bookshelves. He ran his fingers over the brass 
 netting that protected their case, he even tried his 
 play-box key to see if it had lost its cunning. The 
 lock opened easily, and he felt for the backs of the 
 big maroon volumes of Byron with their shiny 
 title-plates. He thought of Mr. Leeming and of 
 Sir Percivale. A foolish phrase, one of a kind that 
 he had often lately found running through his brain 
 - rhythmical groups of words that meant nothing 
 in particular formed itself in his mind and stuck 
 
 42
 
 MIDSUMMER 43 
 
 there. "The white lie of a blameless life." He 
 laughed at himself. These words that came from 
 nowhere were the strangest things. He heard the 
 echo of his own laugh in the dark and empty room. 
 The white lie of a blameless life. ... It pleased 
 him to think that he had done with Mr. Leeming 
 as a form-master, even though the question of 
 Hebrew and Holy Orders remained unanswered. 
 
 Stepping out of the library he was hailed by 
 Widdup; a plumper, sunbrowned Widdup fresh 
 from three weeks with a doctor uncle in Devonshire. 
 There had been long drives through the lanes at 
 the back of Start Bay where the primroses (so 
 Widdup assured him) were as big as door-handles; 
 there had actually been sea-bathing in April, and 
 the joy of watching huge liners, homeward bound 
 from India r making the Start. "And hills . . .'* 
 said Widdup, "you never saw such hills. Talk 
 about these downs. . . ." 
 
 "It's awfully hilly country at home," said Edwin. 
 
 They were walking side by side and up and down 
 the quadrangle, from the gym to the swimming 
 bath, and dozens of couples were crossing and re- 
 crossing in the same track. From time to time 
 they would catch a few words of conversation, 
 eager and excited, as they passed. Above them 
 stretched a deep sky powdered with dust of gold. 
 
 "What did you say?" said Widdup. "I'm awfully 
 sorry, old chap. I didn't catch it. Douglas shouted 
 to me. . . ." 
 
 "I don't know . . ." said Edwin. "Oh, yes . .. . 
 hills. I said there are some ripping hills at home. 
 One called Uffdown."
 
 44 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "But these hills in Devonshire . . . you've got 
 to get out of the trap for nearly every one. I used 
 to drive my uncle. It was awful sport. You'd 
 think I was rotting, but it's true." 
 
 The chapel bell started tolling in short jerks. 
 The couples began to drift towards the northern 
 end of the Quad, where the gates were being un- 
 bolted. For five minutes exactly the gravel of fhe 
 wide path sloping to the chapel gave out a grating 
 sound beneath the pressure of many hundred feet. 
 The last stragglers hurried in. The master on duty 
 entered the porch. All the life of that dark mass 
 of buildings spread upon the bare edge of the downs 
 became concentrated within the walls of the chapel. 
 Its stained glass windows glowed as with some 
 spiritual radiance. Inside they began to sing the 
 hymn which is used at the beginning of the term : 
 
 "Kank by rank again we stand 
 From the four winds gathered hither, 
 Loud the hallowed walls demand 
 Whence we come and how and whither . . ." 
 
 and from the open doors there issued a faintly 
 musty smell, as though indeed the dead air of the 
 holiday-time were dispossessed and young life had 
 again invaded its ancient haunt. 
 
 It seemed to Edwin from the first as though the 
 concentrated delights of this summer term were 
 surely enough to efface every memory of discom- 
 fort and suffering that had clouded his early days 
 at St. Luke's. He was exceptionally happy in Ms
 
 MIDSUMMER 45 
 
 new form. The form-master, whose name was 
 Cleaver, was an idle man with a young wife and 
 a small income of his own, circumstances that com- 
 bined to make him contented with the conditions 
 of servitude at St. Luke's which weighed so heavily 
 on the disappointed and underpaid Selby. He was 
 also a fine cricketer, accepting the worship which 
 was the prerogative of an old "blue," and convinced 
 in his own mind if ever that kingdom were pos- 
 sessed by anything so positive as a conviction > 
 that the main business of the summer term was 
 cricket. The atmosphere of the cricket-field, with 
 its alternations of strenuousness and summery 
 lassitude, pervaded his classroom, and the tradi- 
 tions of that aristocratic game, in which nobody 
 could conceivably behave in a violent or unsports- 
 manlike manner, regulated his attitude towards the 
 work of his form. 
 
 Edwin found it fairly easy to keep his average 
 going at the departments of the game in which Mr. 
 Cleaver was concerned : Latin and Greek and Eng- 
 lish. If, as occasionally happened, he made a cen- 
 tury, Cleaver was ready to congratulate him as a 
 sportsman and a brother. To be beaten by some 
 yorker of Tacitus was no crime if he had played 
 with a straight bat and didn't slog. Even a fool 
 who could keep his end up had Mr. Cleaver's sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 It was not only in a spiritual atmosphere of the 
 Lower Fifth that Edwin found content. The class- 
 room which the form inhabited was the most pleas- 
 ant in the whole school, placed high with a bow- 
 window overlooking a pleasant lawn that a poplar
 
 46 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 overshadowed. Beyond the lawn lay a belt of dense 
 thickets full of singing birds, on the edge of which 
 laburnum and lilac were now in flower: so that 
 when Edwin's innings was over, or Mr. Cleaver was 
 gently tossing up classical lobs to the weaker mem- 
 bers of the form, he could let his eyes wander over 
 the warm air of the lawn to plumes of purple 
 lilac waving in the summer breeze, or the tops of 
 the avenue of lime-trees leading to the chapel spire. 
 Even in the heat of the day the Lower Fifth class- 
 room was cool and airy, visited only by wandering 
 bees and scents of lime and lilac beckoning towards 
 a golden afternoon. 
 
 The term was full of lovely animal delights ; the 
 luxury of flannels and soft felt hats; the warmth 
 of a caressing sun ; the contrast of cool drinks and 
 water-ices; the languors of muscular fatigue; the 
 reviving ecstasy of a plunge into the green depths 
 of the swimming bath; the joy of extended twi- 
 lights, and, in the thin air of evening, a multitude 
 of sounds, soothing because they were so familiar 
 as to be no more disturbing to consciousness than 
 silence : boys' voices calling in the fields, the clear 
 click of bat and ball, the stinging echoes of the 
 fives-court. Great days . . . great days . . . 
 
 Edwin found himself becoming keen on cricket 
 not indeed from any ambitions towards excellence, 
 though the mere fact of sitting at Mr. Cleaver's 
 feet was an inspiration, but for the sheer joy of 
 tiring himself at the nets and the peculiar charm 
 of the game's setting of sunburn and white flannels 
 and green fields. Cricket was a part of this divine 
 summer, and therefore to be worshipped. Little
 
 MIDSUMMER 47 
 
 by little as he practised he found he was beginning 
 to improve, and before the middle of the term he 
 was developing into a fair bowler of medium pace 
 and had taken his own place in the house second 
 eleven. It did him good in other ways ; for in this 
 capacity he found that he was at length accepted 
 naturally and without any exceptional effort on his 
 part. So, miraculously, he seemed to have arrived 
 at a degree of normality. This, in itself, was a 
 triumph. 
 
 Spending long afternoons with his team in the 
 lower fields, he found that he could feel really at 
 home with other "men." He discovered qualities 
 in them that he had never guessed before. In the 
 cricket field even Douglas became tolerable; no 
 longer a terrible and baleful influence with scowl- 
 ing brows under a mop of black hair, but just a 
 jolly good wicket-keeper. Edwin began to be fever- 
 ishly interested in the fortunes of the second eleven : 
 kept their averages, produced an elaborate table of 
 league results, conceived a secondary but violent 
 interest in the progress of his own County, Worces- 
 tershire, in those days, thanks to the brilliancy of 
 the Foster brothers slowly rising to fame. Some- 
 times while he lay on the grass, watching his own 
 side bat, he would see the figure of old, fat Leem- 
 ing ambling along the path. He would shrink into 
 the concealment of his uniform flannel, being afraid 
 that his patron would speak to him and isolate him 
 from his pleasant company. Leeming was not fond 
 of cricket and his shadow would mar this particular 
 joy. Only when he had passed relief would come. 
 Great days . . . great days.
 
 8 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 m 
 
 In the pursuit of these joys it is not to be sup- 
 posed that Ingleby forsook his friends the poets. 
 In the flush of early June, before the crowding of 
 midsummer's high pomps, there came to him many 
 moments of ecstasy. In the spinney at the back 
 of the head master's house there was a nightingale 
 to which his evening dreams were dedicated. All 
 the twilights were full of delicious scents and 
 sounds. Of all other times he remembered most 
 clearly certain evenings when he would walk all 
 alone up the long slope of the gravel-path from the 
 chapel, hearing the whizzing wings of the cock- 
 chafers that made their home in the shrubs on 
 either side. Sunday evenings . . . Sundays were 
 the most wonderful days of all ; not, indeed, because 
 the chapel services made any religious appeal to 
 him the advances of Mr. Leeming had scotched 
 that long ago but because of the peculiar atmos- 
 phere of freedom which the long day possessed and 
 which, somehow, even the Head's sermons failed 
 to mar. He hated the Head's sermons; he hated, 
 in particular, the sight of Griffin, who was a use- 
 ful member of the choir, singing, like any golden- 
 headed cherub, a solo in the anthem. But he loved 
 the music, and particularly the psalms, with which 
 the daily matins and evensong made him so familiar 
 that he couldn't help knowing many of them by 
 heart. 
 
 The chants to which the psalms were sung at St. 
 Luke's had been specially composed for the school 
 chapel by Dr. Downton, the organist, who had fitted
 
 MIDSUMMER 49 
 
 them with modulations that were, at the least, sur- 
 prising to ears which could not be happy or feel 
 secure far from the present help of tonic and domi- 
 nant. Most of the congregation at St. Luke's con- 
 sidered that Sammy's tunes were rotten. At first 
 they were inflicted upon the choir in manuscript; 
 but in Edwin's second summer they appeared col- 
 lected in a slim gray volume, and Heal, who acted 
 as choirmaster, explained that they were the result 
 of the most careful study of the Hebrew text, of 
 night-long ecstasies, and the deep brooding of Dr. 
 Downton's mind. It gave Edwin a picture of Sam- 
 my, with his gray, impassive face, weaving his tunes 
 out of the silence of the night by candlelight in the 
 high turret-room which that solitary master in- 
 habited, and for this alone he began to love the 
 St. Luke's Psalter. It is certain, at any rate, that 
 his early acquaintance with strange harmonic ideas 
 made a great deal of the most modern music easy 
 to him in after years. Later, in North Bromwich, 
 when he became immersed in the flood of Wagner, 
 he often wondered whether Sammy in his lonely 
 tower, had known these wonders, and cherished 
 them up there all by himself. He certainly couldn't 
 associate that sort of music with the nr.ivetes of Mr. 
 Heal's flute. And yet, you never can tell. . . . Mr. 
 Heal knew his Hardy. . . . 
 
 Then there were Sunday walks with Widdup 
 over the downs under a grilling sun, and through 
 the woods of York Park, where Griffin and Doug- 
 las, poaching, had encountered keepers; but the 
 glare and dryness of a chalk country in summer 
 does not invite exercise, and the most precious
 
 50 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 hours of all were spent on the sloping banks be- 
 tween the Grand Entrance and the chapel. Here, 
 early on a Sunday morning, Edwin and Widdup 
 would carry out an armful of rugs and cushions: 
 and there all day they would lie in the shade of the 
 limes, reading, writing letters (Ingleby always had 
 a letter from his mother to answer on Sundays), 
 watching the restless flight of little copper butter- 
 flies, seeing the hot sky deepen to an almost south- 
 ern blue behind the pointed gables of the school. 
 Against such skies the red brick of St. Luke's be- 
 came amazingly beautiful. It seemed to Edwin that 
 in his home, on the edge of the black country, the 
 sky was never so clear and deep. Lying there he 
 would read the books that he had smuggled out of 
 the library . . . poetry ... a great deal of it. 
 Novels ... he read, and he always remembered 
 reading, Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination: 
 "The Murder in the Hue Morgue," "The Pit and the 
 Pendulum," "The Masque of the Ked Death." Such 
 titles! There seemed to be no end to the leisure 
 of those days. 
 
 With the middle of the term came the Race Meet- 
 ing on the Downs. During the whole of Race Week 
 the college bounds were tightened, so that no boy 
 dared show his face outside the iron gates. Within 
 the short memory of the school, a prefect no less! 
 had been expelled, confronting his own house- 
 master on the edge of Tattersall's ring. 
 
 On Wednesday of the week the race for the Six 
 Thousand Guineas, the greatest of the classics, was 
 to be run, St. Luke's within its closed gates buzzed 
 like a hive. In every house and every form there
 
 MIDSUMMER 51 
 
 were sweepstakes. Griffin made a book ; boasted in 
 Hall that he meant to see the "Guineas" run or die. 
 Ingleby very nearly admired him for his courage. 
 The great day came. All morning from the open 
 windows of the Lower Fifth classroom he could 
 hear the rumble of loaded brakes climbing the 
 Downs road. In those days there were no motors, 
 but white dust, up-churned by many hundreds of 
 wheels, filled the air and drifted in clouds into the 
 college quad. From a high wall at the back of the 
 swimming-bath they could see the road itself and 
 the unceasing, hot procession moving upwards; 
 brakes full of men who carried beer-bottles ; bookies 
 in white top-hats; costers with buttons as big as 
 half-crowns driving carts drawn by little donkeys 
 whose thick coats were matted with sweat; gipsies 
 out to prey upon the rest of mankind ; smart gentle- 
 men in dog-skin gloves driving tandem ; regimental 
 drags. All the road was full of dust and torn paper 
 and the odour of beer and sweat, and every member 
 of the crowd looked anxiously forward, as though 
 he feared he would be too late for the "Guineas," 
 toward the summit of the Downs where the grand 
 stand, like a magnificent paper-rack, stood up white 
 against the sky. Down in the playing-fields that 
 afternoon nobody thought much of cricket. For all 
 the locked iron gates, the eager consciousness of 
 the crowd on the Downs had invaded St. Luke's. 
 Ingleby was scoring for his own side's innings. 
 Douglas, who was sitting astride of a bat, kept his 
 eyes fixed on the airy summit of the grand stand, 
 now fringed with the black bodies of a thousand 
 spectators. He pulled out his watch.
 
 52 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 ' "They're off!" he said. "My God, don't I envy 
 old Griff!" 
 
 Ingleby forgot his scoring. He, too, was won- 
 dering what had happened. He could imagine it 
 easily, for several times on the Downs he had 
 crossed the tan gallops on which, it was said, horses 
 from the royal racing stables were trained, and seen 
 incredibly slender creatures, lithe as greyhounds, 
 thundering neck and neck, over the sprinkled bark. 
 He could think of nothing swifter or more exciting 
 on earth. The game stopped. All the players were 
 looking at the grand stand, as though their eyes 
 could tell them which horse had won. Two min- 
 utes. Three. From the top of the Downs a great 
 roar came down to them. Some monstrous beast, 
 no congregation of men, was roaring there. The 
 black fringe on the grand stand became animated 
 by waving arms and hats and sticks. A cloud of 
 tinier specks detached themselves. These were the 
 carrier pigeons ; and in a very little time they were 
 flying high above the playing-fields, seeing, no 
 doubt, the black mass of London outstretched so 
 many miles away. 
 
 "God ... I wish I could shoot one," said Doug- 
 las. "I never heard such a row as they made up 
 there. Ingleby, I'll lay you two to one the Prince's 
 horse has won." 
 
 That evening witnessed the canonisation of 
 Griffin. Veritably he had seen the Guineas. A 
 crowd of admirers listened to his story between 
 preps in the house classroom. His manner was in- 
 dolent and boastful. This was to be no more than 
 the first of many exploits. On Friday Ladies' Day
 
 MIDSUMMER 53 
 
 the race for the Birches would be run. He had 
 put the money he had won over the Guineas on a 
 horse called Airs and Graces, and was going to see 
 her bring his money home. 
 
 Ingleby had never heard the name of this horse 
 before, but when the house sweepstakes for the 
 Birches was drawn he found that Airs and Graces 
 had fallen to him. Griffin, who evidently consid- 
 ered that this animal's destinies were in his keep- 
 ing, offered him a pound for his ticket. Ingleby 
 wasn't having any. Douglas, called in to give an 
 opinion on the damnableness of that skunk Ingle- 
 by's sticking to a sweepstake ticket for which he 
 had been given a fair offer, agreed it was a bloody 
 shame that a man like that should have drawn any- 
 thing but a blank. What did he know about rac- 
 ing? Racing was a pastime of gentlemen in which 
 he couldn't obviously have any interest. Did Ingle- 
 by understand that Griffin was going to see the race 
 itself, a thing that he would never have the guts 
 to do in all his life? 
 
 A couple of years before Ingleby would not have 
 known how to meet the coalition ; it is possible, even, 
 that he would have given up his ticket, and im- 
 probable that he would have received the pound 
 that Griffin offered. By this time he had learnt 
 that no answer at all was better than the softest; 
 that when Griffin and Douglas started that sort of 
 game the best thing was to keep his temper and 
 clear out as quickly as possible. On this occasion 
 the chapel bell saved him. All through the service 
 that evening he was pondering on Griffin's words, 
 trying, rather obstinately, to convince himself that
 
 154 }THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 they weren't true; that he wasn't the skunk they 
 had agreed to call him; that he was sufficiently 
 gentle in birth to have an interest in what the 
 newspapers called "the sport of kings," that, at a 
 pinch, he might summon up sufficient "guts" to 
 emulate the boldness of such a daring customer as 
 Griffin. Perhaps it was all too horribly true. . . . 
 
 He couldn't accept it. It was inconceivable that 
 all the attributes of knightly courage should be 
 vested in people like Griffin; and yet he couldn't 
 be certain that he wasn't deceiving himself. It was 
 so easy to imagine oneself brave . . . the easiest 
 thing in the world. "That's the worst of me," he 
 said to himself, "I can imagine anything. I could 
 imagine myself hiring a coach and wearing a white 
 top-hat and asking old fat Leeming to come to the 
 Birches with me on Friday. I'm all imagination 
 and silly rot of that kind; but when it comes to 
 the point I'm no damned good at all." 
 
 It wasn't the first time that he had realised de- 
 fects of this kind. Term after term he had been 
 reproaching himself for the lack of moral or phys- 
 ical courage. 
 
 There was only one way out of it : to prove that 
 he was capable of the things which he feared by 
 doing them. In this way he had driven himself to 
 batter his hands to pulp by playing fives without 
 gloves; for this he had taken a dive into the deep 
 end of the swimming-bath for the sole reason that 
 he found it impossible to float in the shallow water 
 and had determined to swim ; for this he had forced 
 himself to spend long hours, or to waste long hours, 
 over Geometry, the subject that he hated most
 
 MIDSUMMER 55 
 
 Now, in the same way, and wholly for his own sat- 
 isfaction, he determined to go to the Birches. 
 
 That night, walking up and down the Quad, he 
 opened the subject to Widdup. He said, 
 
 "Do you know I drew Airs and Graces in the 
 house sweep? Griffin offered me a quid for the 
 ticket." 
 
 "I should jolly well let him have it," said Widdup, 
 explaining the mathematical side of the question. 
 "You see, you've won a twenty to one chance al- 
 ready. The chances against the horse winning are 
 . . . well you can work it out easily. I'll do it for 
 you in second prep. Besides, old Griff has a lot GI 
 money on the horse and he's going to see the race 
 run." 
 
 "Well, so am I," said Ingleby. Widdup laughed, 
 and that annoyed him. 
 
 "What do you think of it?" 
 
 "I think you're a damned fool," said Widdup. 
 
 Ingleby left it at that. Perhaps Widdup was 
 right. But why in the world should the same thing 
 count for heroism in the case of Griffin and folly 
 in his own? He distrusted the mathematical 
 Widdup's sense of proportion. In any case he had 
 to go through with it. If he didn't, no subsequent 
 heroism could ever persuade him that he wasn't a 
 coward and worthy of every epithet with which 
 Griffin had loaded him. It was in the same spirit, 
 lie imagined, that knights in the ages of chivalry 
 had set themselves to perform extravagant tasks, 
 that saints had undergone monstrous privations; 
 just to convince themselves that they weren't as 
 deficient in "guts" as they feared.
 
 56 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 The business came more easily than he had ex- 
 pected when first he tied himself to his resolve. 
 Friday at St. Luke's was a "fag-day." On Friday 
 afternoon, that is to say, there were no organised 
 games. The afternoon prep started at half-past 
 three, and afternoon school at four-fifteen. The 
 great race, he learned, was to be run at three 
 o'clock; and this would give him time to miss the 
 hour of prep which was not supervised and to be 
 ready for an innings of Greek with Cleaver. An 
 easy game, Greek. . . . For once in a way he was 
 prepared to slog like blazes. 
 
 Up to the last moment Widdup refused to think 
 that he would go through with it. He didn't be- 
 lieve, indeed, until he saw Edwin climb on to the 
 top of the wooden fence in the nightingale's spinney 
 at the back of the Head's house and drop over into 
 the road. 
 
 "Now, I should think you've had enough of it," 
 said Widdup. "If the old man came along and 
 saw you there, you'd be bunked to-morrow. Come 
 along. . . ." 
 
 "I'll be back just after three," said Edwin. "You'll 
 be here to give me a hand over?" 
 
 "All right," said Widdup. "You are a bloody 
 fool, you know."
 
 CHAPTER Y 
 
 AIRS AND GRACES 
 
 HE didn't need telling that. With every step 
 the conviction was borne in on him, and when 
 he came to the end of the wooden palings that 
 marked the school boundary he was very near to 
 giving up his enterprise. He could easily, so easily, 
 slip over the hedge on the opposite side of the road 
 and wait there until the race was over and the 
 bookies' messenger-boys came racing down the hill 
 on their bicycles, bells tingling all the way; and 
 then he could meet Widdup at the appointed place 
 and say that he had seen the race. By that time 
 rumour would have told him the winner's name. 
 But that wouldn't do. Not that he cared two* 
 pence-halfpenny whether he told the truth or a lie 
 to Widdup, but because he would feel such a 
 wretched coward in his own mind. He had got to 
 prove to himself that he possessed the moral courage 
 which he doubted. It was only the existence of 
 the very real danger and he envisaged not only 
 his own expulsion, but harrowing scenes of remorse 
 and distress at home that made the thing a fair 
 test. He had to go through with it. 
 
 Beyond the line of fencing, even standing in mid- 
 stream of that determined crowd, he felt himself 
 curiously unprotected. He did a curious thing. He 
 
 57
 
 58 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 turned his college cap, with its circular stripes 
 of green, inside out, presenting to the world a dirty 
 brown lining. This wasn't enough for him : he also 
 turned up the collar of his Eton coat. But the 
 crowd was thinking of one thing only and none 
 seemed to notice him. They noticed nothing. Even 
 the sellers of the race cards and the tawny gipsies 
 who cried for a piece of silver to cross their palms, 
 and promised good luck, were unheeded. Edwin 
 concealed himself, or imagined some measure of 
 concealment, in an eddy of dust between a heavy 
 wagonette, crammed with men who looked like li- 
 censed victuallers, and a coster's donkey cart. He 
 found that by holding on to the step of the wagon- 
 ette he felt safer. It was reassuring to hold some- 
 thing. What a rotten coward he was ! 
 
 At last one of the men in the last seat of the 
 wagonette who had been rolling about with his eyes 
 closed, opened them and looked at Edwin. They 
 were curiously watery eyes, and his mouth was all 
 over the shop. When he had dreamily considered 
 the phenomenon of Edwin for a little while he ad- 
 dressed him, 
 
 "You look ? ot, young man." 
 
 It was hot, Edwin panted. 
 
 "Bloody 'ot," said the man in the wagonette. As 
 an afterthought he took a bottle of beer, about a 
 quarter full, from his pocket. The cork came out 
 with a pop. "Gas," said the fat man, and chuckled. 
 "Gas . . . eh?" He took a swig, and with the froth 
 fringing his moustache, offered the bottle to Edwin. 
 Edwin shook his head. 
 
 "You won't?" said the fat man. "You're workin'
 
 AIRS AND GRACES 59 
 
 'arder than I am. Oh, well, if 'e won't," he con- 
 tinued dreamily, and finished the bottle. Then he 
 pitched it over the hedge. 
 
 The dust was terrible. On either side of the track 
 the hedges and banks were as white as the road. 
 The horses pulled well, and even hanging on the 
 step Edwin found it difficult to keep up with them. 
 At the crest of the hill the driver whipped them 
 into a trot. Edwin let go the step and was cursed 
 fluently by the coster for standing in the way of his 
 donkey-cart. His friend waved him good-bye. He 
 found himself caught up in a stream of other walk- 
 ers, hurrying in a bee-line for the grand stand, now 
 distantly visible with the royal standard drooping 
 above it. Behind him and in front the black snake 
 of that procession stretched, sliding, literally, over 
 the shiny convolutions of the Down that the feet 
 of the foremost had polished, and moving in a sort 
 of vapour of its own, compact of beer and strong 
 tobacco and intolerable human odours. From the 
 crown of the Downs Edwin looked back at the play- 
 ing-fields, the tiny white figures at the nets and in 
 the fives-court that sometimes stopped in their play 
 to watch the black serpent in whose belly he now 
 moved. They seemed very near far too near to 
 be comfortable ; and even though he knew that no- 
 body down there could possibly see him, he felt 
 happier when a billow of the Down hid the plain 
 from sight. 
 
 It was only when he reached the grand stand, 
 losing himself in the thick of the crowd that clus- 
 tered about it, that he began to feel safe. He looked 
 at his watch and found that he had a quarter of
 
 60 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN, 
 
 an hour to spare. A little old man in seedy black 
 clothes grabbed his elbow fiercely. "Young sir, 
 young sir," he said, "take my advice . . . gratis; 
 free; for nothing." He laughed, and Edwin saw 
 gray bristles stretched on his underlip. "Take my 
 advice. Never expose your watch at a race-meeting. 
 Myself . . . I've learnt it from long experience, 
 my own and my friends'. . . . Never even take a 
 watch when I go racing. No, I leave it at home. 
 A beautiful half -hunter by Benson of Ludgate Hill, 
 with enamelled face. Yes. . . . You take my ad- 
 vice. A thing to always remember. Yes. . . ." 
 
 Edwin seriously thanked him. A roar went up 
 from the crowd. "The Prince. The Prince has en- 
 tered the Royal Box," said the old man. "God bless 
 him." He raised a dusty top-hat, An extraordi- 
 nary gesture for this wrinkled, gnomish creature. 
 "Yes," he mumbled; "a handsome time-piece. . . . 
 Benson of Ludgate Hill. A very prominent firm. 
 We shall see nothing here. You follow me." 
 
 Edwin followed. More beer, more tobacco, more 
 of the curious composite smell, more positively veg- 
 etable than human, that he had begun to associate 
 with trampled pieces of paper, probably the debris 
 of bags that had once held fruit of some kind. The 
 little man pushed his way deftly through the crowd. 
 He was so small and inoffensive that nobody seemed 
 to notice him; and indeed the leading character- 
 istics of this crowd's vast consciousness seemed to 
 be good humour. The bookies in their white hats, 
 the many-buttoned costers, the sweating men in 
 black coats, the very waiters in the refreshment 
 tents, staggering under leaning towers of beef'
 
 AIRS AND GRACES 61 
 
 plates, seemed determined to enjoy themselves in 
 spite of the heat and the smell of their neighbours 
 Tinder the white-hot sky. 
 
 Edwin, too, forgot his anxieties. The vastnesa 
 of the crowd subtly shielded him. He felt newly 
 secure, and his spirit was caught up into its ex- 
 citement and good humour. He even turned down 
 his collar. And all the time his mind exulted in a 
 queer sense of clarity, an intoxication due, per- 
 haps, to his successful daring. In this state he 
 found all his surroundings vivid and amusing; all 
 colours and sounds came to him with a heightened 
 brilliancy. He smiled, and suddenly found that a 
 young gipsy woman with her head in a bright 
 handkerchief was smiling back at him. He thought 
 it was jolly that people should smile like that. He 
 thought what jolly good luck it was meeting his 
 guide, the shiny shoulders of whose frock coat he 
 saw in front of him. His quick mind had placed 
 the little man already: a solicitor's clerk in some 
 ancient worm-eaten Inn of Court, a relic of the 
 dark, lamp-litten London of Dickens : a city of yel- 
 low fog and cobbled pavements shining in the rain : 
 of dusty, cobwebbed law-stationers' windows and 
 cosy parlours behind them where kettles were sing- 
 ing on the hob of a toasting fire, and punch was 
 mixed at night. 
 
 It seemed to him that he could have met no more 
 suitable person than his friend; for really all this 
 racing crowd were making a sort of Cockney holi- 
 day of the kind that the greatest Victorian loved 
 most dearly. He began to find words for it all. 
 He must find words for it, for it would be such fun
 
 62 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 writing to his mother about it. If he dared. . . . 
 It would be time enough to write a letter about it 
 when the business was finished without disaster. 
 There was always the possibility that he would be 
 found out and expelled. Even if that should happen, 
 he thought, he would like to tell his mother. . . . 
 
 Together they passed the level of the grand stand. 
 This huge erection of white-painted wood provided 
 the only constant landmark, for Edwin was not 
 tall enough to see above the shoulders of the adult 
 crowd in which he was moving. Now they had left 
 the grand stand behind it seemed that they must 
 surely be crossing the course. And then a bell 
 clanged and the crowd parted like a great wave of 
 the Bed Sea in pictures of the Exodus. Edwin 
 found himself clinging to the coat-tails of his friend, 
 and the little man, in turn, hanging on, as if for 
 his life, to a whitewashed post from which the next 
 wave would have sucked him back. The crowd 
 swayed gently, settling down and leaving them 
 stranded upon the very edge of the course. "That's 
 a trick worth knowing," said Edwin's friend. 
 
 Opposite them the stands, well known to him on 
 Sunday walks as a vast skeletal erection, stood 
 clothed in flesh and blood : tier upon tier of human 
 faces packed one above the other looked down on 
 him. Edwin had never before realised how pale 
 the faces of men and women were. From the midst 
 of them there rose a ceaseless murmur of human 
 speech, shrilling occasionally like the voices of star- 
 lings when they whirl above an autumn reed bed, 
 and then, as suddenly, still. For one extraordinary;
 
 AIRS AND GRACES 63, 
 
 moment they were nearly silent. "They're off !" said 
 the little man. . . . 
 
 Again the murmur of the stands arose. A bookie 
 just behind them was doing his best to get in a 
 last few bets, entreating, proclaiming passionately 
 the virtues of "the old firm." His red face lifted 
 above the crowd, and while he shouted saliva drib- 
 bled from his mouth. A curious roaring sound 
 came from the other side of the horse-shoe course 
 a mile or more away. He stopped with his mouth 
 open in the middle of a sentence. Something had 
 happened over there. Everybody, even those who 
 couldn't see anything, turned in the direction from 
 which the sound came. Edwin turned with them. 
 He couldn't imagine why. And when he turned his 
 eyes gazed straight into those of Miss Denning, the 
 matron of the College Sanatorium, marvellously 
 dressed for the occasion and leaning upon the inno- 
 cent arm of Mr. Heal. Thank God, Mr. Heal was 
 short-sighted! Edwin felt himself blushing. He 
 knew for certain that she had seen and recognised 
 him; for his sick headaches had often taken him 
 to the Sanatorium and he had always been rather 
 a favourite of hers. She stared straight at him and 
 her eyes never wavered. Obviously the game was 
 up. He fancied that her lips smiled faintly. Never 
 was a smile more sinister. 
 
 Edwin had an impulse to bolt . . . simply to 
 turn tail and run at his hardest straight back to 
 the college. He couldn't do that. Between him 
 and escape, an impassable river, lay the parabola 
 of yellow grass over which the Birches was even 
 now being run. Feeling almost physically sick, he
 
 64 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 slipped round to the other side of his companion. 
 He wished that gnomish creature had been bigger. 
 "They're at the corner ... if you lean out you 
 can see ... look, they're coming into the straight 
 . . . Airs and Graces leading. Down they come. 
 L The finest sight in the civilised world." 
 
 Edwin didn't see them. He saw nothing but the 
 phantom of Miss Denning's eyes, her faint and 
 curiously sinister smile. He wished to goodness 
 the race were over. Now everybody was shouting. 
 The stands rose with a growl like great beasts heav- 
 ing in the air. Something incredibly swift and 
 strepitant passed him in a whirl of wind and dust. 
 The crowd about him and the heaving stands broke 
 into an inhuman roar. The little old man beside 
 Mm was jumping up and down, throwing his top- 
 hat into the air and catching it again. The whole 
 world had gone shouting and laughing mad. Edwin 
 heard on a hundred lips the name of Airs and 
 Graces. It meant nothing to him. Now he could 
 only think of escape ; and as the crowd bulged and 
 burst once more over the course he made a dash 
 for the other side. 
 
 Mounted police were pressing back the tide ; but 
 Edwin was small, and quick enough to get over. 
 He pushed and wriggled his way through masses 
 to which there seemed to be no end. Only in the 
 rear of the stands the density of the crowd thinned. 
 Then he broke into a run and though he was soaked 
 with sweat and his head was aching fiercely, he 
 did not stop running until a billow of the Down 
 had hidden the stands from sight. 
 
 In a little hollow littered with tins and other
 
 AIRS AND GRACES 65 
 
 debris, and choked with nettles and some other hot- 
 smelling herb, he lay, recovering his breath, and, 
 for the first time, thinking, beside a diminished dew- 
 pond of dirty water. He was miserable. Fate now 
 brooded over him as heavily as the white-hot sky, 
 and he couldn't, for the life of him, imagine why. 
 It was ridiculous, in any case, that the mere sight 
 of a woman's eyes should have worked so extraor- 
 dinary a miracle. Yet this was no less than the 
 truth. Suddenly, without a shadow of warning, all 
 the happiness and light and colour had gone out of 
 his adventure. That which had been, at least, mag- 
 nificent, had now become childish or nearly silly. 
 Reflecting, he couldn't be satisfied that anything 
 was changed. Nothing had really changed except 
 himself; and he didn't want to admit that he had 
 changed either. No, he hadn't changed. Only his 
 mind was just like the dewpond at his feet in which 
 the burning sky was mirrored. Some days it would 
 be blue and white and others black with thunder. 
 But the pool would be just the same. "I oughtn't 
 to be more miserable now than I was when I came 
 up here; and then, apart from being a bit funky, 
 I felt ripping." None of these sober reflections re- 
 lieved him. All the rest of the way back he felt 
 hunted and miserable, and something very near to 
 panic seized him at the point when he reached the 
 college palings. 
 
 At the corner, looking horribly scared, Widdup 
 was waiting. 
 
 "Thank goodness you've come," he said. Then 
 he suddenly went white. 
 
 "What's the matter?" cried Edwin.
 
 66 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Oh, Lord, it's the Head." 
 
 The voice of the head-master came next, 
 
 "Hallo, what are you doing here? Let me see * 
 Widdup, isn't it?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 A mortar-board topped the palings. 
 
 "Ingleby What's this? What's this? What are 
 you doing there?" 
 
 A moment of brilliant inspiration. 
 
 "Widdup and I were fooling, sir, and he chucked 
 my cap over the fence. May I get it, sir?" 
 
 "Serious very serious," muttered the Head. 
 "The letter of the law. Eace-week. You're out of 
 bounds, you know technically out of bounds. Boys 
 have been expelled for less. Yes, expelled. Ruin 
 your whole career." 
 
 Edwin saw that he was in a good humour; saw, 
 in the same flash, the too-literal Widdup, white with 
 fear. 
 
 "I'm sorry, sir," he said . . . "awfully sorry." 
 
 "Mph. . . . What were you two doing here?" 
 
 "I wanted to get some poplar leaves for my puss- 
 moth caterpillars." Silence then, rather lamely, 
 
 "They're in the fourth stage, sir." 
 
 "Are they?" The Head smiled, possibly because 
 he approved of this fervent manifestation of what 
 the head-masters' conference called "nature study," 
 possibly at Edwin's sudden revelation of schoolboy 
 psychology. Decidedly he approved of the puss- 
 moths. He had been reading Fabre aloud to his 
 wife. Fabre, too, was a schoolmaster, poor devil! 
 He did not speak his thoughts : schoolmasters never 
 can. He said,
 
 AIRS AND GRACES 67 
 
 "Let me see, Ingleby, you're in the Lower Fifth?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "I must speak to Mr. Cleaver. . . ." He didn't 
 say what he must speak about. "All right get 
 along with you." He left them, walking away with 
 his hands joined behind his back supporting an im- 
 mense flounce of black silk gown. Edwin scrambled 
 over the fence ; his hands, as they clutched the top 
 of it, were trembling violently. 
 
 "Well, you are a prize liar," said Widdup, "and 
 the old man believed every word of it." 
 
 "I know," said Edwin. "That's the rotten part 
 of it. . . ." 
 
 "What on earth do you mean?" 
 
 "Oh, I don't know. . . ." He knew perfectly 
 well what he meant. 
 
 "Who won?" 
 
 "Airs and Graces." 
 
 "Then you've won the sweep." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Ten minutes later he was back in Mr. Cleaver's 
 classroom trying to make himself so inconspicuous 
 that he wouldn't be called upon to make an exhibi- 
 tion of himself, and, as luck would have it, nothing 
 of any difficulty came his way to drag him from 
 his comfortable obscurity. Even though the in- 
 tense excitement of his adventure had now faded, 
 the atmosphere of that high room had changed. He 
 felt that he didn't somehow belong to it ; or, rather, 
 that he had left something behind. All through 
 that drowsy hour some part of him was still being 
 hurried over the hot downs, swept along in the 
 sweating crowds of the racecourse, and this cir-
 
 68 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 cumstance made his present life strangely unreal, 
 as though he were a changeling with whom it had 
 nothing in common. Gradually, very gradually, the 
 old conditions reasserted themselves, but it was 
 not until the insistent discipline of the evening ser- 
 vice in chapel had dragged him back into normal- 
 ity that his adventure and the influence of the 
 strange people with whom he had rubbed shoulders 
 began to fade. Widdup, with his unblushing admi- 
 ration, helped. There was no shutting him up. 
 
 "Well, you have a nerve," he said. "I wonder 
 what you'll do next. . . ." 
 
 "Oh, stow it," said Edwin. "I've finished with 
 that sort of thing. I'm not cut out for a blood." 
 
 "I can't think how you did it." 
 
 "Neither can I. It was damned silly of me. I 
 just wanted to satisfy myself that . . . that I had 
 some guts, you know. I didn't really care what 
 you chaps thought about it. It was sort of pri- 
 vate. ."
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THUNDER WEATHER 
 
 THAT night a thrilled but incredulous dormi- 
 tory discussed the exploit of Ingleby. With- 
 out pretending to have approached the dizzy 
 achievements of Griffin, Edwin perceived that in 
 addition to reassuring himself he had managed to 
 atone for a little of his former reputation. He 
 found himself treated with something that was 
 almost respect, partly for the daring of the whole 
 expedition, but even more for the crowning achieve- 
 ment of his inspired lie. 
 
 "I wish you hadn't told them that," he said to 
 Widdup. 
 
 "Why not?" said Widdup. "That was the best 
 part of it." 
 
 "I don't think so. I don't mind telling a lie, but 
 it's rotten if the chap you tell it to believes you." 
 
 "Get out," said Widdup. "If you want to know 
 the truth it's only another example of your rotten 
 cockiness." 
 
 Why? Why? Why? ... He couldn't under- 
 stand it. It seemed to him that the most natural 
 decent things in the world were all labelled as ab- 
 normalities. Even if he had proved to his own 
 
 69
 
 70 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 satisfaction that he possessed the usual amount of 
 "guts," it seemed that he was a kind of freak. 
 There was no getting to the bottom of the mystery. 
 Yet, when he came to consider himself, he was cer- 
 tain that his attitude was infinitely humble. Per- 
 haps that was the trouble. Other chaps didn't think 
 about themselves. Edwin envied them unfeignedly. 
 He felt that he was condemned to travel a sort of 
 vicious circle. Thus, if he were honest to himself 
 he was bound to fail in the ordinary normal stand- 
 ard and to be considered, if not a prig, an oddity. 
 If, by enormous efforts, he were to compel himself 
 into the trodden ways of thought and conduct, he 
 couldn't be honest and in the process of regain- 
 ing his honesty he found himself fighting his way 
 back to the original misfortune. There was no way 
 out of it. Isolated he must be. He determined, 
 above all things, that even if he were not ashamed 
 of his isolation, he wouldn't be proud of it. It wasn't 
 easy. 
 
 The whole incident of the Birches which, after 
 all, he had meant for a sort of private trial was 
 becoming a nuisance. He almost welcomed the 
 attitude of Griffin, who scoffed at the whole busi- 
 ness and refused to believe he had been there. 
 Griffin, his own reputation for valour and cunning 
 being in question, determined to prove that Edwin 
 had not been near the race. In the dormitory that 
 night the coalition set themselves to this business, 
 beginning with an examinatllp at the hands of 
 Griffin himself. 
 
 "Widdup says you went to see the Birches run." 
 
 "Does he?" said Edwin.
 
 THUNDER WEATHER 71 
 
 "Now, none of your fooling, Ingleby. You're a 
 damned little liar. You never put your nose near 
 the races." 
 
 "Well, it doesn't matter to you anyway." 
 
 "Doesn't it? You'll soon know that it does. 
 We're not going to have any liars in this house. 
 You'd better tell the truth at once." 
 
 "All right, then. I did go to the races." 
 
 "The swine ! . . . Get a towel, Duggie." 
 
 "Well . . . you asked me. . . ." 
 
 "Now, I'm going to prove that you're a liar. 
 Of course you know that already. But you ought 
 to be shown up for your own good. Then you'll get 
 a tight six. What were Airs and Graces' colours?" 
 
 "I don't know what his colours were." 
 
 Griffin howled. "HIS . . . listen to the swine. He 
 doesn't know a horse from a mare, Duggie. Ingleby, 
 how do you tell a horse from a mare?" Edwin 
 blushing, was overwhelmed with laughter. By this 
 time the towel was ready, wet, and twisted into a 
 cable. "I'll teach you the colours of Airs and 
 Graces," said Griffin. "We've had quite enough of 
 your airs and graces here. Next time you'll find it 
 pays to tell the truth in this dormitory." 
 
 Edwin got his six, having been bent double over 
 the end of his own bed by the other seekers after 
 truth. It was worth it. When the lights were out 
 and he was comfortably settled in bed he decided 
 that that sort of thing oughtn't to make any differ- 
 ence. "My mind to me a kingdom is," he said to 
 himself; and in his mind the great guts question 
 had been settled for ever. As for the lamming. . . . 
 Well, it might have been a gym shoe. . . . While
 
 72 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 lie lay thinking of these things he was surprised 
 to hear the voice of Widdup, who slept next to 
 him, speaking in a whisper. "I say," he said, 
 "did you really go to the Birches, or were you pull- 
 ing my leg?" 
 
 "Of course I did," he replied. It gave him a 
 little shock to find that so slight a thing as a dis- 
 play of physical violence had shaken Widdup's 
 faith. 
 
 "I'm glad of that," came Widdup's apologetic 
 whisper. A long silence. "You've won the sweep, 
 anyway," said Widdup. "Thirty-eight and six- 
 pence." Edwin grunted. 
 
 "If you reckon that you'll be here four more 
 years, taking into account the number of men 
 average, you know who go in for the house sweep 
 every year, you could calculate the exact chances 
 against your ever " 
 
 He was asleep. 
 
 n 
 
 And while he slept after that day of unusual ex- 
 citement and fierce colour, he had a curious dream. 
 In the beginning it reflected a little of the anxieties 
 of the afternoon, for he found himself hurrying in 
 the middle of a huge and sweaty crowd which made 
 no way for him. He did not know why he was run- 
 ning so violently ; but of one thing he was certain, 
 and this was that he was going to be late. At first 
 he had in front of him the little man in the rusty 
 coat who had been his companion on the Downs: 
 the same queer creature now endowed with an 
 aspect even more grotesque and an agility more
 
 THUNDER WEATHER 73 
 
 elfish, so that Edwin knew from the first that this 
 time he was sure to lose him and never to catch 
 him up again. All the masses of people through 
 whom he pressed were moving even faster than him- 
 self and in the same direction, so that it seemed as 
 if he could never gain ground at all, but must go 
 on running for ever with no sight of his goal, nor 
 any hope of getting nearer to it. At last his breath 
 gave out, and he stopped. It wasn't a bit of good ; 
 for the moving crowd wouldn't stop w r ith him, and 
 he was pushed forward by this multitude of tall 
 people, knowing that if he faltered for a moment or 
 fell (as in the end he must), he would certainly be 
 trampled to death by the feet of those who followed. 
 
 At last the little man outstripped him altogether, 
 and feeling that he had lost all hope, Edwin gave a 
 cry. When he cried out the whole hurrying crowd 
 melted away, the noise of their padding footsteps 
 left a clear patch of silence (it was like that) and 
 a puff of cool, thin air blew suddenly right into his 
 nostrils. He thought, "I'm not going to be late after 
 all. . . . Why didn't they tell me that I was going 
 to Uffdown?" There was no air like that in the 
 world. He drank it down in gulps as a horse drinks 
 water. "Eddie, you'll choke yourself," his mother 
 said. . . . "The light won't last much longer." "But 
 why should it last, darling?" he replied. "You've 
 got to look over there," she said, "in the west. You 
 see that level ridge dropping suddenly? Well, it's 
 the third farm from the end. Do you see?" 
 
 "Yes, darling, I can see it quite clearly. . . ." 
 And he did see it. A long building of bluish stone 
 with small windows set flush in the walls and no
 
 74 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 dripstones save one above the oak doorway. Not 
 a soul to be seen. It looked as if the place had been 
 deserted by living creatures for many years. "I 
 can see it," he said, "but I don't think anybody lives 
 there." 
 
 "But you can see it?" she asked him eagerly. 
 "Can you see the little bedroom window on the left 
 the third from the end quite a little window?" 
 It was difficult to see, for, after all, it was more 
 than a hundred miles away, and all the time that 
 he was looking, the streamers of cloud kept rolling 
 down from the darens on the mountain and drench- 
 ing the whole scene in mist. "Eddie . . . there's 
 not much time," she pleaded. "Do tell me." 
 
 "Yes," he said. "I can see the window you mean." 
 She sighed. "I'm so glad, Eddie. I did want 
 to show it you." 
 
 "But why were you in such a hurry?" 
 "It was my last chance of showing it to you." 
 '^Whatever do you mean, darling?" 
 She turned her face away. Now it was quite 
 dark. "I'm really dreaming," he thought, "and this 
 is a sort of stage on which they can do lightning 
 tricks like that." But there was no doubt about 
 it being Uffdown. All round the sky the pit-fires 
 of the black-country were flickering out. And 
 though he couldn't see her face, he could feel her 
 soft hand in his. "At any rate, I've written . . ." 
 she said at last. 
 
 That was the sentence which he carried in his 
 mind when he awoke. A letter. But she didn't 
 usually write to him before Sunday, and it was 
 now only Saturday. Yet, when he came into Hall
 
 THUNDER WEATHER 75 
 
 for breakfast a letter was lying on his plate. There 
 was something so strange about the whole business 
 that he was almost afraid to open it. He had a 
 sudden, awful intuition that she was dead. Ridicu* 
 lous, of course, for dead people didn't write letters. 
 Smiling at himself, yet scarcely reassured, he 
 opened the letter and read it. 
 
 "My Darling Boy (she wrote), Did you really 
 make fifteen ? You must be getting on. Aunt Laura, 
 has just been in to tea, and we talked such a lot 
 that I have only just time to write this before father 
 goes down to business and can post it. I have 
 some very interesting news for you. The other 
 afternoon Mrs. Willis of Mawne came in to see me. 
 She and Lilian are going to Switzerland for a 
 month this summer, and now she suggests that I 
 should join them there. It won't be just yet, and 
 I think no, Pm sure that I should be back again 
 before your holidays. Father wants me to go. I 
 haven't been very well, and the doctor says he's 
 sure it would do me good. All my life I've wanted 
 to see Switzerland. I'm most awfully excited about 
 it, Eddie, and father says he can spare me. Won't 
 it be wonderful? They are going about the end 
 of June. I won't forget that postal order, but I'm 
 rather poor myself just at present. Eddie, do you 
 keep my letters? I think I should like you to. The 
 double stocks which father planted in the long bed 
 are just coming out. 
 
 "Good-bye, my darling, 
 "Tour loving 
 
 "Mother."
 
 76 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Of course nothing, in spite of the news of the 
 Swiss excursion, could be more ordinary. That 
 would be wonderful for her ... of course it would. 
 And yet, in spite of all these reasonable convictions 
 he couldn't get that dream out of his head. Some- 
 thing, he felt sure, was going wrong. 
 
 He tried to analyse the source of his disquietude. 
 "Perhaps I'm jealous," he thought. He was most 
 awfully jealous of anything that other people had 
 to do with his mother, and, anyway, he didn't know 
 these Willis people very well. They were new 
 friends of hers: a family of wealthy iron-masters 
 whose works had suddenly risen in the year of the 
 Franco-Prussian war, and were now slowly but gi- 
 gantically expanding. They lived at Mawne Hall, 
 a sad but pretentious mansion of the departed Pom- 
 frets, of which Edwin knew only the wrought-iron 
 gates at the bottom of a steep drive. They had a 
 son, Edward, of very much the same age as him- 
 self, but the Willises had no great educational am- 
 bitions (that was where Edwin's mother came in), 
 and had sent him to the ancient but decaying Gram- 
 mar School of Halesby, an impossible concern in 
 the eyes of any public-schoolboy. The Willises had 
 pots of money. Here again Edwin suspected them. 
 It rather looked as if they had "taken up" his moth- 
 er; and nobody on earth had the right to do that. 
 He hated the Willises (and particularly Edward) 
 in advance. He always hated people he hadn't met 
 when he heard too much about them. He thought 
 that the new intimacy probably had something to 
 <lo with his Aunt Laura, who was diffuse and fussy
 
 THUNDER WEATHER 77 
 
 i> 
 
 and ornate, and not a patch on his mother. No- 
 body was a patch on his mother . . . 
 
 He couldn't get rid of his anxiety, and so, in the 
 heat of the moment, before morning school, he an- 
 swered her letter. "Oh, darling, don't go to Switz- 
 erland with a lot of strangers. If you do go, I feel 
 that I shall never see you again," he wrote. He 
 knew it wouldn't be any good. She couldn't rea- 
 sonably do anything but smile at his fancies. But 
 he couldn't help it. He even took the trouble to 
 post the letter in the box at the Grand Entrance, 
 so as to make certain that he couldn't change his 
 mind. 
 
 On the way into the classroom he met Griffin, 
 who pushed a packet into his hand. "Here you are," 
 he said. "Take it." It was thirty-eight shillings 
 in silver, the first prize in the house sweep on the 
 Birches. He wished he had remembered about it. 
 He would have told his mother in the letter not to 
 bother about the postal order. It was an awful 
 thing to think of her being hard-up and himself 
 rolling in this prodigious and ill-gotten fortune. 
 
 The morning class was listless, for the weather 
 remained at a great pitch of heat, and the only thing 
 that any one thought of was the fixture with the 
 M.C.C. which would begin at noon. Cleaver always 
 assisted as umpire at this match, and so the de- 
 serted Lower Fifth occupied a corner of the Big 
 Schoolroom by themselves. In this great chamber 
 it was said that the roof-span was as wide as 
 any in England Edwin dreamed away the morn- 
 ing, reading, sometimes, the gilt lettering on the 
 boards on which the names of scholars were record-
 
 78 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 ed: giants who had passed before him along the 
 same corridors, and whose names were only mem- 
 orable as those of heroes in a mythology, or more 
 ponderably evident in reports of parliamentary de- 
 bates and the scores of county cricket teams. 
 
 Opposite him hung the board devoted to the win- 
 ners of entrance scholarships. His own name was 
 there. Edwin Ingleby . . . 1895. He remembered 
 the day when it had almost embarrassed him with 
 its fresh gold lettering. Now the leaf had toned 
 down, and the name had sunk into obscurity be- 
 neath a dozen others. So the passage of fleet time 
 was measured on these tables. In a few more years 
 nobody who didn't take the trouble would read his 
 name. Even those of the batch before "him were 
 lialf -buried in obscurity. One other name arrested 
 him: G. H. Giles. He knew nothing of Giles ex- 
 cept that this brilliant beginning had been followed 
 by disaster. The name of Giles appeared on no 
 other board; for the term before Edwin came to 
 St. Luke's Giles had been expelled from the school. 
 Edwin didn't know what he had been expelled for; 
 but the circumstance, remembered, afflicted him 
 with a kind of awe. "It might happen so easily," he 
 thought. Why, if he hadn't lied to the Head the 
 day before he might have been expelled himself, 
 and years afterwards some one sitting in his place 
 would stare at the name of Ingleby with the self- 
 same awe. The voice of Mr. Leeming, stuck fast 
 where Edwin had left him a year before, in the 
 Stuart period, recalled him. "We will pass over 
 the unpleasant . . . most unpleasant side of Charles
 
 THUNDER WEATHER 79 
 
 the Second's reign. Unfortunately, he was a thor- 
 oughly bad man, and his court . . ." 
 
 Edwin heard no more, but he heard another sound 
 peculiar to the Big Schoolroom on Saturday morn- 
 ings: the measured steps of the school sergeant 
 plodding down the long stone corridor which led 
 to the folding doors. On Saturday morning the 
 form-masters presented their weekly reports to the 
 Head, and boys whose names came badly out of the 
 ordeal were summoned to the office to be lectured, 
 to be put on the sort of probation known as "Satis- 
 fecit," or even to be caned. 
 
 The Lower Fifth knew none of these terrors. 
 Cleaver was far too easy-going to take his weekly 
 report seriously ; but the lower ranks of Mr. Leem- 
 ing's form trembled. You could never be sure of 
 old Leeming. The folding doors opened. Mr. Leem- 
 ing stopped speaking, and the sergeant walked up 
 to his desk and stood waiting at attention while 
 Leeming read his list. He looked over his glasses. 
 "Let me see ... Sherard . . ." he said. "Sherard, 
 the head-master wishes to see you at twelve-thirty." 
 His voice was so gently sympathetic that nobody 
 could possibly imagine that he had had anything to 
 do with this calamity. "Then . . . the Lower 
 Fifth . . ." he fumbled with the paper. "Ingleby. 
 The head-master will se,e you at the same time." 
 He looked over at Edwin with the most pained sur- 
 prise. "Very good, sergeant," he said. 
 
 Edwin felt himself going white. Yes, that was 
 it. That was the explanation of his feeling of un, 
 rest. He was going to share the fate of the tradi- 
 tional Giles. Good Lord . . think of it! Miss
 
 8o THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Denning had done this. And yet he could hardly 
 believe it she had always been far too nice for 
 that. Now his face was burning. It struck him 
 that it wasn't a bit of good worrying. If it weren't 
 ... if it weren't for his mother it really wouldn't 
 be so bad. He couldn't bear to think of her dis- 
 appointment in his disgrace. She thought so 
 much of him. It wouldn't be quite so bad if she 
 were not ill. It might kill her. Good God! . . . 
 that would be awful! Suppose, after all (it was 
 no good supposing), that the Head wanted to see 
 him about something else. . . . There wasn't any- 
 thing else. Unless . . . unless it were something 
 to do with his mother. Unless she were seriously 
 ill ... even something worse. But he had her 
 letter. It couldn't be that. Yesterday she was well 
 enough to write to him. No . . . the story was out, 
 and he was going to be expelled. In three quarters 
 of an hour he would know the worst. He wished 
 that the time would pass more quickly. Time had 
 never been so slow in passing. The clock in the 
 tower chimed the quarter. From where he sat he 
 could see the tower through the upper lights of the 
 long window. He could see the minute-hand give 
 a little lurch and move infinitesimally forward. He 
 remembered Widdup telling him exactly how many 
 times it moved to the minute. Was it twice . . . 
 or three times? He had forgotten. There must be 
 something wrong with the clock to-day. In the 
 middle of this purgatory one half-humorous fancy 
 came to him: "At any rate old Griff will know; 
 that I did go to the races now."
 
 JHUNDER WEATHER 81 
 
 in 
 
 They waited, ten or twelve of them, in the twi- 
 light of the passage outside the Head's study. The 
 atmosphere of this place resembled that of a crypt, 
 or more properly since the keynote of the St. 
 Luke's architecture was baronial rather than mon- 
 astic a dungeon. The only light that came to 
 them entered by way of certain dusty windows of 
 lancet shape on either side of the gothic porch. Be- 
 neath these windows languished a pale array of 
 botanical specimens rotting in their test tubes 
 and bearing witness to the week-old zeal of the 
 Head's particular section of the Natural History 
 Society. 
 
 They waited, a miserable company of all shapes 
 and sizes : some, who knew the worst, with a rather 
 exaggerated jauntiness, determined to make the 
 best of it: others, such as Edwin r being in doubt 
 of their fate and burdened with a spiritual appre- 
 hension far worse than any physical penalty which 
 might overtake them. 
 
 The sergeant opened the door. "Sherard W.," 
 he said. Sherard W. crammed a sweaty cap into 
 his pocket and started forward, eager to get it 
 over. The aperture which admitted him showed no 
 more than the end of a table crammed with books, 
 a number of highly-varnished shelves, a polished 
 floor covered with Turkey carpet, and a blaze of 
 mocking sunshine. The nails in the heels of Sher- 
 ard W.'s boots rang on the stone flags. When he 
 reached the Turkey carpet his steps became silent. 
 The door closed. The rest of them strained to
 
 82 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 listen. They heard little: nothing but the quiet 
 rumour of the head-master's voice, and little patches 
 of silence in which the replies of Sherard W. were 
 not heard at all. A moment later he emerged. A 
 number of whispered questions assailed him, but 
 Sherard W. didn't feel like answering questions. He 
 brushed by the rest of them as quickly as he could 
 go, with his school-cap pressed to his eyes. An- 
 other patch of sunlight was revealed. "Fraz- 
 er . . ." called the sergeant. And Frazer, a tall lout 
 of a boy with sallow face, came forward and was 
 swallowed up in the same way as Sherard W. A 
 minute later the sound of dull blows was heard. 
 
 "Frazer's got it," said somebody. "One . . . 
 two . ,. . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . Poor 
 old Frazer!" 
 
 "Six from the Head isn't equal to three from 
 Cleaver. You should see Cleaver's biceps in the 
 gym." 
 
 One by one the members of the crowd entered and 
 returned. It seemed to Edwin that his turn would 
 never come. All the time that he waited his imagi- 
 nation ( accursed gift ! ) was playing with the hidden 
 scene within : the long table, that he had seen only 
 once before, and, at the head of it, the lean, bearded 
 figure in the silk gown wielding an absolute power 
 of life and death like God in the Old Testament. 
 Yes, it was just like that. He remembered a mina- 
 tory text that hung cobwebbed in one of the attics 
 at home : PREPARE To MEET THY GOD. It was not 
 pleasant to hear these muffled sounds of chastise- 
 ment, but what was a flogging (the Head's favour- 
 ite word) compared with the more devastating fate
 
 THUNDER WEATHER 83 
 
 that awaited him? "That's why he's keeping me 
 till last," he thought. 
 
 "Ingleby . . ." said the sergeant. Edwin had 
 time to fancy that his tone implied a more awful 
 enormity than he had put into any other name. He 
 entered, and stood waiting in the sunlight. It was 
 rather less frightening than he had imagined, this 
 long room, relatively luxurious, and the pale man 
 at the head of the table with his lined, black-beard- 
 ed face, and the peculiar twitching of his left arm 
 which had always added to the sinister side of his 
 equipment. For a moment he took no notice of Ed- 
 win. Then he looked up and smiled. Would the 
 storm never break? 
 
 "Ah . . . Ingleby." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "I hope your entomological zeal isn't going to 
 take you up to the racecourse, Ingleby. How are 
 the puss-caterpillars getting on?" 
 
 He smiled again, and showed his teeth beneath 
 his shaggy moustache. Edwin was seized with a 
 sudden terror. The worst had happened, and now 
 the Head was playing with him. He could say 
 nothing. 
 
 "Eh? . . . What's the matter with you? You 
 aren't faint, are you? You'd better sit down." 
 
 Edwin trembled into a chair. 
 
 "Now, are you all right?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "I sent for you, Ingleby, because I have been hav- 
 ing a talk with Mr. Leeming." 
 
 What in the world had old fat Leeming to do 
 with it? Edwin wished he would get it over.
 
 84 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Mr. Leeming has always given me good reports 
 of you ... I don't know if you deserve them . . . 
 and last night I saw Mr. Cleaver, who . . . um . . . 
 um . . . tells me that you are one of ... No, I'll 
 leave that part out . . . that you've got plenty of 
 brains when you choose to use them, but that you 
 are somewhat lacking in application. H'm?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 Why wouldn't he get to the point? 
 
 "He says, Ingleby, that you're a dreamer. Well, 
 you know, there's no use for dreamers in this world. 
 They're not wanted. Even dreamers with the bless- 
 ing of good brains. H'm?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "But Mr. Leeming is satisfied, and so am I, that 
 if you chose to make an effort, and take a ... a 
 healthy interest in things, we might do some good 
 with you. You might win scholarships, and be a 
 credit to the school. That's what we want. That's 
 what your parents sent you here for. Now . . . 
 now Mr. Leeming tells me that you aspire to be- 
 coming a priest of the church. . . ." 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 "No . . .? But Mr. Leeming told me he had 
 talked the matter over with you?" 
 
 "He mentioned it, sir ... but I didn't say any- 
 thing. I ... don't think I do want to, sir." 
 
 The Head frowned. "You mean that you don't 
 feel worthy of so great a vocation? Well, you're 
 young. You're a promising boy. I want to do what 
 is best for you . . . and the school. At the end 
 of this term you are likely to get a move, and after 
 a certain time I don't think, from the scholarship
 
 THUNDER WEATHER 85 
 
 point of view, you can begin to specialise too early. 
 You have shown a certain . . . aptitude for Eng- 
 lish. You might read History. You might stick 
 to Classics. What do you think about it?" 
 "I should like to read History, sir." 
 <r Very well, I'll write to your father about it. We 
 won't say anything more about the Church for the 
 present. That will come later. I expect Mr. Leem- 
 ing will talk it over with you. You may go now."
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 IMPURITY 
 
 fin HE "little chat" as Mr. Leeming would cer- 
 A tainly have called it did not take place for a 
 long time, for the reverend gentleman's mind had 
 become exercised with a problem of greater impor- 
 tance than the devotion of Edwin. It wasn't exactly 
 his fault. Mr. Leeming was a bachelor. He was now 
 in his forty-third year. Naturally endowed with 
 an intense shyness of disposition which the forced 
 publicity of his two professions, in the pulpit and 
 the classroom, had overlaid with a veneer of suave 
 assurance, he was none the less a man of ardent, 
 if timid passions. He himself had always been 
 aware of this powerful sensual element in his na- 
 ture. With a certain degree of courage he had 
 subjected it to a deliberate mortification. Obsti- 
 nately he had fitted his body to the Procrustean 
 couch that his conscience recommended: obsti- 
 nately, and in a degree successfully. Not quite 
 successfully . . . for his original appetites were un- 
 wieldy, and if they had been coerced in one direc- 
 tion they had undoubtedly and demonstrably over- 
 flowed in another, as witnessed the growing expanse 
 of his waistcoat. 
 
 This waistcoat, on week-days of broadcloth and 
 86
 
 IMPURITY 87 
 
 on Sundays of a more sensual silk, was the symbol 
 of Mr. Leeming's possibilities. He didn't know it. 
 Even if he were aware, in the lacing of his boots, 
 of its physical existence; he hadn't the least idea 
 of its spiritual significance. If he had realised this, 
 if he had been content to see himself as he actually 
 stood upon the brink of his morning bath instead 
 of as a snowy surpliced priest of God or a knightly 
 figure in the armour of Sir Percivale (such, indeed, 
 was his Christian name), Mr. Leeming might have 
 been a healthier and a happier man. As it was, the 
 devil that he believed he had conquered, in reality 
 possessed his soul. 
 
 In his quest for the thing which he had labelled 
 purity he had unconsciously allowed the idea of 
 "Impurity" to become an obsession. In the activi- 
 ties of a parish, hustled by the continual accidents 
 of stark life and stabilised by the actual responsi- 
 bility of a wife and an increasing family, Mr. Leem- 
 ing might have become a thinner and a wiser man. 
 In the sedentary and monotonous duties of a pub- 
 lic school, he had become gradually more fat and 
 introspective, and, as the years advanced, more per- 
 petually conscious of the unashamed presence 
 throughout human nature of his own suppressed 
 desires, more frightened . . . and more curious 
 ... of their terrible existence and more terrible 
 power. Mr. Leeming, with the best intentions in 
 the world, was in a bad way. 
 
 A number of circumstances favoured the develop- 
 ment of the unfortunate gentleman's obsession. In. 
 the last Easter holidays he had attended a confer- 
 ence of assistant masters in London, at which the
 
 88 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 whole question had been discussed with the great- 
 est solemnity, and plans had been formulated for 
 the stamping out of "impurity" in every public 
 school in England. The speeches of the delegates 
 had convinced him of his own blindness. It was 
 impossible that St. Luke's should be so very differ- 
 ent from any other public school, yet other people 
 had assured the meeting that in their own schools 
 tthe disease was "rampant," and Mr. Leeming had re- 
 turned to his summer duties convinced that if only 
 he looked with sufficient care more ills than he had 
 ever suspected might be found. He had become a 
 man with a mission. 
 
 For a crusade of this kind St. Luke's was not by 
 any means an ideal field. The head-master, for all 
 his imposing presence, was not a practical man. He 
 was intolerant of enthusiasms in his staff, not so 
 much because they were symptomatic of ill-breed- 
 ing, but because they tended to disturb the pleasant 
 ordered tenor of his life. Croquet and botany were 
 sciences of more interest to him than education. He 
 believed in hard games, corporal punishment, na- 
 ture study, and the classics. He hated extremes. The 
 golden mean was his creed, his weakness, and his 
 apology. He hadn't any use for Mr. Leeming's in- 
 tensities. He could even be picturesque on oc- 
 casion. "If you are going to appoint yourself in- 
 spector of our dirty linen, Leeming," he said, "you 
 really mustn't expect me to do the washing." 
 
 "I don't think you understand me, sir," Mr. Leem- 
 ing began. . . . 
 
 "Oh, don't I?" said the Head. The word Im- 
 purity formed voicelessly on Mr. Leeming's lips.
 
 IMPURITY 89 
 
 "It is a scandalous thing . . . scandalous . . ." 
 he complained to the common-room, "that a man 
 who knows what is right and is determined to fol- 
 low it shouldn't be properly backed by the head- 
 master. The matter is vital. It is the most im- 
 portant ... by far fhe most important problem 
 in modern education. Any means are justified to 
 purge the schools of this sort of thing. . . ." 
 
 "I can see you, Leeming," drawled Selby, "in 
 the role of agent provocateur." The common-room 
 exploded. 
 
 "What is wanted in the public schoolmaster is 
 a higher sense of seriousness," Leeming spluttered. 
 "You have no sense of suspicion." 
 
 "What is more wanted in the public schools," 
 said Cleaver, "is a suspicion of sense common 
 sense." 
 
 "All you fellows talk," said Dr. Downton, "as if 
 the whole thing were a problem for the public 
 schools purely and simply. It's nothing of the kind. 
 It's not the ignorance of the average schoolmaster 
 as much as the ignorance of the average parent. I 
 mean ignorance of the nature of boys . . . lack 
 of sympathy, lack of responsibility. And when ugly 
 things happen they shove it on to us." 
 
 "That's what they pay a hundred and fifty a 
 year for," said Cleaver. 
 
 "Of which we don't see any too much . . ." Selby 
 growled. 
 
 "None of you take it seriously. The thing ia 
 enormous," said Leeming. "What can you expect 
 in a way of improvement when a housemaster like 
 Selby makes jokes about it? I'm convinced that
 
 90 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 there's only one way. . . . You can't drive boys. 
 You've got to understand their hearts." 
 
 "You've got to understand their bodies," said 
 Cleaver. 
 
 Mr. Leeming flushed. "I think you are merely 
 disgusting, Cleaver." 
 
 "He's quite right," said Downton. "It isn't sexu- 
 al education, it isn't moral instruction that's going 
 to work the miracle. When a boy reaches a cer- 
 tain age and it isn't the same age with all boys 
 he begins to be conscious, and quite properly, of 
 his physical passions. You needn't shudder, Leem- 
 ing. They exist. You know they exist as well as 
 anybody. Well, when he reaches that stage a pub- 
 lic school isn't the proper place for him." 
 
 "The games would go to pot," said Cleaver. From 
 his point of view there was no more to be said. 
 
 "It depends entirely on your boy. Some are too 
 old at seventeen. Some are perfectly safe at nine- 
 teen. The trouble is that just when you get them in 
 eight of these dangers you put them in supreme au- 
 thority. A prefect can do pretty well as he 
 likes. . . ." 
 
 "It's the essence of the system . . . responsi- 
 bility," said Selby. 
 
 "It gives them what Shaw said about something 
 else: the maximum of inclination with the maxi- 
 mum of opportunity." 
 
 "Shaw?" said Cleaver. "You fellows are too deep 
 for me. Anyway, I don't believe there's much 
 wrong here. So long." He swung out of the room. 
 
 "That kind of man," said Mr. Leeming, "is at the 
 root of the whole business."
 
 IMPURITY 91 
 
 Dr, Downton was almost angry. 'Ton know, 
 Leeming, you're talking bosh. The thing's solving 
 itself. All over the world schoolboys are getting 
 wider interests at school. In their homes they're 
 taking a more equal place in family life. It is no 
 longer a matter of being seen and not heard. 
 They're being treated like human beings. The 
 more you treat them like human beings the less 
 likely they are to behave like young animals. And 
 the greatest mistake of all is to keep on talking 
 to them about it. Every boy of a certain age is 
 curious, and quite naturally curious, about his 
 physical possibilities. So is every girl. . . ." 
 
 "My dear Downton," said Leeming flushing, "I 
 shall be obliged if you won't er pursue the sub- 
 ject. You make it painful. . . ." 
 
 "Very well," said Downton gathering up the 
 skirts of his gown. 
 
 "Thank you." Leeming left the room. Selb 
 smiled lazily. 
 
 "If only," he said, "if only our friend Leeming 
 had ever enjoyed the advantage of a really bad 
 woman's society." 
 
 n 
 
 Unconscious of the doom which was being forged 
 for their chastisement in the white heat of Mr. 
 Leeming's troubled brain, the school lay scattered 
 along the perimeter of the cricket-field waiting 
 for the players to emerge from the pavilion. They 
 came, and the great expanse of green was made 
 more beautiful by their scattered figures. Every- 
 thing in the game seemed spacious and smooth and
 
 92 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 clean the white flannels of the players; the paler 
 green of the rolled pitch; the new red ball; the 
 sharp click of the bat. Before lunch the school 
 had lost three wickets, but now it seemed as if a 
 stand were to be made. The studious Carr, the 
 head of Edwin's house, was batting steadily ; while 
 Gilson, the school's most showy batsman, who would 
 play for Surrey in the holidays, was beginning to 
 get set. Edwin and Widdup had their deck-chairs 
 side by side, and Douglas, for want of Griffin, ab- 
 sent on some deeper business, had pitched himself 
 near them, reclining upon a positive divan of 
 downy cushions. 
 
 The winnings of the house sweepstake, easily 
 gained, and therefore easily to be spent, supplied 
 the natural accompaniment of ices and ginger beer 
 or that inimitable compound of both that *was 
 known as the Strawberry Cooler. Under such cir- 
 cumstances the mere fact of lazy existence was a 
 pleasure. Even when the cautious Carr was 
 bowled, the long partnership ended, and the St. 
 Luke's wickets began to fall like autumn leaves, the 
 serene beauty of the day was scarcely clouded. 
 
 In the middle of the afternoon the figure of Mr. 
 Leeming drifted along the edge of the field. He 
 halted on the path immediately in front of Edwin 
 with his back to the spectators, considerably in- 
 commoding Douglas's view of the play. "Old 
 Beelzebub's a friend of yours, isn't he, Ingleby?" 
 said Douglas lazily. "You might tell him that he 
 isn't made of glass." But Mr. Leeming, suddenly 
 aware of a voice behind him, turned and came 
 towards them, smiling.
 
 IMPURITY 93 
 
 "Ah, Ingleby," he said. "Is that you?" 
 
 He sat on the grass beside them, very carefully, 
 as befitted a man of his figure. "A beautiful day. 
 Let me see, who are we playing?" 
 
 "The M.C.C., sir." 
 
 "Ah, yes . . . the Marylebone Cricket Club. Are 
 you fond of cricket, Ingleby?" 
 
 "Of course I am, sir." 
 
 "I very seldom see you now. That's the pity of 
 it. The better a boy is the less you see of him. He 
 passes through your form quickly, and that's the 
 end of it. And how is Widdup?" 
 
 Widdup was very well, if a little impatient. 
 
 "You and Ingleby are great friends, Widdup. 
 Quite inseparable. I've often seen you walking 
 up and down the quad at night. I wonder what 
 it is you have in common, eh?" 
 
 Widdup didn't know. They'd always been pals. 
 They'd always slept alongside each other. That 
 was how you got to know a chap. 
 
 "Well, Ingleby, what are you reading in these 
 days?" 
 
 "Well hit, sir; oh, well hit. . . . Make it five. 
 I beg your pardon, sir ... I don't think I'm read- 
 ing anything in particular." 
 
 Slowly it became evident to Mr. Leeming that 
 the audience which he had honoured with his com- 
 pany was bored. With great dignity he picked 
 himself up and left them. 
 
 "He's a funny old swine," said Douglas. 
 
 "I used to think he was rather decent," said 
 Edwin. "Horribly 'pi' you know." 
 
 "I don't trust him," said Douglas. "I always feel
 
 94 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 as if he's up to some low-down business or other. 
 He goes mooching about in those old felt slippers 
 of his, and you never know where he is. The other 
 day he came into the long box-room when Griff 
 and I were there playing Nap. You couldn't tell 
 he was coming. He's like a damned old tomcat. 
 I can't think how you stick him, Ingleby. . . ." 
 
 "I don't, really," Edwin confessed. 
 
 "And old Griff says he follows him like a shadow. 
 Just lately he's taken to haunting the swimming- 
 bath. I don't know what he goes there for. He 
 never used to. He never goes in. I don't suppose 
 the fat beast can swim." 
 
 "He could float . . ." said the practical Widdup. 
 
 The golden afternoon dragged out its lovely 
 length. The atmosphere of luxurious indolence 
 grew so heavy that it became too great an effort 
 to think of carrying the rugs and deck-chairs back 
 to the studies; and when Douglas had left them to 
 keep an appointment with Griffin, Widdup and 
 Edwin sat on till the meadows swam with soft 
 golden light, till the tops of the pyramidal lime- 
 trees became the colour of their blossoms, and the 
 sun cast long shadows upon the yellow fields. In 
 this delightful hour the sounds of the match from 
 which excitement had faded almost as the fierce- 
 ness had faded from the sky, became no more than 
 a placid accompaniment to the dying day. At six- 
 thirty stumps were drawn. The wide fields began 
 to empty and soon no life was seen upon them but 
 low dipping swallows who skimmed the smooth 
 lawn as though it were the surface of some placid
 
 IMPURITY 95 
 
 lake. Upon the hillside a straggling trail of boys 
 could be seen taking home their rugs and cushions 
 as though they were returning from a day of toil 
 instead of one of the most exquisite idleness. 
 
 "Come on," said Widdup at last; "we shall be 
 late for chapel." And indeed another twenty 
 minutes found them assembled in the oak pews for 
 evensong. They sang the Nunc Dimittis, a canticle 
 which for all the rest of his life Edwin associated 
 with the placid closing of a summer day, and the 
 mild rays of the departing sun blazed through the 
 stained glass of the west window upon the pale 
 mosaic of the nave. When they emerged from the 
 chapel the sun had set, the skyline of the downs lay 
 low and almost cold, and cockchafers were whirring 
 blindly among the sticky tops of the conifers along 
 the chapel path. 
 
 In the middle of the crowd that stuck congested 
 in the porch Edwin found himself wedged between 
 Douglas and Griffin. They whispered together be- 
 hind his back. "Well, are you going?" 
 
 "Of course I'm going, I told you." 
 
 "You've fixed it up with her?" 
 
 "Yes, she's up to any sport. Why don't you 
 come with us?" 
 
 "Two's company. . . ." 
 
 "Go on with you. . . . You can easily pick up 
 another. You're not a sportsman, Duggie." 
 
 "I don't take risks of that kind. You bet your 
 boots I don't. Why don't you ask Ingleby? He's 
 a blood. Says he went to see the Birches. And 
 he's flush, too. Won the sweep."
 
 96 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Ingleby?" Griffin scoffed. "I bet you he'd 
 funk it." 
 
 "Funk what?" said Edwin. 
 
 "Going down town to-night. There's a fair on. 
 I'm taking the skivvy from J dorm. She's all right. 
 She knows a thing or two." 
 
 "Don't talk so loud, you ass," said Douglas. 
 
 "Well, will you come?" 
 
 "No, I won't," said Edwin. 
 
 "You said you went to the Birches." 
 
 "I did go to the Birches." 
 
 "Well, nobody believes you. Now's your chance 
 to show your pluck. Come along, gentlemen, show 
 your pluck. . . . Three to one bar one. . . . 'Ere 
 you are, sir. The old and trusted firm. Ingleby 
 . . . you are a rotten little funk !" 
 
 Edwin said nothing. "He's got more sense than 
 you have, anyway, Griff," said Douglas. 
 
 That night in the dormitory when the lights were 
 turned down Griffin had not appeared. Douglas, 
 who slept next to him, had constructed, by means 
 of his own bolster and another confiscated from 
 the bed of the small boy on whom the animosity of 
 the coalition was now chiefly lavished, a very 
 plausible imitation of Griffin's prostrate figure. As 
 Griffin habitually slept in a position which enabled 
 him to absorb his own fugginess, this was not diffi- 
 cult. When Edwin went to sleep Griffin had not 
 arrived. Drugged with fresh air he slept un- 
 troubled by any dream. In the middle of the night 
 (as it seemed) he awoke, not because he had 
 heard any sound but rather because he had become 
 aware in his sleep of some unusual presence. He
 
 IMPURITY 97 
 
 did not move, but slowly opened his eyes, and all 
 he saw was the figure of Mr. Selby, gigantically 
 tall, clad in a long bath-gown of Turkish towelling 
 and carrying a lighted candle that cast a shadow 
 even more gigantic on the whitewashed walls. He 
 moved slowly and his bedroom slippers made no* 
 sound on the boarded floor. Opposite the foot of Ed- 
 win's and Widdup's bed he paused for a moment. 
 Edwin closed his eyes. He felt the eyelids quiver. 
 Why on earth should Selby want to look at him? 
 He passed on, and Edwin, cautiously opening his 
 eyes, saw him pause again opposite the gap be- 
 tween Douglas and Griffin. At this point he 
 waited longer. He appeared to be thinking. He 
 passed on and then suddenly turned back and 
 gently lifted the sheet from Griffin's pillow. Gently 
 he replaced it. Edwin was almost too sleepy to 
 realize that Griffin wasn't there; but when he did, 
 the first thought which came into his mind was one 
 of spontaneous and inexplicable loyalty. He 
 thought, "Poor old Griff : He's in for it." And yet, 
 if there was one person in the world against whom 
 he had a reasonable excuse for hatred . . . Very 
 silently Selby left the dormitory. Edwin became 
 conscious of the ghostly noises of the night : a night- 
 jar spinning in the wood at the back of the School- 
 house: the boom of a cockchafer that some en- 
 thusiast had captured and imported into the dormi- 
 tory. The clock in the high turret struck twelve. 
 The chime wandered clanging over the empty 
 quadrangle.
 
 98 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 in 
 
 The next week was the most sensational that 
 had ever shaken the placid life of St. Luke's. The 
 fall of Griffin was no startling matter deliberately 
 he had been "asking for it," and the escapade of 
 the fair in race-week was no more than a crown- 
 ing glory. Still, it was an impressive affair. Im- 
 mediately after breakfast next morning it wag 
 whispered that Griffin had been sent to the in- 
 fectious ward in the sanatorium, which was always 
 devoted, by reason of its size rather than any con- 
 scious attempt at symbolism, to the isolation of 
 moral leprosy. It became certain and Edwin, 
 after his vision of Selby's visit in the night had 
 taken it for granted that Griffin was to be 
 "bunked." In the afternoon, Douglas, faithfully 
 prowling near his comrade's prison, had seen 
 Griffin, splendidly unrepentant, at the high window 
 of his condemned cell. Griffin had smiled. Griffin, 
 evidently, didn't give a damn for the whole busi- 
 ness. The house thrilled. Of such stuff heroes 
 were made. It remained to be seen, in the opinion 
 of the critical, how Griffin would shape in the su- 
 preme test of the scaffold on which he would prob- 
 ably be birched before the assembled school. The 
 betting was all on Griffin's being a sportsman. 
 
 There followed a day of suspense. Consultations 
 between masters were noticed. Selby, for a whole 
 hour, had been closeted with the Head. Old fat 
 Leeming had been sent for at last to join their 
 deliberations. What had Leeming to do with it? 
 Other housemasters had been summoned to the
 
 IMPURITY 99 
 
 room beneath the clock and emerged with un- 
 usually serious faces. Who was this Griffin that 
 his fate should shake the foundations of Olympus? 
 The Head, indeed, showed his seriousness more 
 clearly than all the others. He arrived late in 
 chapel, where the service had waited on his coming : 
 he stalked up the aisle, as full of omen as any 
 black crow, with his pale seamed face and his 
 shaggy black beard, and his arms crossed behind 
 his back beneath the skirts of his gown. From 
 his high seat at the end of the chancel he scowled 
 on the whole school as if he hated it. At supper 
 a message was read out. The school would as- 
 semble by classes in the Big Schoolroom at noon. 
 Poor old Griff. . . . The sergeant, it was said, had 
 been seen binding a new birch in the porter's lodge. 
 
 It was all very romantic and thrilling. Edwin, 
 conscious now for the first time of the extreme 
 foolhardiness of his racecourse adventure, felt 
 himself a greater dog than ever. And then, when 
 the stage was set, and the audience attuned to an 
 atmosphere of tragedy by so much thunder- 
 weather, Griffin, from whom the glamour of the 
 heroic had been gradually fading in the shame of 
 his captivity, achieved the dramatic. He bolted. 
 With a ladder of knotted sheets he climbed down 
 the waterspout and disappeared into open country. 
 Griffin lived somewhere in Kent. In half a day he 
 would reach home. 
 
 For Selby's house it was a great morning. 
 Edwin, in spite of his hatred of Griffin, shared in 
 the general elation. Such private feuds were small
 
 ioo THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 concerns in the face of the common enemy. Douglas 
 was flown with insolence. 
 
 "I knew old Griff would do them," he said. "By 
 God . . . that's a man if you like. It's the nastiest 
 knock old Selby's had in his life. Think of it ... 
 a chap with a weak heart like old Griff shinning 
 down a waterspout!" 
 
 Edwin wondered if the meeting in the Big 
 Schoolroom would be off, or whether, perhaps, it 
 would be postponed and Griffin hauled back from 
 the bosom of his family to go through with it. 
 
 "You silly ass," said Douglas. "Of course they 
 can't fetch him back. He's done them brown." 
 
 But the morning went on without any alteration 
 in the programme. At twelve o'clock the solemn 
 procession began: the whole black-coated popula- 
 tion of St. Luke's filtering through narrow corri- 
 dors and the wide folding doors into the big 
 Schoolroom. The whole business was impressive; 
 for nobody spoke and no sound came from the 
 crowd but the drag of slowly-moving feet and arms 
 that brushed one another. They were like a flock 
 of sheep driven away from market on a narrow 
 road between dusty hedges, for none of them knew 
 what was coming. Rumour was busy with whispers. 
 
 Griffin had been found in a ditch with his leg 
 broken and had been hauled back to fulfil his 
 sentence. Like Momnouth, Edwin thought. Griffin, 
 in company with the pale skivvy from "D" had 
 been arrested by the police at Waterloo. Other 
 rumours, less credible, as, for instance, that 
 Cleaver, meeting a jockey friend of his in a little 
 pub called the Grenadier in the Downs Koad, had
 
 IMPURITY 101 
 
 walked into a taproom full of School House bloods 
 on Sunday morning. Indeed, these were strenuous 
 days. 
 
 The school settled down. The Head, lean, crow- 
 like, flapped the wings of his gown. He seemed to 
 find it difficult to make a beginning, and while he 
 waited for a word his left arm twitched. Then 
 he began. It was obvious that his pause had been 
 nothing more than a rhetorical trick designed to 
 fix the attention of an audience already thrilled 
 by uncertainty. He wasn't at a loss for words at 
 all. He boomed, he ranted, he bellowed, he rolled 
 his "r's" and his eyes. The masters, sitting at their 
 high desks, remained discreet and rather bored 
 ... all except Mr. Leeming, to whom the orator 
 appeared as an inspired prophet of God. For the 
 subject of his harangue was Mr. Leeming's own: 
 Impurity; and the whole meeting the immediate 
 result of Mr. Leeming's investigations. The cur- 
 tain had gone up with a most theatrical flourish 
 upon the Great Smut Row. 
 
 The essence of the Head's speech was a general 
 threat. Certain things had been discovered; cer- 
 tain further inquiries were to be made; the fate 
 of a large number of boys lay in the balance ; more 
 details were known, in all probability, than any 
 of the victims suspected; to the youngest among 
 them he made a special appeal; confession, imme- 
 diate confession, would be th better part of valour; 
 he looked to every member of the school to aid him 
 in the task, the sacred duty, of purging St. Luke's 
 of this abominable thing. Indeed it is possible 
 that he meant what he said. His port was bad,
 
 102 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 and he knew better than to drink it ; but the heady 
 vintage that he brewed from sonorous words 
 knocked him over every time. 
 
 The meeting dissolved in silence. For the mo- 
 ment the school was impressed, less by the gravity 
 of the charge than by its indefiniteness. The same 
 evening brought tales of segregated suspects, of 
 tearful and terrible interviews in the rooms of 
 housemasters, of prefects suspended : of a veritable 
 reign of terror lettres de cachet and the rest of 
 it in Citizen Leeming's house. "D" dormitory 
 and the others in charge of the languid Selby suf- 
 fered least. When evening came to set a term 
 to rumours only two were missing the black 
 Douglas, and an insignificant inky creature of the 
 name of Hearn, whom the threats of the head- 
 master had driven to some grubby confession. An 
 atmosphere of immense relief fell upon the awed 
 dormitory and found vent in a memorable "rag." 
 
 But Edwin did not sleep. There was no reason 
 why he should not have slept ; but he couldn't help 
 feeling, against reason, that in some way he might 
 be dragged into the toils of vengeance; that some 
 peculiar combination of circumstances might impli- 
 cate him in the business, even though he had never 
 had anything to do with it. Somehow appearances 
 might be against him. In particular he became 
 suspicious of Mr. Leeming's attentions to him in 
 the past. He imagined that the wily creature had 
 suspected him, and tried, for that reason, to find 
 a way into his confidence. What other explana- 
 tion could there be? His avoidance of Mr. Leem-
 
 IMPURITY 103 
 
 ing could only have increased the suspicion. Plain- 
 ly, he was done for. 
 
 He remembered, with a perilous clearness, words 
 that had passed between them to which he had 
 given no thought. Now they appeared terribly 
 significant. "You and Ingleby are great friends, 
 Widdup," Leeming had said only a few days before. 
 "Quite inseparable. I've often seen you walking 
 up and down the. quad at night. I wonder what 
 you have in common, eh?" Now Edwin knew why 
 he wondered. And Widdup, like a damned fool, 
 had said that they slept alongside each other. Sup- 
 posing old Leeming imagined. ... It was too bad. 
 He lay there staring at the rafters and wondering 
 what could be done. He would like to write to 
 his mother about it. But a man couldn't write to 
 his mother about a thing like that. And his father 
 wouldn't understand. In the end he determined 
 that the only thing he could possibly do was to go 
 and see Leeming next day and assure him that 
 there was nothing . wrong with their friendship. 
 "And then," he thought, "the old beast won't be- 
 lieve me. He'll think that I've gone to him because 
 I have a guilty conscience, and he'll suspect me 
 more than ever. He'll go and make all sorts of 
 inquiries and something will come out that will be 
 difficult to explain." How could anything come 
 out when there wasn't anything wrong? He could 
 not give a reasonable answer to this question, and 
 yet he was afraid. From this spiritual purgatory 
 of his own making he passed into an uneasy sleep. 
 
 Next morning, in the middle of early school, the
 
 104 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 sergeant entered with a message for Mr. Cleaver, 
 and waited while the master read it. 
 
 "Ingleby," he said at last, "Mr. Selby wants to 
 speak to you. You had better go at once." 
 
 Edwin packed up his books with trembling 
 hands. He went very white. It seemed to him that 
 the eyes of the whole form were on him. They 
 were thinking, "Hallo, here's another of them. 
 Ingleby! Who would have thought it?" He heard 
 the footsteps of the sergeant go echoing down the 
 corridor as steadily and implacably as the fate that 
 was overtaking him. He only wanted to get it over. 
 As soon as he was out of the classroom he ran, for 
 every moment of uncertainty was torture to him. 
 He ran across the quad and climbed the stairs, 
 breathless, to the low room still steeped in stale 
 honeydew, where his life at St. Luke's had begun 
 and must now so abruptly end. Mr. Selby sat at 
 his desk waiting for him. When Edwin entered 
 the room he looked suddenly embarrassed and 
 fingered an envelope on his desk. 
 
 "Ingleby, I sent for you urgently . . ." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "It probably came as a shock to you ... or per- 
 haps you were prepared?" 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 "Then you must pull yourself together. You 
 can't guess what it is?" 
 
 "No, sir." . . . But he could. It came to him 
 suddenly, huge and .annihilating, swamping in the 
 space of a second all the uneasiness and terror that 
 had shadowed him in the night. Those things were 
 nothing . . . nothing.
 
 IMPURITY 105 
 
 "Oh, sir ... my mother . . ." 
 
 "Yes . . . It's your mother, Ingleby. I'm sorry 
 to be the bearer of bad news. Very sorry. . . ." 
 
 "Tell me, sir. She's dead. Oh ... she's 
 dead . . . ?" 
 
 Mr. Selby unfolded the telegram although he al- 
 ready knew its contents. 
 
 "No. It's not so bad as that. But she's ill ... 
 very ill . . ." 
 
 "I knew. . . . The minute you spoke I knew, 
 sir. . . ." 
 
 "You had better catch the eight o'clock train 
 at the Downs station. You need only take your 
 little bag. You can get it from the matron. 7 ' 
 
 "Yes, sir. . . ." 
 
 "Have you any money?" Mr. Selby almost 
 smiled to see him so eager to go. 
 
 "No, sir. . . . Only about eightpence." 
 
 "You can't go without money, you know. Here's 
 a sovereign. Now, cheer up, there's a good fellow. 
 Cheer up!" He smiled wanly, and Edwin burst 
 into tears. Mr. Selby laid an awkward hand on 
 his shoulder. It was very decent of him, Edwin 
 thought, as he stood with his fists in his eyes, one 
 of them clutching the sovereign that Selby had 
 given him. 
 
 "Thank you, sir ... but it's awful, it's 
 awful. . . ." 
 
 "Of course, of course. . . ." 
 
 He shepherded Edwin out of the room. When 
 the boy had gone, Mr. Selby, an unemotional man, 
 tore the telegram into small pieces and placed 
 them, with a confirmed bachelor's tidiness, in the
 
 io6 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 waste-paper basket. Then lie lit a pipe of honey- 
 dew; and the blue smoke from the bowl together 
 with the brown smoke that he expelled from his 
 nostrils shone cheerily in the morning sun that 
 beat through the latticed window on to a woman's 
 photograph standing on the desk in front of him. 
 For a moment he gazed at the faded image. He 
 had not thought of her for years.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 HOMEWARDS 
 
 IN a morning air of miraculous freshness Edwin 
 left the quad by the iron gates on the eastern 
 side. The square was quite empty, for all its usual 
 inhabitants were now in early school. He noticed 
 an unusual aspect of space and cleanliness. He 
 could not remember ever having seen it empty be- 
 fore. He noticed the tuck-shop in the corner by 
 the swimming-bath. This, too, was closed, and the 
 windows were heavily shuttered. It was a small 
 thing, but it suddenly occurred to him that people 
 put up their shutters or pulled down their blinds 
 when some one lay dead in a house. It seemed to 
 him like a sort of omen. He said to himself, "I 
 must think of something else ... I must think of 
 something else. I can't bear it." The only other 
 time when he had ever thought of death had been 
 a single moment a week or so before when his 
 mother had written about her plan of a visit to 
 Switzerland. And then the thought had been no 
 more than an indefinite shadow, too remote to be 
 threatening. Now it was different. The threat 
 was ponderable and vast. "Death ... I mustn't 
 think of it. I must think of something else." 
 He had to think of something else; for by the 
 
 107
 
 io8 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 time the gate clanged behind him the clock in the 
 tower struck the quarter, and he knew that he had 
 barely time to catch his train. With his bag in 
 his hand he started running up the road between 
 the tufted grassy banks; past the scene of his last 
 adventure, the oak paling beside the nightingale's 
 spinney, past the last of the new villas, and so, on 
 to the open downs. It was a strange adventure 
 for him to reach them so early in the morning. 
 Their turf was silvered still with a fine dew that 
 made it even paler than a chalk down should be. 
 Fold beyond beautiful fold they stretched before 
 him. The woody belts of beech and pine lay veiled 
 in milky mist, and the air which moved to meet him, 
 as it seemed, over that expanse of breathing grass, 
 was of an intoxicating coolness and sweetness 
 which went to his head and made him want to shout 
 or sing. The spring of a summer morning in the 
 spring of life ! It was all wrong. Surely no awful 
 devastation of death could overshadow such an 
 ecstasy of physical happiness? He refused to be- 
 lieve it. It was all fantastic nonsense. Of course 
 she wasn't dead. Your mother couldn't die without 
 your feeling it. ... 
 
 At the station he had five minutes to spare. He 
 changed his sovereign, and was relieved to be rid 
 of the responsibility of one coin, and to fill his 
 pocket with silver. There were several coppers 
 in the change, and these he placed in a penny-in- 
 the-slot machine, extracting several metallic ingots 
 of chocolate cream. He was ready for these at 
 once, for his only breakfast had been a hurried 
 cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter in the
 
 HOMEWARDS 109 
 
 matron's room. The train jolted out of the station, 
 and soon he was travelling eastward with the high 
 water-tower of St. Luke's dipping gradually be- 
 neath a long horizon. 
 
 The morning grew more beautiful. In some 
 strange way its beauty seemed to have got into his 
 blood; for he tingled with a kind of mild ecstasy 
 which he couldn't help feeling unsuitable almost 
 irreverent, to the tragic occasion. There was ad- 
 venture in it and the added charm of the unex- 
 pected. He was going home. Surely it was reason- 
 able enough to be excited at such a prospect as that, 
 to smell the fine summer scents that were so dif- 
 ferent in a midland shire; to see the gorse ablaze 
 on Pen Beacon and Uffdown and the green glades 
 of the old Mercian wood. Of course it was always 
 wonderful to be going home. 
 
 He remembered other homecomings from St. 
 Luke's; the first, and best of all, when, on a De- 
 cember morning they had crowded into the house- 
 master's room where Mr. Selby sat in his dressing- 
 gown, with a gaslight flaring, handing out the little 
 paper packets of travelling money; how the damp 
 platform at the station had been crowded with 
 human happiness and such a holiday spirit of inde- 
 pendence that Griffin and Douglas had lighted 
 cigarettes while they waited for the train. That 
 was the town station. He reflected that he had 
 only once before been to the Downs, where the train 
 service, except on race days, was not so good ; that 
 had been on the occasion of his first visit to St. 
 Luke's for the scholarship exam. He had come 
 down in an Eton suit, fortunately correct, and an
 
 I io THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 unfortunate topper that he would have given his 
 life to hide when he found that they were not worn. 
 And his mother had come down with him. At the 
 thought of her the old numbing dread fell upon 
 his heart. Perhaps this was the very carriage in 
 which they had travelled. He remembered the 
 journey so well : how she had sat in the right-hand 
 corner, with her face to the engine, wearing a tail- 
 or-made grey coat and skirt, a velvet hat and a veil. 
 He had been looking at her rather critically, for he 
 was anxious that she should seem what she was 
 the most beautiful creature in the world. And 
 when he was looking at her with this in his mind 
 she had smiled at him, for no other reason in the 
 world probably but that she loved him; and with 
 that smile he had been satisfied that she really 
 was beautiful. And he had noticed how lovely 
 her hands were when she took her gloves off. . . . 
 Now, the memory of the moment made him want 
 to cry, just as the beauty of the morning made 
 him full of exultation. It was a most perilous 
 mixture of emotions. 
 
 By this time the region of downs had been left 
 far behind. They were gliding, more smoothly, it 
 seemed, through the heavily-wooded park country 
 of the home counties. Stations became more fre- 
 quent, and the train began to fill with business peo- 
 ple hurrying to London for their morning's work. 
 They settled themselves in their carriages as 
 though they were confident that their seats had 
 been reserved for them. They were all rather care- 
 fully, rather shabbily dressed: the cuffs of their 
 coats were shiny, and the cuffs of their shirts
 
 HOMEWARDS in 
 
 fringed, and one of them, a gentleman with a top- 
 hat half-covered by a mourning-band, wore cuff- 
 covers of white paper. They all read their morn- 
 ing papers and rarely spoke; but when they did 
 speak to each other they used an almost formal 
 respect in their addresses which implied that they 
 were all respectable, God-fearing people with re- 
 sponsibilities and semi-detached houses. Edwin 
 they ignored not so much as a wilful intrusion as 
 an unfortunate accident. He began to feel ashamed 
 that, by starting from the terminus, he had occu- 
 pied a corner seat to which the gentleman with 
 the paper cuffs had an inalienable right. 
 
 In a little while the villas from which this popu- 
 lation had emerged began to creep closer to the 
 track, and by the seventh station their backs were 
 crowding close to the embankment with long, nar- 
 row gardens in which the crimson rambler rose 
 seemed to have established itself like a weed. The 
 houses, too, or rather the backs of them, grew more 
 uniform, being all built with bricks of an unhealthy 
 yellow or putty colour. Soon there were no more 
 buildings semi-detached. The endless rows seemed 
 to be suffering some process of squeezing or con- 
 striction that made them coalesce and edged them 
 closer and closer to the railway line. Soon the 
 gardens grew so small that there was no room in 
 them for green things, only for a patch of black 
 earth occupied by lean cats, and posts connected 
 by untidy pieces of rope on which torn laundry 
 was hung out to collect the smuts or flap drearily 
 in a night of drizzle. Then the gardens went alto- 
 gether ; and the beautiful and natural love of green
 
 ii2 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 things showed itself in sodden window-boxes full 
 of languishing geranium cuttings or mignonette. 
 The very atmosphere seemed to have been subjected 
 to the increasing squeeze; for the mild air of the 
 downs had here a yellow tinge as though it were 
 being curdled. To complete the process the train 
 plunged, at last, into a sulphurous tunnel, emerg- 
 ing amid acrid fumes in a sort of underground 
 vault where the door was opened by a ticket-col- 
 lector with a red tie, tired already, who shouted 
 "Tickets, please." 
 
 None of the respectable suburban gentlemen 
 took any notice of him, for by purchasing season 
 tickets they had rendered themselves immune from 
 his attentions ; but he glared at Edwin, and Edwin 
 passed him his ticket, which was handed on as if it 
 were a curiosity and a rather vulgar possession by 
 the gentlemen on his side of the compartment. The 
 door was slammed. The man with the top-hat 
 placed it carefully on his head and adjusted the 
 paper cuffs. Others folded their morning papers 
 and put them in their pockets. One, apparently 
 recognizing a friend who was sitting opposite to 
 him, for the first time, said "Good-morning," and 
 the train passed amid thunderous echoes under the 
 arch and into Victoria Station. All his fellow-pas- 
 sengers were adepts at evacuation, and before he 
 knew where he was Edwin was alone in the car- 
 riage. 
 
 He was very lonely and yet, somehow, a little 
 important. Usually, at term end, he had crossed 
 London with Widdup, whose westward train also 
 started from Paddington. He hailed a hansom,
 
 HOMEWARDS 113 
 
 and one that was worthy of its name: a shining 
 chariot, all coach-builders' varnish, with yellow 
 wheels and polished brass door-handles and clean 
 straw that smelt of the stable on its floor. The 
 cabman was youngish, mahogany-complexioned, 
 and ready to be facetious. He called Edwin "My 
 lord," and Edwin hardly knew whether to treat 
 him seriously or not. "Geawing to the races, my 
 lord?" he said. The Lord knew Edwin had had 
 enough of races for a bit. He said "Paddington." 
 "Ascot or Newbury?" said the cabby, climbing to 
 his seat. 
 
 It was a great moment. The movement was all 
 so swift and luxurious, the hansom so delicately 
 sprung that it swayed gently with the horse's mo- 
 tion. The polished lamps on either side were filled 
 with wedding rosettes. Inside on either hand were 
 oblong mirrors in which Edwin could almost see 
 his own profile: a subject of endless curiosity. 
 There was even a little brass receptacle for cigar- 
 ash. A Cunarder of a cab! The cabby whistled 
 "Little Dolly Daydreams" with a ravishing 
 tremolo. The cab, which had jolted a trifle on the 
 setts of the station-yard, passed among a flight of 
 feeding pigeons out of the iron gates into the bowl- 
 ing smoothness of the Palace Road. My word, this 
 was life. . . . Life ! . . . Perhaps she was dead al- 
 ready. Oh, why should a day like this be marred? 
 
 It seemed to him, after a moment's thought, that 
 it was possible even if it were wrong to be 
 possessed by two and opposite emotions at once. 
 He was miserable to feel an alarm which wasn't 
 exactly definite or real, and yet he could not help
 
 114 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 enjoying this astounding and unforeseen adventure. 
 "If I do feel like that," he thought, "it can't be 
 exactly wrong." And that comforted him. 
 
 He surrende -ed himself to the joys of the morn- 
 ing. The streets were so wide and clean, the green 
 fringe of the park so pleasant: through the rail- 
 ings he could see men and women on horseback 
 taking an early ride, enjoying, like him, the cool- 
 ness of the morning air. He wondered at the great 
 white stucco houses of Park Lane, standing back 
 from the wide pavement with an air of pompous 
 reticence. Before one of them, remnant of a sum- 
 mer dance the night before, a tented portico, 
 striped with red and white, overstretched the pave- 
 ment. Edwin did not know what kind of people 
 lived in these houses, but in the light of this morn- 
 ing it seemed to him that theirs must be an exist- 
 ence of fabulous happiness, all clean and bright 
 and shining as the morning itself or the rubber- 
 tired hansom, spinning along with its yellow spokes 
 beside the neat park railings. All of them were 
 surely exalted, splendid creatures, born to great 
 names and a clear-cut way of life without the least 
 complication, dowered with a kind of instinctive 
 physical cleanliness. 
 
 At the corner, by Marble Arch, the hansom cab, 
 silent but for its jolly jingling bells, nearly ran over 
 an old gentleman in a frock coat with an exquisite 
 white stock and a noble nose. His name was prob- 
 ably Cohen ; but Edwin thought he must be at least 
 an Earl. 
 
 Once again the resorts of elegance were left be- 
 hind. The hansom, heaving heavily, was checked
 
 HOMEWARDS 115 
 
 on the slope of the gradient descending to the de- 
 parture platform at Paddington. Opposite the 
 booking-office it stopped, and Edwin was released 
 from this paradisaical loosebox. The cabby, wish- 
 ing him the best of luck at Goodwood, patted his 
 horse, whom he had christened Jeddah, and 
 climbed up again to his seat whistling divinely. 
 Edwin was disgorged upon the long platform at 
 Paddington that rumbled with the sound of many 
 moving trollies below a faint hiss of escaping 
 steam, and smelt, as he had always remembered 
 it, of sulphur mingled with axle grease and the pe- 
 culiar odour that hangs about tin milk-cans. He 
 was thankful to be free of it, sitting in the corner 
 of a third-class carriage opposite a stout woman 
 with eyes that looked as if she had been crying all 
 night, and a heavy black veil, whose hat was sur- 
 mounted by coloured photographs of the Memorial 
 Theatre at Stratford and Brixham Trawlers wait- 
 ing for a Breeze. 
 
 This train ran out of London more easily than 
 the other had entered it. The area of painful con- 
 striction seemed more narrow, and in an incredibly 
 short time he found himself gliding along the 
 Thames valley with the ghostly round tower of 
 Windsor Castle on his left. 
 
 At Reading, where the sidings of the biscuit 
 factory reminded him of teas which he had 
 "brewed" with Widdup, the woman opposite took 
 out a crumpled paper bag, and began to eat sand- 
 wiches. She lifted her veil to do so, and the process 
 suddenly proclaimed her human. Edwin saw that 
 she wasn't, as he had imagined, a sombre, mute-like
 
 i;6 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 creature, but a woman of middle age with a com- 
 fortable face and a methodical appetite. 
 
 He began to wonder what he should say if she 
 offered him a sandwich, for he dreaded the idea of 
 accepting anything from a stranger, and at the 
 same time could not deny that he was awfully 
 hungry, for the chocolate creams that he had ab- 
 sorbed at the Downs station had failed to dull his 
 normal appetite. This emergency, however, never 
 arose. The woman in black worked steadily 
 through her meal, and when she had finished her 
 packet of sandwiches folded the paper bag tidily 
 and placed it in a wicker travelling basket, from 
 which she produced one of those flask-shaped 
 bottles in which spirits are sold at railways sta- 
 tions. From this she took a prolonged and delicious 
 gulp; recorked and replaced it, smiled to herself, 
 sighed, and lowered her portcullis once more. 
 
 It cheered Edwin to think that she wasn't as 
 inhuman and sinister as he had imagined; and in 
 a little while he saw beneath her veil that she had 
 closed her eyes and was gradually falling asleep. 
 The sun, meanwhile, was climbing towards the 
 south, and the railway carriage began to reflect 
 the summery atmosphere of the green and pleasant 
 land through which the train was passing. It 
 made golden the dust on the window-pane at Ed- 
 win's elbow and discovered warm colours in the 
 pile of the russet cloth with which the carriage was 
 upholstered. 
 
 It was a country of green woods and fields of 
 ripening mowing-grass from which the sound of a 
 machine could sometimes be heard above the
 
 HOMEWARDS 117 
 
 rumble of the train. It all seemed extraordinarily 
 peaceful. A cuckoo passed in level flight from one 
 of the hedgerow elms to the dark edge of a wood. 
 In the heart of the wood itself a straight green 
 clearing appeared. It reminded Edwin of the green 
 roads that pierced the woods below Uffdown, and 
 he remembered, poignantly, the walk with his 
 mother in the Easter holidays when they had 
 reached the crown of the hills at sunset. Some 
 day, they had said, they would make that journey 
 again. Some day . . . perhaps never. Was it quite 
 impossible to get away from that threatening 
 shadow? But even while he was thinking how un- 
 reasonable and how cruel the whole business was, 
 another sight fell upon his eyes and filled him with 
 a new and strange excitement: a small cluster of 
 spires set in a city of pale smoke, and one com- 
 manding dome. He held his breath. He knew that 
 it was Oxford. * 
 
 This, then, was the city of his dreams. Here, in 
 a little while, he would find himself living the 
 new life of leisure and spaciousness and culture 
 which had become his chief ambition. This was 
 his Mecca: "That lovely city with her dreaming 
 spires," he whispered to himself. It was indeed 
 merciful that the vision of his second dream should 
 come to cheer him when the first became so peril- 
 ously near extinction. 
 
 Even when the train began to slow down among 
 red-brick suburbs of an appalling ugliness the 
 mood of excitement had not faded. The train 
 ran in smoothly, and the woman in black awoke 
 and blew her nose. Edwin, looking out of the car-
 
 ii8 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 riage window, saw a congregation of demigods in 
 grey flannel trousers, celestial socks, and tweed 
 Norfolk coats lounging with a grace that was 
 Olympian upon the platform. All of them, he 
 thought, were supremely happy. In this holy city 
 happiness had her dwelling. One of them his 
 back was turned to Edwin reminded him of Lay- 
 ton, the old head of the house. He remembered 
 with a thrill, that Layton, who had won a scholar- 
 ship at New College, was now in Oxford. Of course 
 it must be he. Very excited, Edwin slipped out of 
 the carriage and ran after him. "Layton!" he 
 called. And the young man looked round. "What 
 do you want?" he said. It wasn't Layton at all. 
 Edwin apologised. "I'm awfully sorry. I thought 
 you were a chap I knew." 
 
 The porters were slamming the doors and he 
 only just managed to scramble into his seat before 
 the train started. The woman in black spoke for 
 the first time. She had a soothing voice, with a 
 west-country burr that reminded him of his father 
 and Widdup. "I thought you were going to be 
 left behind," she said. "I saw your bag was 
 labelled North Bromwich." 
 
 Shouts were heard on the platform. "North 
 Bromwich next stop. . . . Next stop North Brom- 
 wich . . ." Edwin sat down panting, and the train 
 moved off. "Next stop North Bromwich. . . ." 
 The words echoed in his brain, and chilled him. He 
 didn't want to look back to see the last of Oxford. 
 Next stop North Bromwich. At North Bromwich 
 he would know the worst. Swiftly, inevitably, the
 
 HOMEWARDS 119 
 
 train was carrying him towards it. The tragedy 
 had to be faced. 
 
 He was seized with a sudden inconsolable fear of 
 desolation. His eyes brimmed with tears so that 
 the coloured landscape could not be seen any 
 longer. The tears gathered and fell. He could 
 feel them trickling down his cheeks, and when he 
 knew that he could not hold them back any longer 
 the strain of his emotion was too strong for him, 
 and, against his will, he sobbed aloud, burying his 
 face in his hands. 
 
 The woman in black, hearing the sobs, raised her 
 veil and looked at him. 
 
 "What is it, my dear?" she said. 
 
 "Oh, nothing . . . nothing." 
 
 "Folks don't cry about nothing. . . ." 
 
 She spoke quite kindly, and her kindness was 
 too much for him. It gave him quite an unaccount- 
 able feeling of relief to speak about it. 
 
 "It's . . . it's my mother," he said. 
 
 "There now. ... Is it really? That's bad for 
 'ee. When did she pass away?" 
 
 "She isn't dead. I ... I hope she isn't. But 
 she's awfully ill." 
 
 "Don't cry now, boy. While there's life there's 
 hope. I always tells them that." 
 
 "Who do you tell that to?" 
 
 The black woman laughed. "Who do I tell 
 that to? Ha . . . that's a good 'un. Why, dearie, 
 my patients, of course." 
 
 "I don't understand. . . . What sort of pa- 
 tients?"
 
 120 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Well, Mr. Inquisitive, if you must know, I'm a 
 monthly nurse." 
 
 Still Edwin did not understand. He asked, 
 
 "Do many of them die?" 
 
 "Why, bless my heart, no. It's more a matter 
 of births than deaths. Not that I haven't a' seen 
 deaths. And laid them out. But I'll tell you some- 
 thing. It's my belief that they all die happy. And 
 though it's hard on a young boy like you to lose 
 his best friend that's his mother it's my belief 
 that death is a happy release. Yes, a happy re- 
 lease. I always tell them that. Especially after a 
 long illness. I wonder, has your dear mother been 
 ill for a long time?" 
 
 Edwin thought. "Yes." 
 
 "Perhaps," said the black woman with relish, 
 "Perhaps you could give me some idea of what she 
 was suffering from and then I could tell you near 
 enough." 
 
 "I think," said Edwin, "it was diabetes." 
 
 "Diabetes . . . think of that! I've a' had sev- 
 eral with that. It's a bad complaint. Very. I'm 
 afraid I can't give you the hopes that I'd like to." 
 
 "But don't they ever get better?" Edwin asked 
 in agony. "I expect they do sometimes, don't 
 they?" 
 
 "It all goes to sugar," said the woman enigmati- 
 cally. "I ought to know for I've had them. Yes 
 . . ^ I've had them. But while there's life there's 
 hope. That's what I always say. And a boy's best 
 friend is his mother. You must never forget her." 
 
 "I couldn't forget her. Oh, I wish you'd never 
 told me," said Edwin, sobbing once more.
 
 HOMEWARDS , 121 
 
 "Now, dearie, don't take on so. You mustn't 
 take on so. You must take what God gives you. 
 I always tell them that." 
 
 "I won't take what God gives me," he cried. "I 
 won't. I can't bear to lose her." 
 
 "Ssh. . . . You mustn't say that. It's wicked to 
 say that ; I should be frightened to be struck dead 
 myself if I said a thing like that in God's hear- 
 ing." 
 
 She looked nervously at the luggage rack above 
 her head as if she expected to find the Almighty 
 in hiding there. Edwin followed the direction of 
 her glance and read: "This rack is provided for 
 light articles only it must not be used for heavy 
 luggage" He wondered inconsequently, whether 
 the stop, which was missing, should come before or 
 after the word "only." 
 
 "You must cheer up, dearie," said the black 
 woman soothingly. "While there's life . . ." 
 
 Edwin wished she would shut up. He was sorry 
 that she had ever spoken, and yet he couldn't quite 
 suppress a desire to be further informed on certain 
 technical details which this authority had at her 
 finger-tips. "Is it a painful death?" he asked 
 slowly, wiping away the last of his tears. 
 
 "Painful? . . . Well . . . not to say painful. 
 Not as painful as some. Most of mine passed away 
 in their sleep like. And they look so peaceful and 
 happy. It's a great consolation to their friends. 
 Just like a doll, they look. That's better. You 
 mustn't cry. That's a brave boy. Upon my word, 
 even though I'm used to it, it's quite upset me talk- 
 ing to you." She gave a little laugh and dived once
 
 122 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 more for the bottle of spirits. "This wouldn't be 
 no use to you," she said, as she took a swig. 
 
 Edwin shook his head. 
 
 "Every woman has a mother's feelings. And I 
 know what they go through. I understand. I do. 
 Now, that's right. Cheer up and be a good lad. 
 Hope for the best. That's what I tell them. . . ." 
 
 "This rack is intended for light articles only. 
 It must not be used for heavy luggage. This rack 
 is intended for light articles. Only it must not 
 be used for heavy luggage. While there's life 
 there's hope. While there's life there's hope. While 
 there's life there's hope." 
 
 So, in the pitiful whirl of Edwin's brain, foolish 
 words re-echoed, and in the end the empty phrase 
 seemed to attach itself to the regular beat of the 
 train's rhythm as the wheels rolled over the joints 
 in the rails. Mesmerised by the formula he only 
 dimly realised that they were now roaring, under 
 a sky far paler and less blue, towards the huge 
 pall of yellowish atmosphere beneath which the 
 black country sweltered. 
 
 Soon the prim small gardens told that fthey 
 were touching the tentacles of a great town. A 
 patch of desert country, scarred with forgotten 
 workings in which water reflected the pale sky, and 
 scattered with heaps of slag. A pair of conical blast 
 furnaces standing side by side and towering above 
 afche black factory sheds like temples of some savage 
 religion, as indeed they were. Gloomy canal wharfs, 
 fronting on smoke-blackened walls where leaky 
 steampipes, bound with asbestos, hissed. The ex- 
 haust of a single small engine, puffing regular jets of
 
 HOMEWARDS 123 
 
 dazzling white steam, seen but not heard. A canal 
 barge painted in garish colours, swimming in yel- 
 low water, foul with alkali refuse. A disused fac- 
 tory with a tall chimney on which the words Harris 
 and Co., Brass Founders, was painted in vertical 
 letters which the mesmeric eye must read. An- 
 other mile of black desert, pools, and slag heaps, 
 and ragged children flying kites. Everywhere a 
 vast debris of rusty iron, old wheels, corroded boil- 
 ers, tubes writhen and tangled as if they had been 
 struck by lightning. An asphalt school-yard on a 
 slope, with a tall, gothic school and children 
 screaming their lungs out, but silent to Edwin's 
 ears. Endless mean streets of dusky brick houses 
 with roofs of purple slate and blue brick footpaths. 
 Dust and an acrid smell as of smoking pit heaps. 
 More houses, and above them, misty, and almost 
 beautiful, the high clock tower of the Art Gallery. 
 A thunderous tunnel. . . . The clamour of the 
 wheels swelled to an uproar. "While there's life 
 there's hope. While there's life there's hope." Un- 
 der the gloom of the great glass roof the train 
 emerged. 
 
 "Good-bye, dearie," said the black woman, smil- 
 ing. "I hope it's not as bad as you think. You 
 never know. Don't forget your bag, now." 
 
 He could easily have done so.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 
 
 AUNT LAURA was waiting for him on the plat- 
 form. It was a very strange sensation. Al- 
 ways at other times when he had come home from 
 St. Luke's his mother had met him at North Brom- 
 wich, and even now it seemed natural to look for 
 her, to pick out her fragile figure from all the 
 others on the platform, and then to kiss her cool 
 face through her veil. On these occasions neither of 
 them would speak, but he would see her eyes smil- 
 ing and full of love looking him all over, drowning 
 him in their particular kindness. Aunt Laura was a 
 poor substitute. To-day she was a little more dif- 
 fuse and emotional than usual, and at the same 
 time curiously kinder. She kissed him her lips 
 were hot and he felt that the kiss was really noth- 
 ing more than an attempt to conceal an entirely 
 different emotion and to hide her eyes. On his 
 cheek her lips trembled. He dared not look at her 
 for he was afraid that in her eyes he would be 
 able to read the worst. It had to be faced. At 
 last he managed to say, 
 
 "How is she?" 
 
 And above the roar of the station he heard an 
 
 124
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 123 
 
 uncertain voice answer. "She's very ill, Eddie . . 
 very ill indeed." 
 
 "Not dead? . . . she's not dead?" 
 ."No, no. We must all be brave, Eddie." 
 "We must all be brave." . . . He hated to hear 
 her talk like that. What had she to be brave 
 about? It wasn't her mother who was dying, only 
 her sister. A sister wasn't like a mother. It was 
 all very well to say these conventional things. He 
 didn't believe she really meant them. She could 
 cry her eyes out before he'd believe her, however 
 kind she might try to be. It wasn't any good her 
 trying to be kind now. She hadn't been kind to 
 his mother. He remembered the day when her cal- 
 lousness had made his mother cry. He couldn't 
 pity her now; he couldn't put up with her con- 
 dolences ; he believed he hated her. He would hate 
 any one in the world who had given his mother a 
 moment's pain. She was so little and beautiful and 
 perfect. . . . 
 
 And yet, when he sat opposite to Aunt Laura in 
 the Halesby train, and examined her more closely, 
 he could see for himself that the strain of the last 
 few days had somehow chastened her she seemed 
 to have lost some of her florid assurance, and her 
 eyes looked as if she had been crying. She even 
 seemed to have shrunk a little. And this made 
 matters worse, for it seemed to him that the very 
 thing which had obliterated what he most disliked 
 in her had also accentuated the family likeness. 
 All the time, beneath this face, which he distrusted, 
 he could see a faint and tantalising resemblance to 
 the other face that he adored. If any one had sug-
 
 ' 126 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 i 
 
 gested to him that Aunt Laura was in any way like 
 his mother, he would have denied it indignantly; 
 but the likeness was there, a curious, torturing 
 likeness of feature. He didn't know then what in 
 after years he was to realise time after time : that 
 grief has a way of suppressing individual charac- 
 teristics and reducing the faces of a whole suffer- 
 ing family to their original type after the manner 
 of a composite photograph. It was tantalising, and 
 so harrowing that he dared not look at her any 
 longer. 
 
 At Halesby they walked up from the station to- 
 gether almost without speaking. The little house 
 on the edge of the country wore a strangely tragic 
 air. Downstairs all was quiet. After the big echo- 
 ing rooms at St. Luke's it seemed ridiculously small. 
 Nobody inhabited the rooms, and the soft carpet 
 created a curious hushed atmosphere in which it 
 seemed sacrilege to speak in anything but a whis- 
 per. Aunt Laura took off her hat and veil. 
 
 "I'd better carry my bag upstairs," said Edwin. 
 He felt somehow, that in his little old room he 
 could be happier. He could even, if he wanted to, 
 throw himself on the bed and give way to the tears 
 which were bound to come. 
 
 "No . . . you'd better wait here," said Aunt Lau- 
 ra. "Your father is sleeping in your room. You 
 see it wouldn't do for him to be in hers. He's been 
 there for three nights. And I'm in the spare room. 
 I think you're going to sleep over at Mrs. Bar- 
 row's." 
 
 Edwin flamed with jealousy. What was Aunt
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 127 
 
 Laura doing in the house? She, above all people, 
 had no right to be there. 
 
 "But I could sleep on the sofa in the drawing- 
 room," he said. 
 
 "You mustn't make difficulties, Eddie. It's all 
 arranged. The specialist has been out this after- 
 noon to see her with Dr. Moorhouse. He may be 
 upstairs now." 
 
 "But I can't, I can't be so far away. I ought to 
 be here. She would like me to be here." 
 
 "Eddie, dear ... do be a good boy. Here comes 
 your father." 
 
 And his father came. Strangely, strangely old 
 and worn he looked in the shabby alpaca coat. 
 Edwin had never realised that he could be so pa- 
 thetic. He smiled at Edwin, a smile that was un- 
 utterably painful. "Eddie . . . my boy," he said, 
 and kissed him, "I'm glad you've come. . . . She 
 was anxious for you to come. . . ." 
 
 "Oh, father. . . ." 
 
 "We must all be brave, Eddie." Again that ter- 
 rible smile. 
 
 "Father, may I go and see her . . . ?" 
 
 "The doctor says that nobody had better see her 
 to-night." 
 
 "Yes, Eddie, we must obey the doctor's orders, 
 dear," said Aunt Laura. 
 
 "But you've seen her . . . you saw her this 
 morning, didn't you?" 
 
 "That was different," said Aunt Laura. "I was 
 up all night with her." 
 
 "It isn't different, is it, father? Aunt Laura's 
 nothing to her. . . ."
 
 128 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Eddie, Eddie. . . ." Aunt Laura protested. 
 
 "Father, if she asked for me she ought to see 
 me. . . ." 
 
 "She's so ill, Eddie. I'm afraid she wouldn't 
 know you." 
 
 "Oh, I'm sure she would. . . ." 
 
 "Edwin, you mustn't worry your father; there's 
 a good boy." 
 
 "Oh, Aunt Laura . . ." Then fiercely, "She's 
 my mother. . . ." 
 
 Edwin's father sighed and looked away. Aunt 
 Laura, with a business-like change of tone which 
 implied that Edwin's question was disposed of, 
 whispered to his father, "Is she still sleeping?" 
 
 "Yes. . . . The doctor says it isn't really sleep, 
 it's coma." 
 
 Coma ... a gloomy and terrible word! What 
 did it mean? Edwin remembered the woman in 
 the train. "Most of them pass away in their sleep 
 like." ' 
 
 "I think I'll go and lie down for an hour," said 
 his father. 
 
 "Yes, do, John," said Aunt Laura encouragingly. 
 "You need it. I'll go upstairs myself to be handy 
 if the nurse wants anything." 
 
 This was the first that Edwin had heard of a 
 nurse. The idea inspired him with awe. His father 
 sighed and turned to go. 
 
 "Father . . . can't I go up, only for a minute?" 
 
 Aunt Laura, who had taken upon herself the role 
 of protectress and manager of the distressed house- 
 hold, intervened, 
 
 "Eddie, you mustn't worry your father. We're
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 129 
 
 all in trouble, and you mustn't be a nuisance." 
 
 His father went, without speaking. 
 
 "Well, when can I see her?" Edwin demanded. 
 
 "To-morrow. . . . You must be patient like the 
 rest of us. Now I must go upstairs. You'll be 
 quiet, won't you? Mrs. Barrow has your bedroom 
 ready, and if you take your bag over she'll give you 
 some tea. She promised to look after you. She 
 was most kind. Or, if you like, and will keep very 
 quiet, you can stay here and read." 
 
 "I didn't come home to sit down here and read. 
 Why did they send for me to come if they won't 
 let me see her? I want her. . . ." 
 
 "Hush . . ." said Aunt Laura, with an air of 
 being scandalised. She left him, closing the door 
 with exaggerated quietness behind her, leaving him 
 alone in the room that had once witnessed so much 
 happiness. He didn't know what to do. Read? 
 The idea was ridiculous. He looked at the familiar 
 shelves, on which he knew the place and title of 
 every book. A sense of the room's awful emptiness 
 oppressed him, for everything in it recalled the 
 memory of his darling's presence; the books that 
 they had read together; the big chair in which he 
 had sat cuddled in her arms; her workbasket on 
 the table by the window; and terribly pathetic 
 a shopping list scribbled on the back of an enve- 
 lope. He couldn't bear to be alone in the room 
 with so many inanimate reminders; and while he 
 was debating where he should go, a sudden angry 
 jealousy flamed up in his heart towards the other 
 people in the house: his father, Aunt Laura, the 
 doctor, and the unknown nurse who shared the
 
 130 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 privilege that was denied him and didn't realise its 
 value. He clenched his hands and cried aloud: 
 "We belong to one another. . . . She's mine. . . . 
 She's mine. I hate them." 
 
 He opened the door softly and stepped into the 
 hall. Scarcely knowing what he was doing he 
 looked into the drawing-room. There stood the 
 piano with a sonata of Beethoven upon the music- 
 stand. The room was full of a curious penetrat- 
 ing odour which came, he discovered, from a big 
 vase full of pinks that had faded and gone yellow. 
 Some days ago, he supposed, his mother had picked 
 them. Her hands ... he worshipped her hands. 
 A strange and uncontrollable impulse made him 
 bend and kiss the dead flowers. 
 
 But the atmosphere of that room was if anything 
 more cruel than the other. He couldn't stay there. 
 Once more he found himself in the darkness and 
 quiet of the hall. The house had ifever been so 
 silent. Only, in the corner an oak grandfather's 
 clock with a brass face engraved with the name of 
 Carver, Hay, ticked steadily. In the silence he 
 heard his own heart beating far faster than the 
 clock. 
 
 Scarcely knowing what he was doing he climbed 
 upstairs and crept quietly to the door of the room 
 where his mother was lying. He knelt on the mat 
 outside the door and listened. Inside the room 
 there was no sound ; not even a sound of breathing. 
 If only he dared open the door. ... If only he 
 could see her for a second she might smile at him 
 and he would be satisfied. He was thankful to 
 find that the mere fact of being nearer to her made
 
 THE DARK HOUSE . 131 
 
 him feel more happy. For a long time he knelt 
 there, and then, hearing a slight noise in his own 
 room, where his father was supposed to be resting, 
 he stole downstairs again, a little comforted, 
 opened the front door and went out into the garden. 
 
 Mrs. Barrow, at whose house it had been ar- 
 ranged that Edwin should put up for the night, 
 was the Ingleby's nearest neighbour and their land- 
 lady. The gardens of the two houses stood back 
 to back with a high wall between, and the relations 
 of the neighbours had always been so friendly that 
 the little door in the wall was never locked, even 
 though it was so seldom used that tendrils of ivy 
 had attached themselves to the woodwork, form- 
 ing a kind of natural hinge. 
 
 On the Inglebys' side of the wall lay a modern 
 well-kept garden, not more than twenty years old. 
 Edwin's mother had a passion for flowers, and his 
 father had made the gratification of her pleasure 
 his favourite hobby, so that Edwin's earliest memo- 
 ries of both of them were associated with the gath- 
 ering of fruits and blooms, with the rich odours 
 of summer, or, above all, the smell of newly-turned 
 earth. This summer Mr. Ingleby had planted the 
 long bed that stretched along the side of the house 
 towards the door in Mrs. Barrow's wall with masses 
 of delicately-coloured stocks. Though the form of 
 these flowers was not particularly beautiful their 
 scent rose to meet him in a hot wave of overpower- 
 ing sweetness. He remembered a letter in which
 
 132 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 his mother had told him how wonderful they were. 
 Everything reminded him of her. . . . 
 
 He passed through the door in the wall and en- 
 tered another world. 
 
 Everything connected with Mrs. Barrow was in 
 character. She was a little old woman, the widow 
 of a small manufacturer who had set his mark upon 
 the countryside by the erection of. a chimney stack 
 taller than any other in the district, so tall that 
 even from the summit of Pen Beacon it made a 
 landmark more prominent than the slender spire 
 of Halesby church. In Edwin's eyes its presence 
 was so familiar that he had almost become fond of 
 it. Many and many times on windy days he had 
 watched the immense structure swaying gently as 
 a reed in a summer breeze. Under the shadow of 
 Mr. Barrow's monument lay an old garden designed 
 on the formal lines of a hundred years ago, full of 
 honeysuckle arbours and narrow twisted paths : so 
 rich, and so tangled that every year a great part 
 of its fruitfulness ran to waste. Long rows of 
 lavender were there; and alleys of hoary apple- 
 trees whose, gnarled branches overreached the 
 paths: and the whole place was so crowded with 
 decaying vegetable matter and the mould of fallen 
 leaves that even in high summer it had an autum- 
 nal savour and a ripe smell that was not unlike that 
 of an apple loft. 
 
 Through this shady precinct he passed carrying 
 his hand-bag, pausing only in a sudden patch of 
 light where a bank of tawny scabious diffused an 
 aromatic perfume in the sun. He paused, not be- 
 cause he was impressed by their garish beauty, but
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 133 
 
 because many of the heads were now frequented by 
 a new hatch of Comma butterflies eagerly expand- 
 ing their serrated wings, drugged already with the 
 flowers' harsh honey. Edwin had never seen this 
 uncommon butterfly before. In the neighbourhood 
 of St. Luke's the species, which is notoriously ca- 
 pricious, had never appeared. He wished that he 
 had a butterfly net with him: for by catching one 
 of them he would have scored over Widdup. 
 
 So he passed to Mrs. Barrow's house, a dark 
 Georgian structure as twisted and autumnal as 
 her garden, and there, in a gloomy sitting-room, 
 he found the old lady herself, a little demure crea- 
 ture with round-hunched, shawl-covered shoulders, 
 like the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, taking 
 tea with her companion, a decorous lady of the same 
 age named Miss Beecock. 
 
 They did their best to make Edwin feel at home. 
 They never mentioned his mother, but it was so ob- 
 vious that their maidenly commonplaces were only 
 designed to divert his mind from the tragic shadow 
 which he carried with him, that Edwin felt inclined 
 to scandalise them by talking of it. ... Their 
 deliberate awkward kindness, the cautious glances 
 which they exchanged, the little sniff of emotion 
 which Mrs. Barrow concealed in her empty teacup, 
 when the pitiful contemplation of Edwin's youth 
 and innocence overcame her, would have been 
 amusing if there had been room for anything amus- 
 ing on the darkened earth. 
 
 When they had finished the buttered scones and 
 medlar jelly which Mrs. Barrow made from fruit 
 that fell on the dark leaf -mould of her garden, Mrs.
 
 134 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Barrow herself moved with short steps to a mahog- 
 any bureau, and calling Edwin to her side, showed 
 him one of those secret drawers whose secret every- 
 body knows, smelling of cedar wood and aged russia 
 leather. From this drawer she produced a purse 
 made of beadwork, and from the purse her fragile 
 fingers extracted a Georgian five-shilling piece, 
 which, with a sigh, she then presented to Edwin. 
 "If I were you," she said, "I don't think I should 
 spend it. Old coins like that are valuable. Mr. 
 Barrow had a great interest in anything old and 
 historical." 
 
 Edwin was so surprised by this generosity that 
 he almost forgot to thank her; but Miss Beecock, 
 in a shrill, soft voice, reminded him of his duty, 
 saying: "Now, isn't that kind of Mrs. Barrow, 
 Edwin?" Edwin hastily agreed that it was, and 
 the old ladies smiled at one another, as though they 
 were saying, "Isn't that clever of us, to give him a 
 toy that will take his mind off his mother?" In 
 the silence that followed, a canary which had been 
 pecking at a lump of sugar stuck in the bars of his 
 cage, attracted by the bright hues of the ribbon on 
 Mrs. Barrow's cap, broke into a shrill twitter. 
 
 "Sweet . . . swee . . . t," said Mrs. Barrow with 
 pursed lips. 
 
 "Sweet . . . sweet," echoed Miss Beecock, with 
 a little laugh. 
 
 "I think I will take my crochet on to the lawn," 
 said Mrs. Barrow. 
 
 "If you have your shawl, and the grass is not too 
 damp," Miss Beecock reminded her. 
 
 "There was a heavy dew last week," said Mrs.
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 135 
 
 Barrow. "Which day was it? I think it must have 
 been Tuesday. Yes ... it was Tuesday. That 
 was the day on which I spoke to Mr. Waldron 
 about thinning the grapes. And now, Edwin, would 
 you like to fetch a book from the drawing-room? 
 You may prefer to bring it out on to the lawn. 
 You know the way. The key is on the outside of 
 the door." 
 
 Edwin said, "Yes." He left them and climbed 
 the creaking oak stairs, to the first story landing, 
 a wide passage of polished wood lit by a shining 
 fanlight that overlooked the street. He knew the 
 room well enough. It had been one of the delights 
 of his childhood. It was long, and irregular in 
 shape, and crammed with curious things that he 
 had once found entertaining. 
 
 He unlocked the door and released immediately 
 a concentrated odour of the same character as that 
 which had issued from the secret drawer in Mrs. 
 Barrow's bureau. Damp and cedar wood and 
 mouldy russia leather. All the chairs in the room 
 were covered with white draw-sheets as though 
 they were dead and awaiting burial. The Venetian 
 blinds were down, and when Edwin raised them, 
 the heavy rep curtains at the side of the three tall 
 windows admitted no more than an ecclesiastical 
 twilight. 
 
 There, however, stood the things which had de- 
 lighted his youth. Nothing had been moved a hair's- 
 breadth for many years : since the day, indeed, long 
 before Edwin was born, when Mr. Barrow had died. 
 It was the best room of the house: and so rever- 
 enced by Mrs. Barrow that she would never have
 
 136 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 dreamed of living in it or using it at all except on 
 Christmas Day, when a melancholy family party 
 of relatives and possible heirs assembled to do their 
 duty by the old lady. Then, and only then, a fire 
 was lighted, extracting from the walls a curious 
 odour of dry rot, which resembled, curiously 
 enough, the apple-loft odour which pervaded the 
 garden. 
 
 Edwin was soon at home. Here was a great 
 glass-fronted mahogany bookcase the wonder of 
 which he had never thoroughly explored. Here 
 was the flat glass showcase, shaped like a card- 
 table in which a number of Mr. Barrow's curiosi- 
 ties reposed. Here was the great musical-box 
 (glass-topped again) with its prickly brass cylin- 
 der and twanging teeth for notes, and a winding 
 lever that made a sound as impressive as the wind- 
 ing of a grandfather's clock. 
 
 Edwin thought he would try a tune. He wound 
 up the mechanism, pressed over the starting lever, 
 and the prickly cylinder began slowly to revolve. 
 It made a bad start; for no one knows how many 
 years ago it had been stopped in the middle of a 
 tune. Then, having finished the broken cadence, 
 it burst gaily into the song called "Mousetraps for 
 Sale," a pathetic ballad which may have sounded 
 sprightly in the ears of young people fifty years 
 ago, but in this strange room was invested with a 
 pathetic and faded quality which made Edwin wish 
 it would stop. There was no need for him to pull 
 back the lever, for the musical box, as though guess- 
 ing his wishes, suddenly petered out with a sort of 
 metallic growl. Edwin laughed in spite of himself,
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 137 
 
 at this peculiar noise, and hearing the echo of his 
 own laugh turned to find himself staring into the 
 jealous eyes of a portrait of a Victorian gentleman 
 whom he took to be the late Mr. Barrow, for whose 
 delectation, over his glass of punch, the instrument 
 had been purchased. Edwin began to feel a little 
 uneasy. The feeling annoyed him. "I'm silly to 
 be like this," he said to himself. "I suppose it's 
 the uncertainty. . . . Oh, I wish I knew. . . ." 
 
 He took refuge in the bookcase, from which he 
 extracted, to his great delight, the complete works 
 of Shenstone in two volumes, bound in slippery calf 
 and published by Dodsley in the year seventeen- 
 seventy. . . . The books were in a beautiful state 
 of preservation. Edwin doubted if they had ever 
 been read. Mr. Barrow, no doubt, had purchased 
 them simply for their local interest. With a final 
 glance at Mr. Barrow's portrait, in a faint hope 
 that he approved of his choice, Edwin let down 
 the blinds, so that no light penetrated the room 
 but a single gleam reflected from the glass pane of 
 a wool-worked fire-guard that hung from a bracket 
 at the side of the fireplace. With a shiver he re- 
 locked the door. . . . 
 
 When he reached the garden with his Shenstone, 
 the light was failing. 
 
 "You were a long time, Edwin," said Mrs. Bar- 
 row. 
 
 "Yes, wasn't he?" echoed Miss Beecock. "I'm 
 afraid it is time Mrs. Barrow was going in." 
 
 Quietly, and with a leisure that seemed to pre- 
 sume an endless placidity of existence, the old 
 ladies folded their work, sighed, and recrossed the
 
 138 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 lawn towards the house. In a little time came 
 supper: biscuits and milk on which a thick cream 
 had been rising all day. Then Mrs. Barrow kissed 
 him good-night. He felt her face on his cheek: a 
 little chilly, but lax and very soft. Miss Beecock 
 lighted him to bed with a candle in a highly- 
 polished brass candlestick. The sheets were cool 
 and of old linen. The bedroom smelt of apples. 
 With the air of "Mousetraps for Sale" in his head, 
 and a sleepy consciousness of ancient creaking tim- 
 bers, Edwin fell asleep. 
 
 He slept long and dreamlessly, waking in the 
 morning to find the sun shining brilliantly through 
 Mrs. Barrow's lace curtains. At first he could not 
 remember where he was, so completely had sleep, 
 bred of long fatigue, obliterated his consciousness. 
 Before he opened his eyes he had half expected to 
 hear the noise of Widdup turning out of bed with 
 a flop, or the clangour of the six-thirty bell. And 
 then, with a rush, the whole situation came back to 
 him: this was Halesby, and the new day might 
 be full of tragedy. 
 
 At his bedside Miss Beecock, who had stolen into 
 the room an hour or so before in slippered feet and 
 found him sleeping, had placed a glass of creamy 
 milk and biscuits. It was awfully kind of her, 
 Edwin thought, as he sipped the yellow cream at 
 the top of the glass. Outside in the garden it was 
 very quiet. He had overslept the morning chorus 
 of birdsong; but he heard the noise of a thrush 
 cracking snail-shells on the gravel path beneath his 
 window. He had forgotten to wind up his watch 
 overnight; and when he found it in his waistcoat
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 139 
 
 pocket where he had left it he saw that it had 
 stopped. "I'd better get up, anyway," he thought, 
 and while he stood at the door wondering if Mrs. 
 Barrow's house ran to a bathroom, he heard a clock 
 in the hall give a loud whirr and then strike ten. 
 "Good Lord, I've overslept myself," he thought. 
 "I'd better buck up." 
 
 Abandoning the uncertainty of hunting for a bath 
 he dressed and came downstairs to the sitting-room 
 (that was*what it was called) in which the meals 
 had been served the day before. Mrs. Barrow was 
 sitting there in pleasant sunlight, wearing a less 
 elaborate cap and a Shetland shawl, and the canary, 
 whose brass cage and saffron plumage now shone 
 brilliantly in the morning sunlight, was singing like 
 mad. When Edwin came into the room she smiled 
 at him. 
 
 "We're so glad that you slept well," she said. 
 "Miss Beecock went to have a look at you but you 
 were sleeping so soundly that she didn't like to dis- 
 turb you. You must have been tired out. Now 
 you'll be ready for breakfast." 
 
 At this point Miss Beecock entered the room, her 
 attire modified in the same degree as that of Mrs. 
 Barrow. 
 
 "Ah . . ." she said with a little laugh. , "Here 
 you are. I must ask Annie for your breakfast." 
 
 "He'd like a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, and 
 some buttered toast," said Mrs. Barrow temptingly. 
 
 "Yes, of course he would," said Miss Beecock. 
 
 "I think. if you don't mind," said Edwin, "I'd 
 like to go home. It's so late."
 
 140 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Oh, you needn't mind us," chimed the two old 
 ladies. 
 
 That wasn't exactly what Edwin had meant, but 
 he allowed himself to be persuaded, and even en- 
 joyed his breakfast, to the accompaniment of the 
 twitterings of the canary and his two hostesses. 
 
 "You'll sleep here again to-night, won't you?" 
 they said when he was ready to go. Edwin thanked 
 them. "Oh, we're only too pleased to be of any 
 assistance to your mother," they said, pursuing his 
 departure with the kindest and most innocent of 
 smiles. 
 
 This time he did not linger in the old garden : he 
 was far too anxious to get home and learn how 
 things were going. At the door in the wall his 
 heart stood still. What was he going to find? It 
 seemed to him that something terrible might be 
 waiting for him on the other side of the wall. It 
 was a silly apprehension, he thought, and when he 
 stepped into it the new garden was as sunny as 
 the old. Only, on the long walk beside the bed of 
 stocks, a mattress, blankets, and sheets were spread 
 out to air in the sun. The scent of some disinfec- 
 tant mingled with that of the flowers. His fears 
 supplied an awful explanation. It was the bedding 
 from his mother's room that was spread out there 
 in the sun. And when he looked up to the windows 
 of the house above him, he saw that the blinds were 
 down. That, of course, needn't mean anything on 
 the sunny side of the house. In a great hurry he 
 turned the corner to the front and saw that the 
 blinds on that side were down as well.
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 141 
 
 m 
 
 In the darkened dining-room Aunt Laura sat at 
 his mother's desk writing letters with dashing flu- 
 ency. When he came in she stopped her writing 
 and rose to meet him. "Edwin, my poor dear," she 
 said, holding out her hands to him. He took no 
 notice of her hands. 
 
 "She's gone," he said, "in the night?" 
 
 "Yes. ... In the night. She passed away quite 
 quietly. It's a dreadful blow for us, Edwin, we 
 must be brave. . . ." 
 
 He hadn't time for sentiments of that kind. "She 
 was alive when I came yesterday. And you wouldn't 
 let me see her. You, of all people. . . . She hated 
 you. She told me so. She always hated you . . . 
 and she'd hate you for this more than anything." 
 
 "Edwin," she cried, "don't say these terrible 
 things." 
 
 "They're true . . . true. I wish it were you who 
 were dead. It was you who stopped me from see- 
 ing her . . . my little darling. . . . Damn you 
 . . . damn you." 
 
 "Edwin . . . you don't know what you're saying. 
 You're cruel." 
 
 "Cruel. . . . I like that. Cruel. Tow talk about 
 cruelty. . . ." 
 
 "Edwin. . . ." Aunt Laura clutched nervously 
 at her breast. It was funny to see this big blowzy 
 woman crumple up like that. She flopped down 
 in a red plush chair and started crying softly in 
 a thin voice. Edwin didn't mind. Let her cry.
 
 142 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 She deserved it. Nothing of that kind could soften 
 his indignant heart. 
 
 "Where's father?" he asked at last. 
 
 "I don't know. He's upstairs somewhere," she 
 said between her sobs. "For goodness' sake, Ed- 
 win, don't go and say things like this to the poor 
 man. We all have this trouble to bear. And we've 
 had the strain of nursing her. Now, don't be 
 hasty," she pleaded. 
 
 "All right," said Edwin, and left her. 
 
 Upstairs on the landing he found a pale, shadowy 
 figure in which he could scarcely recognise his fa- 
 ther. Neither of them could speak at all. Edwin 
 had been ready with the reproaches that had come 
 to his lips in the presence of Aunt Laura; but he 
 couldn't do it. This man was too broken. He was 
 face to face with a grief as great as his own. There 
 were no words for either of them. The boy and the 
 man clung together in each other's arms, overcome 
 with pity and with sorrow. On the landing, out- 
 side the door of the room where she lay dead, they 
 stood together and cried quietly to each other. And 
 now it seemed to Edwin as if pity for his father 
 were overriding even the intensity of his own grief ; 
 for she had been everything to him, too, and for so 
 many years. He felt that he would have done any- 
 thing in the world to comfort this desolate man, 
 whom he had always taken for granted and never 
 really loved. But his mother had loved him. He 
 wondered if they could do anything to assuage the 
 bitterness of their loss by loving one another. They 
 were two people left alone with nothing else in the 
 world but each other. Why not . . .? That, he
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 143 
 
 thought, was what his mother would have wished. 
 
 He felt his father's tears on his forehead, the 
 roughness of his father's grey beard. He felt the 
 man's body quivering with sobs, and the arms which 
 clutched his body as if that were the only loved 
 thing left to him in life. They went together into 
 the little room that had always been Edwin's, and 
 there they knelt together beside the bed. He didn't 
 exactly know why they knelt, but kneeling there 
 at his side, with his arm still clasped about his 
 waist, he supposed that his father was praying; 
 and though Edwin could not understand what good 
 prayer could do, it seemed to him a simple and a 
 beautiful thing. It made him feel that he loved 
 his father more than ever. He wished that he could 
 pray himself. He tried to pray . . . for what? 
 There was nothing left in this world for him to 
 pray for. At last his father rose to his feet in the 
 dim room, and Edwin rose with him. He spoke, 
 and the tears still choked his voice and his bearded 
 lip trembled. "Edwin," he said, "I shall never be 
 able to get over this. I'm broken. . . . My life 
 . . . my life has . . ." He stopped. 
 
 "You don't know what she was to me, Eddie. I 
 can't realise, Eddie, there are only two of us left. 
 We must help each other to bear it. We must be 
 brave." 
 
 Strange that a phrase which had sounded like 
 cant on the lips of Aunt Laura should now seem 
 the truest and most natural thing imaginable. 
 
 "We ... we were like children together," said 
 his father.
 
 144 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Again they stood for a little while in silence. At 
 last Edwin, still gripping his father's arm, said, 
 
 "Father, may I see her?" 
 
 "Of course, dear. . . ." 
 
 They went together to the room, and his father 
 opened the door and pulled up one of the blinds. 
 Mrs. Bagley, the charwoman who did odd work in 
 the house and was an expert in this melancholy 
 office, had drawn a clean white sheet over the bed. 
 His mother lay there in a cotton nightdress with 
 her hands folded in front of her, and her lips gently 
 smiling. Even her cheeks were faintly flushed, but 
 the rest of her face and her hands were of a waxen 
 pallor. She looked very small and childlike. She 
 looked like a small wax doll. In this frail and 
 strangely beautiful creature Edwin could only rec- 
 ognise a shadow of the mother that he knew. It 
 was a little girl that lay there, not his mother. 
 
 Edwin spoke in a whisper, 
 
 "Should I kiss her?" 
 
 His father nodded and turned away. 
 
 But he did not kiss her as he had thought he 
 would. For some reason he dared not, for he could 
 not feel certain that it was she at all. He only 
 touched her hands, the hands that he had always 
 worshipped, with his fingers. They were cold ; and 
 still her lips smiled. The room was full of the 
 odour of Sanitas which some one had sprayed or 
 sprinkled over the floor. For the rest of his life 
 the smell was one which Edwin hated; for in his 
 mind it became the smell of death.
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 145 
 
 IV 
 
 On the evening after the funeral Edwin sat alone 
 in the drawing-room. He sat there because the 
 other room was still cumbered with the remnants 
 of a melancholy repast: several leaves of mahog- 
 any had been dragged down from the dust of the 
 attic and had lengthened the dining-room table to 
 such an extent that there was scarcely room to 
 move in it, and round this table, in the sunny after- 
 noon, had clustered a large collection of people who 
 smelt of black crape and spoke in lowered, gentle 
 voices, out of respect for the woman whom, it 
 seemed to Edwin, they had never -known. 
 
 Everybody who entered the house and there 
 were many, for Mr. Ingleby was much respected in 
 Halesby wore the same grave air. Even the un- 
 dertaker, a brisk little man with a fiery red beard 
 and one shoulder lower than the other from the 
 constant carrying of coffins, treated his daily task 
 with the same sort of mute reverence. His face, at 
 any rate, wore an expression that matched that of 
 the mourners; and Edwin was only disillusioned 
 as to the sincerity of his expression when he heard 
 him swearing violently at the driver of the first 
 mourning carriage. This moment of relaxation 
 caused him to forget himself so far as to whistle 
 a pantomime song as he crossed the drive. 
 
 The black-coated people in the dining-room did 
 not hear him: they were far too busy being seri- 
 ous: and behind them, from time to time, Edwin 
 could see the grey face of his father, with curiously 
 tired and puzzled eyes. Puzzled * . . that was the
 
 146 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 only word for them. It was just as if the man 
 were protesting, in all simplicity, against the un- 
 reason and injustice of the blow which had fallen 
 on him. Edwin, savagely hating the presence of 
 all these hushed, uninterested people, found in his 
 father's suffering face a sudden reinforcement to 
 his anger. It was a shame, a damned, ghastly 
 shame, that a simple man like that should be hit 
 in the dark ; and even more pathetic that he should 
 be simple enough to take the sympathy of his neigh- 
 bours at its face value. Edwin glowed with a new 
 and protective love for his father. It was as well 
 that some generous emotion should be born to take 
 the place of his numb grief. 
 
 Above all, the sight of his Aunt Laura, who was 
 conscientiously doing the honours of the house, 
 maddened him. He could not look at her without 
 remembering that she had been selfish and unkind 
 to his mother; that, on the very last day, she had 
 robbed him of the privilege of seeing his darling 
 alive. Even now, he believed that she was enjoying 
 herself. Her eyes occasionally brimmed with tears, 
 but that meant nothing. They were such easy tears 
 ... so different from the terrible tears that had 
 shaken his father's body on the day of desolation. 
 If only she were dead, he thought, there would be 
 no great loss. 
 
 And yet, while he thought of this, he suddenly 
 caught sight of her husband, the little manufac- 
 turer whom he had lately begun to know as Uncle 
 Albert, a small man with a shiny bald head and a 
 diffident manner : and in the eyes of Uncle Albert, 
 which were fixed upon his wife, he saw an extraor-
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 147 
 
 dinary mixture of love and admiration for this 
 shallow, diffuse creature whom he had found him- 
 self hating. 
 
 "If Aunt Laura were to die," he thought, "Uncle 
 Albert might very well be like father is to-day. 
 That's a queer idea. . . ." He was amazed at the 
 complications of human relationships and the po- 
 tential pain that love brings with it. He thought, 
 "It's no good thinking about it. ... I give it up. 
 I don't really wish she were dead. I only wish 
 . . . that there were no such thing as death. Why 
 does God allow it?" No answer came to him: but 
 in place of an answer another angry impulse. 
 "Curse God," he thought, meaning the God of Mr. 
 Leeming, the God to whom this queer collection of 
 people were to dedicate his mother's soul. Another 
 thought followed quickly: "What's the good of 
 cursing him? He doesn't exist. If he existed this 
 sort of thing couldn't happen. . . ." 
 
 People were seriously setting themselves to the 
 putting on of black kid gloves that the undertaker 
 had provided. The horses on the gravel drive were 
 getting uneasy and the cab wheels made a grating 
 noise. Heavy steps were heard descending the 
 stairs awkward steps like those of men moving 
 furniture. Edwin saw that his father had heard 
 too. He was looking towards the closed door of 
 the room. He wanted to go and take his father's 
 hand and hold it, but the space round the edge of 
 the table was packed with people. Now they had 
 opened the hall door. He dared not look out of the 
 window. 
 
 The voice of Aunt Laura, most studiously kind,
 
 148 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 said to him : "Eddie, you'll come along with your 
 father and Uncle Albert and me." He said, "All 
 right." People at the side of the table made way 
 for him. On his way he found himself abreast of 
 his friend, Miss Beecock. She said nothing, but 
 smiled at him and put her arm on his sleeve. She 
 was wearing black silk mittens, and her eyes were 
 full of tears. That weak, tearful smile nearly did 
 for Edwin. 
 
 The first cab was drawn up at the hall door. 
 Edwin scrambled in last. Aunt Laura, with a 
 rustle of black silk, made way for him. She took 
 out her handkerchief, and Edwin was stifled with 
 a wave of scent. He hated scent: but anyway it 
 was better than Sanitas. He saw his father's puz- 
 zled eyes on the other side of the cab ... so old, 
 so awfully old. Uncle Albert took out his hand- 
 kerchief, too. Evidently, Edwin thought, it was 
 the correct thing to do. He had misjudged him. 
 Uncle Albert proceeded to blow his nose. 
 
 They were driving through the High Street. Aunt 
 Laura noticed that most of the shop shutters were 
 up, and in several cases tradesmen were standing 
 at their shop doors bare-headed as they passed. 
 
 "It's very kind of them . . . very nice to see so 
 much respect, John," she said to his father. Mr. 
 Ingleby said "Yes," and Aunt Laura, with a little 
 laugh that was merely a symptom of nervousness, 
 went on: "I expect there'll be a crowd at the 
 cemetery gate." This time Mr. Ingleby said noth- 
 ing and Uncle Albert once more stolidly blew his 
 nose. "Albert, dear, I wish you wouldn't," said 
 Aunt Laura. The brakes grated, and the cab stopped
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 149 
 
 with a jerk. "Come along, Edwin, jump out, there's 
 a good boy," said Aunt Laura. "You'll walk with 
 your father." 
 
 He walked with his father. The church was full. 
 His father went with bowed head, seeing nothing; 
 but Edwin was conscious of many faces that he 
 knew. In the middle of the aisle the thought sud- 
 denly came to him that these people weren't really 
 there to do honour to his mother: they were so 
 many that most of them could never have known 
 her: no, they were just curious people who had 
 flocked there to find something sensational in the 
 faces of the mourners. In a dull place like Halesby 
 a funeral, and such an important funeral, was 
 an unusual diversion. And this revelation made 
 him determined that whatever happened he would 
 show no emotion that might tickle the sensations 1 
 of these ghouls. He only wished to goodness that 
 he could explain the matter to his father so that 
 he too might give them nothing to gloat over. 
 
 In the church, where a faint mustiness mingled 
 with the exotic scent of arum lilies that diffused 
 from the heap of wreaths on the coffin, Edwin held 
 himself upright. They sang a hymn : "I heard the 
 voice of Jesus say . . . Come unto me and rest" 
 the first quatrain in unison, and Edwin sang with 
 them, just as he would have sung in the chapel at 
 St. Luke's. In the churchyard, when they walked 
 in procession behind the bearers to the grave-side, 
 his eyes were still dry, his lips did not tremble, 
 though Aunt Laura's scented handkerchief was now 
 drenched with tears, and even Uncle Albert, a vir- 
 tual outsider, was on the edge of violent emotion.
 
 ISO THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 The burial service was nothing to Edwin. There 
 was no consolation in it nor, to him, the least atom 
 of religious feeling. A mockery, a mockery, a 
 solemn and pretentious mockery. For she was dead 
 . . . she had vanished altogether, and the thing 
 that they were burying with muttered formulas 
 and tears was no more she than the empty parch- 
 ment of the cocoon is the glowing butterfly. Let 
 them cry their eyes out. That was not grief. Beyond 
 tears. Beyond tears. . . . 
 
 With a curious air of relief that was very near 
 to a furtive gaiety, the party drove back 'and re- 
 assembled in the dining-room. All except Mr. 
 Ingleby. "He has gone to his room, poor dear," 
 said Aunt Laura, with her nervous laugh. "Mrs. 
 Barrow, do have a slice of ginger-cake. Just a 
 little?" Eound the long table conversation began 
 to flow, cautiously at first, but with an increasing 
 confidence, when it became clear that it was un- 
 attended by any revengeful consequences. 
 
 "Didn't you think it was awfully nice to see the 
 people in High Street so respectful, Mrs. Willis?" 
 said Aunt Laura. Edwin looked up. This then 
 was the Mrs. Willis of Mawne Hall with whom his 
 mother had planned the visit to Switzerland. He 
 saw a middle-aged woman in black satin, with a 
 gold watch-chain round her neck and jet in her 
 bonnet. She caught his interested eyes and in re- 
 turn smiled. Aunt Laura went unanswered. "I 
 wonder," Edwin thought, "if she understands 
 what a fraud the whole thing is." At any rate 
 she looked kind . . . and she had been kind to his 
 mother too. A moment later she said good-bye, and
 
 THE DARK HOUSE 151 
 
 when Aunt Laura had escorted her to the door, 
 for Mrs. Willis was a person of consequence, the 
 rest of the company began to disappear. At last 
 Edwin was left alone in the room with his aunt 
 and uncle. Aunt Laura's face, that had been glow- 
 ing with hospitable smiles, now took a more seri- 
 ous cast. 
 
 "Edwin," she said, "I want to speak to you." 
 
 "Do you?" said Edwin. "Well ... go on." 
 
 "It's very painful . . . I'm afraid . . . I'm half 
 afraid that it will have upset your father, poor 
 man as if he hadn't enough to put up with." 
 
 "What on earth do you mean?" 
 
 "How can you ask? I mean your behaviour to- 
 day. In the church. In the cemetery. You stood 
 there just as if ... just as if ... oh, it was most 
 irreverent. Not a sign of grief! You must have 
 noticed it, Albert?" 
 
 Uncle Albert, most uncomfortable at his inclu- 
 sion in this family scene, but fully aware of the 
 disaster which would follow denial, said, "Yes . . . 
 yes . . . yes, certainly." 
 
 "Every one must have noticed it," Aunt Laura 
 went on. "It was a public scandal. It was un- 
 natural. It showed such a curious lack of feeling." 
 
 "Feeling," said Edwin. "What do you know 
 about feeling?" 
 
 "Steady, Edwin, steady," from Uncle Albert. 
 
 "If mother were here," he said, "and could hear 
 you talking this damned piffle she'd laugh at you. 
 That's what she'd do." 
 
 "Edwin!"
 
 152 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "It's true. . . . She couldn't stick your sort of 
 grief at any price." 
 
 "On the very day of her burial. . . ." 
 
 "She's not buried. It wasn't she you buried. Oh, 
 I'm sick of you. . . ." 
 
 "Edwin . . ." said Uncle Albert, who felt that 
 something in the way of protection was demanded 
 of him. "Really now . . ." 
 
 "Oh, I don't mean you, uncle," said Edwin. 
 
 "You cruel boy," Aunt Laura sobbed. 
 
 He left them there. He carried his bitterness 
 into the drawing-room on the other side of the 
 passage. ... It was very quiet there. Through 
 the bow window floated the perfume of the bed of 
 stocks. In the corner stood the piano. He had 
 often listened to his mother playing at night when 
 he was in bed. He loved her to play him to sleep. 
 The piano was shut; and the shut piano seemed to 
 him symbolical. All the music and all the beauty 
 that had been there had gone out of the house. The 
 house was an empty shell. Like a dry chrysalis. 
 Like a coffin. There, on the hearthrug, where he 
 had crawled as a child, he lay down and cried.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THRENODY 
 
 FROM this emotional maelstrom the current of 
 Edwin's life flowed into a strange peace. It 
 seemed that the catastrophe of Mrs. Ingleby's death 
 had taken the Halesby household by surprise and 
 stunned it so thoroughly that it would never re- 
 cover its normal consciousness. Edwin's father, 
 who had now returned to the ordinary round of 
 business, was still dazed and puzzled, and very 
 grey. Their servant, a young woman with an ex- 
 aggerated sense of the proprieties, or perhaps a 
 dread of living alone in such a gloomy house, had 
 given notice. Only Aunt Laura, to Edwin's shame, 
 showed the least capacity for dealing with the 
 situation. 
 
 However few of the graces may have fallen to 
 her lot, she was certainly not lacking in the do- 
 mestic virtues. When the maid departed with her 
 tin trunk and many tearful protestations of her 
 devotion to the memory of the dear mistress, Aunt 
 Laura turned up her sleeves and took possession of 
 the kitchen, and Mr. Ingleby, who had gloomily 
 anticipated a domestic wilderness, found that in 
 spite of the maid's defection, ambrosial food ap- 
 
 153
 
 154 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 peared before him like manna from heaven, the 
 only difference being that Uncle Albert, who could 
 not be permitted for one moment to remain a 
 bachelor, took his meals with the family. 
 
 The relation between Edwin and Aunt Laura was 
 still difficult. She could not forget and he could 
 not withdraw the bitter things that had been said 
 on that most mournful day, though her native good 
 humour, which was profuse and blustery like the 
 rest of her, made it difficult for her to maintain 
 an attitude of injured benignance. Even Edwin 
 had to admit that she was a good cook; but the 
 excellence of her food was qualified by her inces- 
 sant chatter and her nervous laugh. Edwin simply 
 couldn't stick them ; but it amazed him to find that 
 Uncle Albert evidently found them cheerful and 
 reassuring. Indeed, it was possibly one of the 
 reasons why he had fallen in love with her, being 
 a man who resembled her in nothing and whose 
 enthusiasms could never get him beyond a couple 
 of words and a giggle. 
 
 Mr. Ingleby too seemed to emerge without seri- 
 ous irritation from this diurnal bath of small-talk, 
 retiring, as Edwin supposed, to certain gloomy 
 depths of his own consciousness where the froth 
 and bubble of Aunt Laura's conversation became 
 imperceptible. Even when she spoke to him directly 
 though most of her observations were addressed 
 to the world in general he would not trouble to 
 answer her: a slight which Aunt Laura took quite 
 good-humouredly. 
 
 "Bless you," she would have said, "the man's so 
 wrapped up in himself that he's miles away from
 
 THRENODY 155 
 
 anywhere. Of course you can understand it in a 
 man of his age, especially when you realise how 
 devoted he was to poor Beatrice" Mrs. Ingleby's 
 name might never now escape the commiserating 
 prefix "but when a boy like Edwin tries it on it's 
 another matter altogether. It's simply conceit. 
 Personally, I think it was a great mistake of his 
 poor mother's to send him to St. Luke's. The gram- 
 mar school's good enough for the Willises. A great 
 mistake. . . . The boy is getting ideas of himself 
 that aren't warranted by his position. I don't 
 know what we are to do with him. We certainly 
 can't have him running wild here." And Uncle 
 Albert would say: "Certainly, certainly, my 
 love. . . ." 
 
 In spite of these pronounced opinions Aunt 
 Laura was careful not to cross swords with Edwin 
 himself. Indeed, she went a good deal out of her 
 way to propitiate him with various material kind- 
 nesses, and particularly certain delicacies in the 
 way of food, which, to the ruin of her figure in later 
 life, represented to her the height of earthly enjoy- 
 ment. Edwin didn't quite know how to take these 
 attentions. He couldn't help disliking her, and 
 the fact that she was really kind to him rather 
 took the wind out of his sails. He would have been 
 much happier if they had been allowed to remain 
 in a state of armed neutrality. 
 
 A fortnight passed . . . happily for Edwin in 
 spite of all that he felt he ought to feel. He missed 
 his mother awfully. That was true enough. And 
 yet . . . and yet it was also true to say that he 
 was only beginning to live: to appreciate the joy
 
 156 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 of his growing strength : to realise the enchanted 
 domains that were open to his eager feet and to 
 his eager mind. Here he had freedom, leisure, 
 health : so much of the world to see : so much of 
 human knowledge to explore. And though the 
 thought of death, and the particular disaster that 
 had befallen him fell upon his spirit sometimes 
 with a shadow that plunged the whole world into 
 desperate darkness, he could not deny that the 
 shadow was gradually lifting, and the character of 
 the agony that had desolated him was becoming 
 less spontaneous, till, in the end, it became almost 
 a calculable emotion that might be indulged or 
 banished at will. He found it difficult to under- 
 stand this. He thought: "I'm a brute, a callous, 
 insensitive brute. What would she think of 
 me . . . ? And yet, I can't help it. I'm made like 
 that. ..." And then, after long and bitter de- 
 liberation: "I believe she would understand. I 
 expect she was made like that too. I'm sure she 
 was. And if there's one thing in the world that 
 she'd hate it would be that I should force myself 
 to pretend anything." 
 
 The high summer weather held. Never was there 
 such a June. Edwin, in the joy of perfect health, 
 would get up very early in the morning when the 
 dew lay on the roses, and run in a sweater and flan- 
 nel trousers down the lane and over the field to the 
 mill-pond where he and his mother had walked so 
 often in the evenings of spring. Here, where the 
 water was deepest and great striped perch stole 
 slowly under the camp-shedding, he would strip and 
 bathe, lying on his back in the water so that low
 
 THRENODY 157 
 
 sunbeams came dancing over the surface into his 
 eyes that were on the level of the flat water-lily 
 leaves and their yellow balls now breaking into 
 cups. 
 
 Afterwards when he would sit glowing on the 
 bank, the sun would be rising and growing warmer 
 every minute, and this new warmth would seem to 
 accentuate the odour of the place that was compact 
 of the yellow water-lily's harsh savour, the odour 
 of soaked wood, and another, more subtly blended : 
 the composite smell of water that is neither fast 
 nor stagnant, the most provocative and the coolest 
 smell on earth. 
 
 On the way home he would sometimes get a whiff 
 of the miller's cowhouse, when the door was thrown- 
 open, and from within there came a sound of quiet 
 breathing or of milk hissing in a pail. And some- 
 times, from the garden, the scent of a weed bonfire 
 would drift across his path. All things smelt more 
 poignantly at this early hour of the morning. All 
 things smell more wonderfully early in life. . . . 
 
 With these wonders the day began ; but stranger 
 things lay in store for him. He revisited all his 
 old haunts: the tangled woods and gardens of 
 Shenstone on the hill-side: the ruins of the Cis- 
 tercian abbey on whose fall the poet had moralised^ 
 the little chapel that marked the grave of the mur- 
 dered Mercian prince. His bicycle took him far- 
 ther. Westward . . . always westward. 
 
 In those days it always seemed to him as if the 
 mountainous country that his mother had shown 
 him that evening on Uffdown, rolling away into 
 remote and cloudy splendours, must be the land of
 
 158 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 his heart's desire : and though he could never reach 
 it in a day, he managed several times to cross the 
 Severn and even to scale the foothills upon the 
 farther bank from which he could see the Glee Hills 
 rising in a magnificent bareness, shaking the woods 
 and pastures from their knees. And these distant 
 hills would tempt him to think of the future and 
 other desires of his heart: in the near distance 
 Oxford, where Layton and other demigods in grey 
 flannel trousers abode, and beyond the fine untrav- 
 elled world, rivers and seas and forests, desolate 
 wonderful names. China . . . Africa . . . "Some 
 day," he said to himself, "I will go to Africa. . . ." 
 
 In this way he began to think of his present 
 adventures as a kind of prelude to others remoter 
 and more vast. One day he had ridden farther away 
 than usual, and having taken his lunch at the 
 bridge town of Bewdley, he pushed his bicycle up 
 the immense hill that overshadows the town along 
 the road to Tenbury. For all its steepness this 
 mountain road was strangely exhilarating, the air 
 that moved above it grew so clean and clear. Below 
 him, between the road and the river, lay the mighty 
 remnants of the Forest of Wyre. 
 
 His way tumbled again to a green valley, where 
 no mountains were to be seen; and while Edwin 
 was deciding to turn off down the first descending 
 lane and explore the forest, he heard a sound of 
 spades and pickaxes and came upon a group of 
 navvies, several of them stripped to the waist in 
 the sun, working at a cutting of red earth that was 
 already deep on either side of the road. For the 
 most part they worked in silence ; but one of them,
 
 THRENODY 159 
 
 a little one-eyed man, with a stiff soldierly back, 
 encouraged them with a string of jokes. They 
 called him "Gunner," and the elaboration with 
 which his chest had been tattooed with nautical 
 symbols led Edwin to suppose that he was a sailor. 
 When he saw Edwin leaning on his bicycle and 
 watching the work, he called out to him, asking if 
 he wanted a job. Edwin shook his head. "I reck- 
 on," said the Gunner, "that a foreman's job would 
 be more in your line, Gaffer. It's a fine sight to see 
 other people working. The harder the better." 
 
 The men laughed and stretched their backs, lean- 
 ing on their spades, and Edwin could see how a 
 fine dew of sweat had broken out under the hair 
 on their chests. It seemed to him a noble sight. 
 "What are you working at?" he asked. "Is it a 
 railway?" 
 
 "To hell with your railway," said the Gunner. 
 "Who would make a railway heading for the river 
 Severn? No . . . It's a pipe-track. This here's the 
 Welsh water scheme." 
 
 "Where is it going to?" 
 
 "North Bromwich." 
 
 "And where does it come from?" 
 
 "From Wales. . . . From the Dulas Valley, 
 where they're rebuilding the reservoir under a hill 
 they call Savaddan. And a black job it is, I can tell 
 you." 
 
 "Is it anywhere near a place called Felindre? 
 I think it must be." 
 
 "Right, my son. The pipe-line goes through Fe- 
 lindre. Sixty or eighty mile from here." 
 
 "My people come from Felindre . . ."
 
 160 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Well, God pity them. . . . That's all I can say. 
 I've been in that place on a Christmas Day, and 
 not a pint of beer stirring. . . . Ah, that's a black 
 job. Well, mates, come on. . . ." 
 
 Again the men who had been listening, lifted 
 their picks and spades, and the busy clinking 
 sounds of digging began again. Edwin wished the 
 Gunner good-afternoon, and began to push his bi- 
 cycle up the hill again. Sixty or eighty miles. . . . 
 That wasn't so very far. Six or eight hours' ride. 
 . . . Perhaps some day he could go there. He half 
 persuaded himself with a sentimental argument 
 that it was only natural that he should be happy 
 in the country from which his mother's people had 
 come; that even the borderland of it must be pos- 
 sessed by the same curiously friendly atmosphere. 
 "I'm always most happy west of Severn," he 
 thought. And then he began to wonder about the 
 sailor whom the men called Gunner. Perhaps that 
 man had actually been in Africa. . . . 
 
 He managed to get a sixpenny tea at a little 
 general shop on the very crown of the hills, where 
 a small hamlet named Far Forest stood. The ro- 
 mantic name of the place appealed to him; and it 
 was a curious adventure to sit down alone to tea 
 in a back room that smelt of candles and paraffin 
 and bacon. At the shop door a serious old man 
 with a white beard had received him; but the tea 
 was brought to him by a little girl in an extremely 
 clean pinafore whom the old man addressed as 
 Eva. 
 
 She was a curious mixture of shyness and friend- 
 liness, and her serious eyes examined Edwin mi-
 
 THRENODY 161 
 
 nutely from under straight dark eyebrows. When 
 she came in with the tea she found Edwin examin- 
 ing some books that stood in a cupboard with a 
 glass door. Evidently she was very proud of them. 
 
 "They are my brother James's prizes," she said, 
 and went on to explain how clever he was and what 
 a scholar, until the old man called "Eva," and she 
 returned to him in the shop. It was all amazingly 
 peaceful, with the westering sun flooding the door- 
 way where the old man had been sitting out in a 
 chair when Edwin arrived : and opposite the door 
 was a little patch of green strewn with mossy bould- 
 ers, a kind of platform in front of which the huge 
 panorama of Clee and all the Radnor hills ex- 
 panded. 
 
 "In a place like this," Edwin thought, "people 
 never change." It was a ripping, placid sort of 
 existence, in which nothing ever happened, but all 
 things were just simple and serious and tender like 
 the eyes of the little girl named Eva who had 
 brought him his tea. "Good-evening, sir," said the 
 old man at the door. It was rather nice to be 
 called "Sir." Coasting down the hill into Bewdley, 
 Edwin had all the joy of the state that he called 
 "the after-tea feeling." It was exhilarating and 
 splendid : and at the end of it came the misty river 
 town with its stone bridge and the great river of 
 the Marches swirling proudly to the south. When 
 he neared home, divinely tired and hungry, the 
 black-country stretched before him in a galaxy of 
 starry lights. As he crossed the brow of the hill 
 above Halesby, the Willis' Mawne furnaces sud- 
 denly lit the sky with a great flower of fire.
 
 162 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 n 
 
 At home, Auntie Laura was in possession. 
 Evidently she was primed with serious business; 
 for Edwin could see that his father sat spiritually, 
 if not physically, pinioned in the plush arm-chair. 
 Aunt Laura wore an air of overpowering satisfac- 
 tion. Evidently she had already triumphed, and 
 she smiled so cheerfully at Edwin that he felt con- 
 vinced that she had scored him off in some way. 
 On the side of the fire opposite to his father Uncle 
 Albert sat smoking, not as if he enjoyed it, but 
 because it gave him the excuse of an occupation 
 into which he might relapse in moments of tension. 
 
 "Well, here he is at last," said Aunt Laura. 
 "We've been talking about you, Edwin." 
 
 Edwin had guessed as much. 
 
 "Well, what is it?" he said, and his tone implied 
 that he was certain that some dark scheme had been 
 launched against his peace of mind. Uncle Albert 
 puffed uncomfortably at his pipe and nicotine or 
 saliva made a gurgling noise in it. Mr. Ingleby 
 sighed. Aunt Laura, tumbling to the hostility of 
 the new atmosphere, hastened to propitiate. 
 
 "I expect you're hungry, Edwin," she said. . . . 
 
 "No. . . . I'm not hungry, thanks. What is it?" 
 
 "You needn't be cross, Edwin. . . . We've de- 
 cided. . . ." So it was all arranged. . . . "We've 
 decided that your father must go away for a rest 
 ... a little holiday. . . ." 
 
 "Yes. . . . And that means, of course, that we 
 shall have to shut up the house until he returns, 
 and of course that will be quite easy, because it's
 
 THRENODY 163 
 
 time you were getting back to St. Luke's. We 
 thought you had better go on Monday." 
 
 "Monday?" It was now Saturday. 
 
 "Yes. . . . Monday. It is fortunate that your 
 uncle has to go into North Bromwich on business 
 that day. . . ." 
 
 "Yes. . . . Yes. . . . Business," put in Uncle Albert, 
 as though he were anxious to explain that his visit 
 to that sink of iniquity was in no way connected 
 with pleasure. 
 
 Edwin burned with sudden and quite unreason- 
 able indignation. 
 
 "And you agreed to this, father?" 
 
 "Yes. . . . Of course I agreed. Your aunt is quite 
 right. I am overtired. It was a terrible strain. 
 And the doctor suggested that my native air. . . ." 
 
 "Oh ... I don't mean that," said Edwin. "I 
 mean about St. Luke's ... I can't go back now 
 ... of course I can't . . ." 
 
 "Don't be ridiculous and childish, Edwin," said 
 Aunt Laura severely. "You don't imagine just be- 
 cause" with a hushed and melancholy inflection 
 "this . . . has happened, you're never going to 
 school again?" 
 
 "No. ... I don't mean that. Of course I don't. 
 Only . . . only the term is nearly over. In an- 
 other fortnight all the chaps will be going away 
 for the hols. It isn't worth it. I should feel . . ." 
 
 "We weren't considering your feelings so much 
 as your good," said Aunt Laura complacently. 
 
 "Father . . . father . . . you can't mean it. You 
 see. ... I don't know. ... it would all be so 
 strange. So awfully difficult. I should have lost
 
 164 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 touch with all the work the form was doing. I 
 shouldn't be able to pick it up. It's rotten . . . 
 rotten . . ." 
 
 "Edwin, you will distress your father . . ." 
 
 "Oh, Aunt Laura, do let father speak for him- 
 self." 
 
 Immense volumes of yellow smoke signalled 
 Uncle Albert's distress. 
 
 "Father . . ." 
 
 "It's difficult, Edwin . . ." 
 
 "But it isn't difficult, father, dear. Aunt Laura 
 doesn't realise. She doesn't realise what it would 
 be like going back like that to St. Luke's. It would 
 only be waste of time. Father, I'd read during the 
 hols. ... I would, really. It isn't that I want 
 to get out of going back to work. It isn't that a 
 bit. I'd work like blazes. Only . . . only every- 
 thing now seems to have gone funny and empty 
 . . . sort of blank. I ... I feel awful without 
 mother . . ." 
 
 "Edwin . . ." warningly, from Aunt Laura. 
 
 That Aunt Laura should presume to correct him 
 in a matter of delicacy! "Of course you don't un- 
 derstand," he said bitterly. "You don't want me 
 to speak about mother. You've had your excite- 
 ment out of it. You've had your chance of bossing 
 round, and now you want to arrange what I shall 
 do for the rest of my life, I suppose. ' You've no 
 ... no reverence." 
 
 He was really very angry. It was always difficult 
 for him to be anything else with Aunt Laura ; for he 
 felt that it was somehow horribly unjust for her 
 to be alive when his mother was dead, and he could
 
 THRENODY 165 
 
 never, never forget what his darling had told him 
 of her stupid jealousy. On this occasion Aunt 
 Laura seemed to be less disturbed than usual by 
 his violence. She spoke with a calculated coolness 
 that compelled the admiration of her husband, sit- 
 ting very uncomfortably on the edge of the storm, 
 desperately anxious to show that without his tak- 
 ing sides his wife could rely on his support. 
 
 "It's funny, Edwin," said Aunt Laura, stroking 
 her black skirt, "that you should use the word 
 Keverence. ... It reminds me of something that I 
 wanted to speak to you about. You realise, don't 
 you, that we are all supposed to be .in mourning? 
 And yet, day after day, I see you going down the 
 town in a pair of white canvas gym. shoes. 
 White. . . ! Now, you mustn't talk to me about 
 reverence, Edwin." 
 
 Edwin burst out laughing. It was no good argu- 
 ing with the woman. He gave a despairing glance 
 at his father. Was it possible that the man could 
 listen seriously to superficial cant of this kind? Was 
 it possible that he could tolerate the woman's pres- 
 ence in the house? He looked, and he saw nothing 
 but tiredness and desolation in the man's face. He 
 saw that in reality his father was too tired for 
 anything but compromise. All life, all determina- 
 tion had been stamped out of him, and though 
 Edwin clutched at the sympathy which he knew 
 must be concealed in the man's mind, he began to 
 realise that, after all, circumstances , had left the 
 whole household curiously dependent on Aunt 
 Laura; that without her the whole domestic ma- 
 chine would collapse, and that, therefore, the in-
 
 i66 ,THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 fliction must be suffered patiently. Edwin deter- 
 mined to leave the matter where it stood, but Aunt 
 Laura, inflamed with approaching triumph, would 
 not let it rest. "I am sure that you agree with me, 
 John," she threw out challengingly. 
 
 "No doubt Edwin did not understand. You know 
 more about the people in the town than we do, 
 Laura." 
 
 "Compromise . . ." thought Edwin, "but I sup- 
 pose it can't be helped." At any rate nothing that 
 he might do should give the man a moment's dis- 
 comfort. He possessed himself in silence. 
 
 "But I think, perhaps," Mr. Ingleby went on, 
 "that Edwin is right. It would be hardly worth 
 while going back to St. Luke's for a fortnight." 
 
 "Of course you know best, John," Aunt Laura 
 hurried to assure him, "but it's really quite im- 
 possible for us to put him up while the house is 
 closed and you are away. You know that we've 
 arranged to have the painters in." 
 
 On a matter of fact, and one outside controversy, 
 Uncle Albert felt that he was safe in giving his 
 support. 
 
 "I quite understand that," said Mr. Ingleby, "but 
 it's a simple matter. Edwin can come with me." 
 
 "Oh, father, how wonderful!" 
 
 "Well, of course," said Aunt Laura, "if he won't 
 be a nuisance to you. . . ." But Edwin was too 
 pleased and excited to mind what she said. He 
 kissed his father, and Mr. Ingleby, with a curious 
 tenderness, clasped his arm. It seemed that catas- 
 trophe had strange uses. Already it had thrown 
 the ordinary course of life into more than one curi-
 
 THRENODY 167 
 
 cms byway, and now, behold, he was to embark 
 upon another strange adventure, to become familiar 
 with another sort of life. He determined that his 
 duty (whatever that might be) should not suffer 
 by it. When they returned from their holiday, all 
 through the summer months, he would work like 
 anything: he would make that Balliol scholarship 
 that had seemed part of an indefinite future, as 
 near a certainty as made no matter. He would 
 show them in other words Aunt Laura and Uncle 
 Albert what he could do. 
 
 "If we are going on Monday I had better think 
 of packing," he said. "Shall I need to take many 
 things, father?" 
 
 "Oh, don't worry your father, Edwin," said Aunt 
 Laura. 
 
 m 
 
 Sunday came with its usual toll of dreariness. 
 The customary penance of the morning service was 
 actually the least trying part of it to Edwin. To 
 begin with, the parish church of Halesby was a 
 structure of great beauty. Originally an offshoot 
 of the abbey that now stood in ruins above the long 
 string of slowly silting fishponds on the Stour, the 
 grace and ingenuity of successive ages of priestly 
 architects had embellished its original design with 
 many beautiful features, and the slender beauty 
 of its spire, crowning a steep bank above the de- 
 graded river, had imposed an atmosphere of dignity 
 and rest upon the rather squalid surroundings of 
 this last of the black-country towns. The music, 
 even though it was not in any way comparable with
 
 i68 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 that of St. Luke's, was good, and the recent arrival 
 of a young and distinguished rector from Cam- 
 bridge, whose voice and person would have qualified 
 him for success as a bishop, or an actor manager, 
 had restored to the building some of its popularity 
 as a place of resort or of escape from the shuttered 
 Sunday streets. 
 
 At ten o'clock the fine peal of bells filled the air 
 with an inspiriting music. Edwin remembered, 
 hearing them, the melancholy with which they had 
 often inspired him on dank evenings of autumn 
 when the ringers were at practice. Very different 
 they sounded on this summer morning, for a gentle 
 wind was moving from the hills to westward, and 
 chime eddied in a soft air that was clearer than 
 the usual, if only because it was Sunday and the 
 smoke of a thousand furnaces and chimney stacks 
 no longer filled it with suffocation. 
 
 At ten-fifteen precisely Aunt Laura appeared in 
 the dining-room, in a black silk dress smelling faint- 
 ly of lavender: a minute later, Uncle Albert, in a 
 frock coat, coaxing the last sweetness from his 
 after-breakfast pipe. Mr. Ingleby also had ex- 
 changed the alpaca jacket in which he had been 
 leisurely examining his roses, for the same uniform. 
 Uncle Albert, Edwin noticed, had not yet removed 
 the deep band of crape from his top-hat. As usual, 
 Aunt Laura appeared a little flustered, the strain 
 of conscious magnificence in her millinery making 
 it difficult for her to collect her thoughts. 
 
 "Are you sure you have all the prayer-books, 
 Albert?" she asked anxiously.
 
 THRENODY 169 
 
 Uncle Albert regretfully knocked out his pipe. 
 "Yes, my dear," he said. 
 
 "Don't scatter those ashes all over the fireplace, 
 Albert. The least you can do is to keep the room 
 tidy on Sunday." 
 
 "Yes, my dear." 
 
 "Edwin, have you got your prayer-book? Why, 
 boy, you've actually put on a grey striped tie. Kun 
 and change it quickly. I don't know what people 
 will think." 
 
 Edwin, smarting, obeyed. When he returned the 
 atmosphere of impatience had increased. Aunt 
 Laura was saying: "John, dear, are you sure that 
 the clock is right? I'm afraid the bells have stopped. 
 No . . . thank goodness, there they are again. That's 
 better, Edwin. Now we really must start. You 
 have the money for the collection, Albert? Give 
 it to me, or you'll be sure to leave me without any. 
 I do hope we shan't be late. We should look so 
 prominent. . . ." 
 
 Why should they look s prominent? The ques- 
 tion puzzled Edwin all the way down through the 
 quiet streets. B,ut even though this mystery exer- 
 cised his mind he could not help appreciating the 
 curious atmosphere of the route through which they 
 progressed: At the corner of the street the first 
 familiar thing smote him : it was the odour of stale 
 spirits and beer that issued from between the closed 
 doors of the Bull's Head public-house, behind which 
 it had been secreted ever since an uproarious clos- 
 ing time the night before. Then came the steep 
 High Street, and from its gutters the indescribable 
 smell of vegetable refuse left there overnight from
 
 170 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 the greengrocer's stalls. On an ordinary morning 
 it would not have been noticed, for the motion of 
 wheeled traffic in the highway and the sight of 
 open shop windows would have distracted the at- 
 tention. On Sunday morning, however, it became 
 the most important thing in the road, and seemed 
 to emphasise the deadness of the day in contrast 
 to the activities and dissipations of Saturday night. 
 It called attention to the indubitable sordidness of 
 the whole street: the poverty of its grimy brick: 
 the faded lettering above the shop windows: the 
 paint that cracked and peeled from the closed shut- 
 ters. On this morning Halesby was a squalid and 
 degraded town. Even Mr. Ingleby's shop in the 
 High Street looked curiously small and mean. 
 Edwin disliked the sight of his own name printed 
 over it. It reminded him of Griffin's social prej- 
 udices. 
 
 They entered a small door in the transept when 
 the last bell was tolling; and as they stepped into 
 the full church Edwin realised at last the reason 
 of Aunt Laura's particular anxieties. They were 
 on show. This was the first occasion, since the 
 funeral, that the family had entered the church, 
 and, in accordance with an immemorial custom, the 
 congregation were now engaged in searching their 
 faces and their clothing for evidences of the grief 
 that was proper to their condition. 
 
 Kneeling in the conventional opening prayer, 
 Edwin could see through his folded fingers that the 
 whole of the gathering was engaged in a ghoulish 
 scrutiny of their party. Now, for the first time, 
 -he realised the full meaning of the horror with
 
 THRENODY 171 
 
 which his grey tie had inspired Aunt Laura. He 
 could even feel Aunt Laura, who remained kneeling 
 longer than usual, wallowing in the emotion that 
 her presence evoked. It was a rotten business. If 
 he could have dared to do so without causing an 
 immense scandal, Edwin would have t got up and 
 left the church. He saw Aunt Laura glance at his 
 father with a kind of proprietary air, as if this 
 exhibition w r ere really her own responsibility and 
 the degree of interest that Mr. Ingleby's appearance 
 aroused were to her credit. 
 
 Edwin also looked at his father. He wondered 
 if Mr. Ingleby were in the least conscious of the 
 spectacle to which he was contributing: decided 
 that he wasn't. He was thankful for that. It be- 
 came apparent to him that, if the truth were known, 
 his father was a creature of the most astonishing 
 simplicity: a simplicity that was almost pathetic. 
 He could see, he knew that the whole church must 
 see, that the man had suffered. The brutes. . . . 
 He was awfully sorry for his father. And he loved 
 him for it. The whole affair was shameful and de- 
 grading. Never mind ... in another twenty-four 
 hours they would be clear of all this sort of thing. 
 It was something to be thankful for. 
 
 "When the wicked man turneth away from his 
 wickedness and doeth that which is lawful and 
 right. . . ." The rector began to intone. He spoke 
 the words as though his whole soul were behind 
 them : his voice vibrated with a practiced earnest- 
 ness: and all the time Edwin could see his dark 
 eyes scrutinising the congregation in detail, con- 
 gratulating himself on the presence of his sup-
 
 172 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 porters, speculating on the absence of certain 
 others. In the final cadence of the sentence, a 
 masterly modulation that would have made you 
 swear that his whole life was in his mission, his 
 eyes swivelled into the corner where the Ingleby 
 party were sitting, and Edwin could have bet his 
 life that they lighted up with a kind of satisfac- 
 tion at the addition of this undoubted attraction to 
 his morning's entertainment. It even seemed to 
 him that the rector's glances almost imperceptibly 
 indicated to his wife, a little woman of a pathetic 
 earnestness qualified for the ultimate bishopric 
 by a complete subjection to her husband's person- 
 ality, the fact that the Inglebys were on view. 
 
 The rector, who had views on the advantages of 
 scamping the drier portions of the church service 
 and stressing any sentence that held possibilities 
 of fruity sentiment, soon got into his stride. He 
 was in excellent voice that morning, and on two 
 occasions in the first lesson availed himself of an 
 opportunity of exploiting the emotional break it 
 was very nearly a sob that had done so much to 
 establish his reputation in his early days at 
 Halesby. He was making hay while the sun shone: 
 for in the confirmation service such opportunities 
 are more limited. 
 
 Edwin enjoyed the psalms. There was even 
 something familiar and pleasant in the tunes of 
 the Cathedral Psalter after the exotic harmonies 
 of St. Luke's. He sang the tenor part (when last 
 he remembered singing them it had been alto) and 
 lost his sense of his surroundings in the beauty of 
 the words. In the middle of them, however, he be-
 
 THRENODY 173 
 
 came conscious of his father singing too. He had 
 never sat next to his father in church before. His 
 mother had always separated them: and for this 
 reason he had never before heard his father sing. 
 The result filled him with horror. Mr. Ingleby had 
 no idea of tune and was apparently unconscious 
 of this disability. Edwin reflected how great an 
 interest music had been in his mother's life: 
 realised that from this part of her his father .must 
 always have been isolated by this natural barrier. 
 It was strange. ... He began to wonder what 
 they really had in common. He remembered 
 Griffin. No ... not that. . . . 
 
 This speculation he did his best to stifle while 
 the rector galloped over the desert wastes of the 
 Litany : but the kneeling posture was rendered un- 
 comfortable by the presence in front of him of an 
 old maiden lady who smelt of carraway seeds, 
 a spice that Edwin detested. A hymn followed. 
 Luckily, this time his father did not sing. Poor 
 creature. . . . Edwin was now so ashamed of his 
 criticism that he almost wished he would. And 
 then they settled down to the sermon. 
 
 From the first Edwin had decided that he would 
 not listen. The simple austerity of the service at 
 St. Luke's, where the liturgy was allowed to unfold 
 its sonorous splendours for itself, had bred in him 
 a distaste for the rector's histrionics. So he did 
 not hear them, contenting himself with a detailed 
 examination of such of the congregation as were 
 within his range. He saw them classified in their 
 social gradations from the pompous distinction of 
 Sir Joseph Hingston, the ironmaster, who, in spite
 
 174 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 of his baronetcy, wore a frock coat that did not 
 differ greatly from that of Mr. Ingleby, to their 
 late maid, dressed in black, and now conscious of 
 the reflected glory that she had almost sacrificed by 
 leaving. And the thing that impressed him most 
 about this very various gathering was their shabbi- 
 ness, and the fact that nearly all of those whom 
 he knew seemed so much older than they had been 
 when he last saw them. 
 
 Thinking of the light and elegance and cleanli- 
 ness of St. Luke's, it appeared to him that Halesby 
 was indeed a muddy and obscure backwater and 
 that his own people, sitting in the pew beside him, 
 were in reality as much fitted to inhabit it as all 
 the rest of the shabby congregation. Even the 
 Willises, his mother's new friends, whom a wave of 
 commercial prosperity had carried forward into 
 one of the front pews of the nave within calcul- 
 able distance of the glory of Sir Joseph Kingston 
 himself, would, have looked very ordinary folk in 
 the chapel at St. Luke's. 
 
 He began to wonder if Griffin, and more latterly 
 Aunt Laura, had been right: whether, after all, 
 his mother had made an ambitious mistake in send- 
 ing him to a public school when the ancient founda- 
 tion of the Halesby Grammar School had stood 
 waiting for the reception of him and his kind. 
 There, in the fifth row on the left of the nave, sat 
 Mr. Kelly, the grammar school's head-master: a 
 swarthy Irishman with a sinister, rather disap- 
 pointed face. He wasn't at all Edwin's idea of a 
 schoolmaster. Even old fat Leeming looked more 
 distinguished than that. And yet, if he were good
 
 THRENODY 175 
 
 enough for the son of the opulent Walter Willis, 
 he must surely be good enough for the son of an 
 ordinary Halesby tradesman. 
 
 For the greater part of the sermon these problems 
 of social precedence engaged Edwin's puzzled mind. 
 It had come as something of a shock to him to 
 find that his mother came of a farming stock, 
 even though the farmers had lived in a Norman 
 castle and had once been good enough to bear a 
 lance in company with the Lords Marchers. Ex- 
 amining the face of his father, who appeared to be 
 engrossed in the rector's rhetoric, Edwin decided 
 that his features were really far too distinguished 
 to belong naturally to a country chemist. Here, 
 perhaps, in spite of present circumstance, lay the 
 explanation of his own indubitable gentility. It 
 was funny, he reflected, that he had never heard 
 anything from his mother about the origins of the 
 Inglebys: he had not even known from what part 
 of the country their stock had sprung, and this 
 ignorance made the expedition on which they were 
 to start on the morrow more enthralling than ever. 
 It was quite possible that the discovery of some 
 illustrious ancestry might put him right with him- 
 self and justify his claim to a birthright which at 
 present seemed rather shadowy. 
 
 Even if this failed, he decided, there remained 
 Oxford. A fellow of Balliol (his imagination trav- 
 elled fast) would have a right to hold up his head 
 with any one in that congregation Sir Joseph 
 Kingston not excepted even though the name of 
 the fellow's father happened to be printed on his 
 toothbrush. It might even be for him to restore
 
 1 76 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 the prestige of the Ingleby name. "But in that 
 case," he thought, "it will be better for me to buy 
 my toothbrushes somewhere else. . . ." Even the 
 fact that Keats was a chemist did not modify this 
 determination. 
 
 The sermon ended, and during the collection a 
 hymn was sung. Half an hour before this, a gowned 
 verger had stolen on tiptoe to the Inglebys' pew 
 and whispered in Mr. Ingleby's ear, depositing a 
 wooden plate lined with velvet under the seat as 
 furtively as if it were something of which he was 
 ashamed. When the collection began Edwin's 
 father left his pew and began to carry the plate 
 round the transept in which they were seated. 
 
 Edwin, out of the corner of his eye, saw a glow 
 of satisfaction spread over the features of Aunt 
 Laura. Now, more than ever, the depth of the 
 family's grief was to be demonstrated in the eyes 
 of all men. Edwin thought it was a rotten shame to 
 make his father collect on this Sunday of all Sun- 
 days. The hymn was a short one, and for several 
 minutes after it was finished the clink of silver 
 and the duller sound of copper coins was heard in 
 every corner of the echoing church. Then the sides- 
 men formed themselves into a double file and 
 moved singly up the aisle. First came Sir Joseph 
 Kingston, erect and podgy, with his smooth grey 
 waistcoat in front of him like the breast of a pouter 
 pigeon. Mr. Willis, of Mawne, with a humbler but 
 not unambitious abdominal development followed 
 him. Edwin conceived a fanciful theory that when 
 Mr. Willis, in the course of time, should have grown 
 as wealthy as the baronet, there would be nothing
 
 THRENODY 177 
 
 : 
 
 to choose between their profiles. A miserly but 
 erect old gentleman named Farr, who had once 
 given Edwin a halfpenny, followed Mr. Willis. Last 
 but one came Edwin's father, with the red-bearded 
 undertaker an eager last. 
 
 On the whole, Edwin was satisfied (as was ob- 
 viously Aunt Laura) with Mr. Ingleby's appear- 
 ance. He certainly looked more like the father of 
 a fellow of Balliol than Sir Joseph Kingston. 
 The money descended with a series of opulent 
 splashes into the brass salver that the rector held 
 in front of the chancel steps: the organist (in pri- 
 vate life he was a carpenter) meanwhile extempo- 
 rising vaguely in the key of C. The. rector carried 
 the salver arm-high to the altar, as though he were 
 exhibiting to the Almighty the personal fruits of 
 his oratory. Mr. Ingleby stole quietly to his seat 
 bathed in the admiring glances of Aunt Laura. A 
 short prayer . . . "And now to God the fath- 
 er. . . ." The organist launched into his latest 
 achievement: the Gavotte from Mignon. 
 
 Outside the church the summer sunlight seemed 
 more exhilarating than ever. It was worth while, 
 Edwin thought, to have suffered the dreariness of 
 the morning's service to experience this curious 
 feeling of lightness and relief. He supposed that 
 he was not alone in this sensation; for the crowd 
 that moved slowly from the churchyard gates with 
 a kind of gathering resilience was a happy crowd, 
 and its voices that at first were hushed soon became 
 gay and irresponsible in spite of the slight awk- 
 wardness that its Sunday clothes imposed on it. 
 No doubt they were anticipating their Sunday din-
 
 178 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 ner, for, as Edwin had noticed, the liturgy of the 
 Church of England has some value as an aperitif. 
 Even Aunt Laura was full of a subdued playful- 
 ness. "What a shame, Albert," she said, "that the 
 rector didn't appoint you to collect to-day." She 
 patted his arm. 
 
 "Oh, I don't know, my dear. ... It wasn't my 
 turn, you know." 
 
 "Oh, I know that," said Aunt Laura, "but on a 
 day like this it would have been rather a delicate 
 compliment. I must speak to the rector about it." 
 
 "I don't think I should do that," said Uncle Al- 
 bert, with some alarm. 
 
 She laughed gently. "Don't be an old juggins," 
 she said. 
 
 All down the High Street, in the moving crowd, 
 Edwin could smell the savour of roast beef and 
 baked potatoes and cabbage water wafted from 
 innumerable kitchen windows. , 
 
 IV 
 
 In the afternoon they left Aunt Laura and Uncle 
 Albert asleep in two arm-chairs on opposite sides 
 of the drawing-room fireplace, and Edwin and his 
 father went for a walk by the old abbey fish-ponds. 
 It was the first time for many years that Edwin 
 had been for a walk with his father, and the experii 
 ence promised a new and exciting intimacy to which 
 he looked forward with eagerness. 
 
 Even at this hour of the day the Sabbath 
 atmosphere imposed itself on the countryside. The 
 road that they followed was long and straight
 
 THRENODY 179 
 
 with an open frontage above the reedy pools, and 
 along the cinder path at the side of it a great num- 
 ber of men were lounging: a strange and foreign 
 population of miners from the Mawne pits, who 
 only emerged from their cavernous occupation on 
 this day of the week, and other industrial workers 
 from the great steel rolling mills that lay in the 
 Stour Valley to westward. 
 
 None of them took any notice of Edwin and his 
 father. It was even doubtful if they knew who 
 they were; for these men passed a curiously sepa- 
 rate existence, and Mr. Ingleby would only be 
 familiar to their wives who did the family shopping 
 on Saturday nights while their masters were wait- 
 ing for the football results in their favourite pubs. 
 On this day the miner's passion for sport of all 
 kinds asserted itself in the presence of a great 
 number of slim, jacketed whippets, each warranted 
 to beat anything on four legs for speed, slinking 
 tenderly at their masters' heels. 
 
 It seemed strange to Edwin that his father 
 should know none of these men. It showed him 
 again how remote and solitary the man's life must 
 have been in this ultimate corner of the Black 
 Country. "We don't really belong here," he 
 thought. "We're foreigners. . . ." And the reflec- 
 tion pleased him, though he remembered, with a 
 tinge of regret, that by this denial he dissociated 
 himself from his old idol the poet of the Pastoral 
 Ballad. 
 
 Soon they left the cinder path behind, and 
 plunged into a green lane descending to a water- 
 mill, turned by the tawny Stour, as yet unsullied
 
 i8o THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 by the refuse of factories. At a sandstone bridge, 
 whose parapet was deeply carved with the initials 
 of lovers long since dead or disillusioned, they 
 paused, and, for the first time, began to talk. 
 
 "It's a funny thing, father," Edwin said, "but I 
 don't even know where we are going to-mor- 
 row. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Ingleby smiled. "Don't you, Edwin? Well, 
 the doctor said it would be best for me to go to my 
 native air ; and it struck me as rather a good plan. 
 I never went there with your mother. It belonged 
 to another life. It is quite twenty years since I 
 have been in Somerset." 
 
 "Somerset . . . ? I didn't even know it was 
 Somerset." 
 
 "No. . . . Well, as I say, it was another world." 
 
 Somerset. . . . Edwin's imagination began to 
 play with the word. He could remember very 
 little: only a huge green county sprawling on a 
 map with rivers . . . yes, and hills. A county 
 stretched beside the Severn Sea. The Severn again ! 
 A western county. Cheddar cheese. Lorna Doone. 
 Cider. Coleridge. Sedgemoor. 
 
 "But what part of Somerset?" 
 
 "The eastern end." 
 
 That was a pity. The farther west the better. 
 
 "I suppose it's rather a flat county?" 
 
 "A great part of it. Did you ever hear of Men- 
 dip? 
 
 " 'The rugged miners poured to war 
 From Mendip's sunless caves.' "
 
 THRENODY 181 
 
 "Yes, of course. . . ." 
 
 "I came from a li&le village on the top of Mendip. 
 Twenty years ago it was decaying. Now I expect 
 there's next to nothing left of it. Twenty years 
 makes a lot of difference. It's made a lot of dif- 
 ference to me." 
 
 "And what was the name of the village?" 
 "I don't suppose you will ever have heard it. 
 It was called Highberrow." 
 
 "Highberrow . . . no. It's a jolly name." 
 "I don't think it ever struck me in that light." 
 "Highberrow ... is it right in the hills?" 
 "Yes . . . quite high up. I don't know how 
 many hundreds of feet. I wasn't interested in 
 that sort of thing then. It lies right under Axdown, 
 the highest point of the range. On a clear day you 
 can see right over the Bristol Channel into Wales. 
 All the mountains there. The Brecon Beacons. 
 The Sugarloaf. The Black Mountain." 
 
 "The Black Mountain. But how strange. Why, 
 when you were a little boy you must have been 
 nearly able to see the place where mother lived. 
 With a big sea between. It must have been won- 
 derful . . ." 
 
 "Yes ... I suppose it was. I scarcely remem- 
 ber. Look right down in that deep pool. That's a 
 trout." 
 
 "A trout. . . . Where? Do show me . . ." 
 The vision of Mendip faded instantly, and Edwin 
 only saw the rufous sands of the pool beneath the 
 bridge, and in it a shadowy elongated figure with 
 its head to the slow stream and faintly quivering 
 fins. In Devonshire, Widdup had told him, the
 
 182 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 rivers swarmed with trout: you could catch them 
 all day long if you wanted to, and Edwin, loyal 
 to his own county's excellences, had only been able 
 to produce the silvery roach of the millpool, shoal- 
 ing round the water-lilies and the mythical legend 
 of carnivorous pike lurking in Mr. Willis's ponds 
 in the Holloway. He wished he had known that 
 there were veritable trout in the Stour. Now it 
 was too late to do anything; but when they re- 
 turned from their holiday, he determined that he 
 would catch this shadowy creature, even if he had 
 to induce it to gorge a worm. Still, it was quite 
 possible that by the time he returned he would 
 have captured many trout. For Somerset lay next 
 to Devon on the map. 
 
 "Are there many trout in Mendip?" he asked. 
 
 "No. . . . There is only one river of any size. 
 The Ax, that runs underground and comes out of 
 Axcombe gorge, and there are practically no trout 
 in the Ax. It's a dry country. Limestone. Very 
 barren too." 
 
 That didn't really matter. In a day or two Ed- 
 win would be able to see for himself. On their way 
 home they spoke very little. His father seemed to 
 find it difficult to talk to him ; and in a little while 
 Edwin became conscious of his own unending 
 string of questions that led nowhere. 
 
 But all that night he dreamed of Mendip. A 
 vast, barren, mountain^country, his dreams pic- 
 tured it ; waterless, and honeycombed with the dark 
 caves from which Macaulay's miners had poured 
 to war; a deserted countryside full of broken vil- 
 lages and bounded by steep cliffs against which the
 
 THRENODY 183 
 
 isolating waters of the Severn Sea broke in a sound- 
 less tumult. And there Ax, the sacred river, ran 
 through caverns measureless to man. A fluent 
 gentleman with a noble brow and burning grey 
 eyes pointed out the course of the river to him. He 
 was the only other soul beside Edwin and his 
 father, in all that desert country, and Edwin intro- 
 duced him to Mr. Ingleby as Mr. Coleridge rather 
 diffidently, for he was not sure how the poet would 
 take it until he remembered and explained that 
 Keats was a chemist. There, on the high crown of 
 Axdown, his mother joined them. She, it seemed, 
 was not afraid of Mr. Coleridge. She took his arm 
 so familiarly that Edwin trembled for her; but the 
 poet only smiled, while she pointed out to him a 
 mass of huge fantastic mountains ranged beyoncl 
 the gleaming sea. "You've got to look over there," 
 she said. "You see that level ridge dropping sud 
 denly? Well, it's the third farm from the end. 
 Can you see the little bedroom window on the ex- 
 treme left? . . . quite a little window?" Coleridge 
 nodded, and Mr. Ingleby, too, shielded his eyes 
 with his hands and looked. "It was my last chance 
 of showing it to you," she said. 
 
 "But there are practically no trout in the Alph," 
 said Coleridge.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE THRESHOLD 
 
 /in HE next evening, when Edwin and his father 
 JL reached Bristol, a steady drizzle had set in 
 from the west. They pushed their bicycles out of 
 the station yard at Temple Meads and rode be- 
 tween slippery tramway lines towards a small 
 hotel, a stone's-throw from Bristol Bridge, where 
 Mr. Ingleby had decided to put up for the night. 
 "It's no use trying to ride on to Wringford this eve- 
 ning," he said, "for the wind will be against us and 
 it's collar work most of the way. I think we can 
 be comfortable here to-night. I used to know the 
 landlord of this place. He was a Mendip man." 
 
 The Mendip landlord, of course, had been dead 
 for many years, having made his descent by the 
 route that is particularly easy for licensed victual- 
 lers; but it happened that his daughter had mar- 
 ried the new tenant, and this woman, a comfortable 
 creature who spoke with the slight burr that ap- 
 peared in Mr. Ingleby's speech in times of anger 
 or any other violent emotion, welcomed them for 
 her father's sake, and gave them a bare but cleanly 
 room on the second story. 
 
 The windows of this room looked down obliquely 
 184
 
 THE THRESHOLD 185 
 
 on to the tidal basin of the Avon, thronged with 
 small coasting tramps and sailing ships: and Ed- 
 win was content to stay there watching them; for 
 he had never seen the traffic of a harbour before. 
 It was still too wet to think of going out on to the 
 quays; but even from a distance the misty spec- 
 tacle, enveloped in veils of driving rain, was ro- 
 mantic. 
 
 Edwin watched while a pair of busy tugboats 
 pushed and pulled and worried the hull of a wooden 
 schooner in to mid-stream. The water was high, 
 and she was due to catch the falling tide to Avon- 
 mouth. Whither was she bound? He did not know. 
 Perhaps her way lay down channel to pick up 
 a cargo of bricks from Bridgewater. Perhaps she 
 was setting out at that moment to essay the icy 
 passage of the Horn. Perhaps, in another four 
 months, she would have doubled the Cape and lie 
 wallowing in the torpid seas about Zanzibar. It 
 inspired Edwin to think that he was standing at 
 one of the gateways of the world. From the site 
 of the stone bridge above their lodging, just four 
 hundred years ago, the Venetian pilot, Cabot, had 
 cast loose in the selfsame way, and sailed westward 
 with his three sons, Lewes, Sebastyan, and Sancto, 
 to the mainland of unknown America. To-day, 
 from the same wet quays, other adventurous prows 
 were stretching forth to the ends of the earth. To 
 China ... To Africa. Here begins the sea that 
 ends not till the world's end. 
 
 With his accustomed curiosity as to the origins 
 of his own emotions Edwin was not long in deciding 
 that his growing eagerness to see the beauty and
 
 i86 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 strangeness of the world must have sprung from 
 the fact that his ancestors had lived upon the 
 shores of this great waterway. From Highberrow, 
 his father had told him, you could see the whole 
 expanse of the Bristol Channel. From Highber- 
 row, perhaps, some forbear of his own had watched 
 the caravels of Cabot setting down channel with 
 the ebb tide. He was bewildered with the splen- 
 dour of his heritage. It was impossible to imagine 
 that Sir Joseph Kingston's family had the least 
 share in such a romantic past. 
 
 In the evening, after supper, the rain ceased, 
 and Mr. Ingleby proposed that they should go for 
 a walk through the city. He had known it well 
 in his youth, and it seemed to fill him with an 
 almost childish delight to show Edwin the things 
 that he remembered. They passed through many 
 narrow winding streets where the overhanging 
 houses of the merchant venturers stood, and an- 
 cient churches had been huddled into corners by 
 the growing city. "I remember every inch of it," 
 said Mr. Ingleby, with a happy laugh. Again they 
 crossed the river, and skirting a line of shipping 
 warehouses, now cavernous and deserted, they 
 plunged into a sordid quarter full of sailors' drink- 
 ing dens that smelled of rum, and marine stores 
 that smelled of tar. 
 
 "Where are we going?" Edwin asked. 
 
 '^You'll see in a minute," said Mr. Ingleby. And, 
 in a minute, Edwin saw. 
 
 They had emerged from the huddled houses into 
 a large open space, and in the midst of it rose a 
 miracle of beauty such as Edwin had never seen
 
 THE THRESHOLD 187 
 
 before: a structure too delicate in its airy loveli- 
 ness to have been built of stone; so fragile in its 
 strength that it seemed impossible that the slender 
 flying buttresses should support it. The shadowy 
 spire could be seen dimly piercing a sky that had 
 been washed to clearness by the rain; but inside 
 the church, for some reason unknown, the lamps 
 had been lighted, and the whole building glowed 
 as though it had been one immense lantern. There 
 could not be another miracle of this kind in the 
 world, Edwin thought. 
 
 He remembered a white model of the Taj Mahal 
 at Agra, that stood beneath a dome of glass in Mrs. 
 Barrow's drawing-room, an intricate carving of 
 ivory with a huge dome and many fretted 
 minarets. Edwin remembered that the Taj Mahal 
 was supposed to be one of the wonders of the world ; 
 but he could not believe that it was as beautiful 
 as this : it was too fanciful, too complicated in its 
 detail, while this church, for all its delicacy, was 
 so amazingly simple in its design. 
 
 "St. Mary Redcliffe," said Mr. Ingleby. "I al- 
 ways thought it was a fine church, but I don't think 
 I ever saw it lit up like this before." He paused, 
 and they gazed at the church for a little while in 
 silence. "It's a funny thing," he said at last, "that 
 a great master can sign a picture and the name of a 
 poet be remembered by his writings, while the 
 greatest artists of the Middle Ages, people who 
 planned and built wonderful things like this . . . 
 and I suppose it is more beautiful to-day than 
 when it was first finished . . . should be quite for- 
 gotten. A funny thing. ... I should think the
 
 188 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 man who made this church must have devoted his 
 life to it." 
 
 Edwin glowed. It came as a delightful surprise 
 to him that his father should think of a thing like 
 this. He was ashamed to confess that he hadn't 
 believed him capable of it. It was the sort of 
 thing that he would only have expected of hie 
 mother. "What a rotten little snob I am," he 
 thought. And though he happened to know, quite 
 by accident, from the Rowley Poems of Chatterton, 
 that the builder of Kedcliffe was William Cannynge, 
 round whose shadowy reputation the work of the 
 wondrous boy had grown, he could not for the life 
 of him reveal this piece of learning, since it would 
 have spoiled the originality of his father's reflec- 
 tion. He only said, "Yes," but the train of thought 
 was so strong in him that he couldn't resist asking 
 Mr. Ingleby if he knew which was the muniment 
 room. 
 
 "The muniment room. Why?" 
 
 "Because it was in the muniment room that 
 Chatterton pretended that he found the Eowley 
 manuscripts." 
 
 "Chatterton? Ah, yes. . . . Thomas Chatterton, 
 the poet." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I'm afraid I don't know. I never read any of 
 his poems, but I believe he starved in London and 
 committed suicide with Arsenious Oxide." 
 
 This gleam of professional interest tickled Ed- 
 win. Keats: Keatings. Chatterton: Arsenious 
 Oxide. 
 
 "They found Arsenic on his lips. He made no
 
 THE THRESHOLD 189 
 
 mistake about it. The lethal dose is a very small 
 one. A grain or so would have done it. Why, it's 
 beginning to rain again. We'd better go. I hope 
 it will clear up by to-morrow." 
 
 They walked back to their lodging in a fine 
 drizzle. On the way Edwin's father took his arm. 
 The action gave Edwin a curious sensation. It sug- 
 gested to him that his father was lonely; that the 
 natural instinct of love in the man was making 
 him eager for some sort of sympathy. It was 
 pitiable; for, in reality, they were strangers . . . 
 there was no getting away from the fact that they 
 were strangers. 
 
 "I must make it easy for him," Edwin thought. 
 "However impossible it may seem, I must make 
 it easy. I must know him. I must love him. 
 Whatever it costs I must love him. It is ridiculous 
 that I should have to choose my words and even 
 at times be a little dishonest when it ought to be 
 the most natural and easy thing in the world to 
 be myself with him. Of course it's difficult at 
 present; but later on, when we know each other 
 better, it will be all right." 
 
 When they returned to their lodging their clothes 
 were wet, and they went together into the kitchen 
 of the defunct publican's daughter. She gave them 
 two of her husband's coats to wear while their own 
 were drying, and for a long time they sat over the 
 fire talking to her. It was evident that though Mr. 
 Ingleby was himself unknown to her, she knew 
 all about his family ; for she asked him many ques- 
 tions about various people in Highberrow and 
 Wringford, whom they knew in common. Mr. Ingle-
 
 190 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 by could tell her very little, but the landlady was 
 able to supply him with a lot of gossip from the 
 Mendip villages. 
 
 "We heard that you were married," she said. 
 
 "Yes," replied Mr. Ingleby. "But I've just had 
 a great blow. I've lost my wife." 
 
 "Dear, dear . . . that's very sad for 'ee." 
 
 "Yes. ... I shall never get over it." 
 
 "And this is your eldest? My word, how time 
 flies!" 
 
 "Yes. . . . He's the only one." 
 
 "To look at him at first you wouldn't say there 
 was much of an Ingleby in him." 
 
 "No. He takes after his mother's family." 
 
 "And yet, on second thoughts, he's got a look of 
 your brother William's boy, Joe, about his eyes. 
 Now that's a strange thing. Talking of your 
 brother William, I haven't seen or heard of him 
 for years." 
 
 "I haven't seen him for twenty years myself. 
 We're cycling to Wringford to-morrow. We shall 
 put up with him," 
 
 "Well, remember me to him. He was always a 
 great favourite of dad's." 
 
 "Will's a good fellow." 
 
 "I suppose he's in the same place? Mr. Grise- 
 wood would be a fool to get rid of a man like that. 
 Good gardeners are scarce. ..." 
 
 Edwin could not understand this at all. It was 
 obvious that the woman must be making some mis- 
 take; for it was clearly impossible that his Uncle 
 William could be a gardener. Still, his father of- 
 fered no protest.
 
 THE THRESHOLD 191 
 
 "They tell me," she went on in her soft West- 
 country voice, "that he've apprenticed that boy Joe 
 to Hares, the shoeing-smith." 
 
 "I didn't know that," said Mr. Ingleby. 
 
 "Well, of course, it may be all right," the land- 
 lady went on, "but there's always the future to 
 think on. My husband always says that the day 
 of the horse is over. What with steam and elec- 
 tricity, and these new things that I see in the paper 
 they are running from London to Brighton! 
 There's a gentleman near Bridgewater who has one 
 of these new motor-cars on the road. Of course, 
 I suppose they are fairly reliable on the flat." 
 
 Edwin was thankful that the excitements of 
 motor traction had diverted her from the uncom- 
 fortable subject of his cousin's profession ... if 
 that were the right word to apply to the calling 
 of a Shoeing-smith ; but the matter still troubled 
 and bewildered him when they went upstairs to 
 bed. It was one that would not wait for explana- 
 tion, and so he tackled his father as soon as they 
 were alone. 
 
 "Father, what was that woman talking about? 
 What did she mean when she said that Uncle Will 
 was a gardener?" 
 
 "What did she mean?" Mr. Ingleby laughed. 
 "Why she meant what she said. He is a gardener. 
 He's never been anything else." 
 
 "But, father . . . it's impossible." 
 
 "It isn't impossible, boy. It's the truth. Didn't 
 you know? Didn't mother ever tell you?" 
 
 "No. ... I don't think she ever spoke of him. 
 I . .1 can't understand it."
 
 192 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "You sound as if it had come as a shock to you, 
 Eddie." 
 
 "No . . . yes ... I suppose it did." 
 
 "You didn't imagine that you'd find your an- 
 cestry in Debrett, Eddie?" 
 
 "No ... but that's different. It's . . . it's sort 
 of bowled me over." 
 
 Mr. Ingleby laughed. It seemed that he was 
 really amused at Edwin's consternation. 
 
 "I suppose it's natural for a schoolboy to be a 
 bit snobbish," he said. 
 
 "No ... it isn't that. Honestly it isn't, father. 
 Only I'd kind of taken us for granted. I wish you'd 
 tell me all about it. You see, I know absolutely 
 nothing." 
 
 "It's a long story, Eddie. But of course I'll tell 
 you. Then you won't have any more of these dis- 
 tressing surprises. Suppose you get into bed first." 
 
 It was a strange sight to Edwin to see his father 
 kneel down in his Jaeger nightgown and pray. 
 The boy had never done that since his second term 
 at St. Luke's. 
 
 n 
 
 Lying in bed with his father's arm about him, 
 Edwin listened to a long and strange narration 
 that overwhelmed him with alternations of humilia- 
 tion that made him ashamed, and of romance that 
 thrilled him. Mr. Ingleby began at the beginning. 
 Their family had lived, it appeared, for years with- 
 out number, in the village of Highberrow on Men- 
 dip in a combe beneath the great camp of Silbury, 
 and the calling of all these Inglebys had been that
 
 THE THRESHOLD 193 
 
 of the other inhabitants of Highberrow : they were 
 miners, working for lead in the seams that the 
 Romans, and perhaps the Phoenicians before them, 
 had discovered in the mountain limestone. Even 
 so early as in the youth of Edwin's father the in- 
 dustry had been decaying, for the traditional meth- 
 ods of the Mendip miner were unscientific : he had 
 been content to dig for himself a shallow working 
 from which he collected enough of the mineral that 
 is called calamine to keep him in pocket and in 
 drink. 
 
 "We Mendip folk," said Mr. Ingleby, "are a 
 strange people, very different in our physique from 
 the broad Saxons of the turf-moors beneath us. I 
 suppose there is a good deal of Cornish blood in 
 us. Wherever there are mines there are Cornish- 
 men; but I think there's another, older strain: 
 Iberian . . . Roman . . . Phoenician. I don't know 
 what it is ; but I do know that we're somehow dif- 
 ferent from all the rest of the Somerset people: a 
 violent, savage sort of folk. Did you ever hear of 
 Hannah More?" 
 
 "No." Edwin had been born too late in the 
 century. 
 
 "Well, she was before my time too ; but she made 
 the Mendip miners notorious by trying to convert 
 them. I don't suppose she succeeded. At any rate 
 neither she nor her influences would ever have con- 
 verted your grandfather. He was a wonderful man. 
 Even though my memory is mostly of the way in 
 Which I was afraid of him, I can see what a won- 
 derful man he was. And your Uncle Will would 
 tell you the same."
 
 I 9 4 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "He was a miner . . . ?" 
 
 "Yes. ... A miner amongst other things. 
 was a dowser too." 
 
 "A dowser? What is that?" 
 
 "Don't you know? The divining-rod. A thing 
 that all the scientists have been unable to explain. 
 In a dry country like Mendip the dowser is a most 
 important person; for neither man nor beast can 
 live without water, and he is the only person who 
 can tell where a well should be sunk. Your grand- 
 father was a strange looking man with very clear 
 grey eyes under a black head of hair and heavy 
 bristling brows. Even when he grew very old his 
 hair and his beard were black. 
 
 "I was the youngest of the family. All the others, 
 except your Uncle Will, have died and for some 
 reason or other I was not brought up in my father's 
 cottage but in that of my grandmother, a tiny, 
 tumbledown affair lying in the valley under Sil- 
 bury. We were very humble people, Eddie. I don't 
 suppose anywhere in the world I could have passed 
 a quieter childhood. It's a long way off now. One 
 only remembers curious, unimportant things. 
 
 "When I was four years old I was sent to the 
 village school. I don't think it exists any longer. 
 You see the population of Highberrow disappeared 
 naturally with the abandonment of the mining. 
 Even in my childhood, as I told you, the workings 
 were running pretty thin. The miners were begin- 
 ning to find that they couldn't pick up much of a 
 living on their own calamine claims; and so they 
 drifted back gradually your grandfather along 
 with them to the oldest workings of all : the mines
 
 THE THRESHOLD 195 
 
 that the Romans had made two thousand years ago. 
 You may be certain that the Romans, with their 
 thoroughness, hadn't left much behind. Why, in 
 their days, Mendip must have been a great place, 
 with a harbour of its own on the mouth of the Ax, 
 and great roads radiating everywhere: to Ciren- 
 cester, Exeter, and Bath. Even in the Middle Ages 
 there was a population of fifty thousand souls on 
 Mendip. Now I don't suppose there are a thou- 
 sand in all the mining villages put together. 
 
 "So my father went to work in the Roman mines 
 at Cold Harbour; for a new company had been 
 started that was reclaiming the sublimated lead 
 that had been left in the Romans' flues. And there, 
 as a little boy, I used to carry him his dinner, 
 through the heather, over the side of Axdown. 
 You'll see Axdown for yourself to-morrow : a great 
 bow of a hill. There used to be a pair of ravens 
 that built there. I've seen them rising in great 
 wide circles. They seemed very big to me. I was 
 almost frightened of them; and when I found the 
 skeleton of a sheep one day on the top of Axdown 
 under the barrows, I made sure that the ravens 
 had killed it. 
 
 "I suppose I was a pretty intelligent boy. I 
 know that the men at the workings by Cold Har- 
 bour, where I took father's dinner, used to joke 
 with me a good deal. They used to like the way 
 in which I hit back at them with my tongue. 
 Father didn't take any notice of it. He was always 
 the same dark, silent man, with very few words, 
 and no feelings, as you'd imagine, except the violent 
 passions into which he would burst out when he'd
 
 196 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 been drinking. He didn't often drink, though. He 
 was a good man, Eddie. A good man. . . . And so 
 I myself came to work in the mines." 
 
 "I can't believe it, you know, father. It's so un- 
 like you . . . and mother." 
 
 "Of course it was long before I knew your 
 mother. And it does seem funny, looking back on 
 it. I'm very glad now, mind you, that I had the 
 experience. It's a fine thing for any man at some 
 time of his life to have had to face the necessity of 
 earning his living by the use of his hands. You'll 
 never know what that means, I suppose. It's a 
 pity. . . . 
 
 "Well, while I was working at Cold Harbour, 
 my mother died. I forgot to tell you that Grannie 
 had died some years before, and her cottage under 
 Silbury had been left empty there was no one liv- 
 ing in Highberrow to fill it and was already 
 tumbling into ruins. I haven't told you about your 
 grandmother, my mother. I don't know that I can 
 tell you much. I think she was in some ways a 
 little hard. I don't know. ... I thought the world 
 of her, and perhaps it was my father's difficult na- 
 ture that made her seem harder than she was. Be- 
 sides, being brought up with Grannie, I was a sort 
 of stranger to her. I don't know how father came 
 across her. There's no doubt about it, she was a 
 superior woman. If you're still feeling a little sore 
 about your social origin, Eddie, you can console 
 yourself with the fact that she had a cousin who 
 was a solicitor or was it a solicitor's clerk? 
 somewhere near London. At any rate, poor soul, 
 she died. She was ill for several months, and I,
 
 THE THRESHOLD 197 
 
 being the youngest, had to stay at home and nurse 
 her. It was in that way that I met Dr. Mar- 
 shall. . . . 
 
 "I'll tell you about him in a moment ; but think- 
 ing of the days of my mother's death puts me in 
 mind of a strange thing that happened at the time 
 that will show you what sort of man your grand- 
 father was. Early on in the family there had been 
 a girl that died to whom my mother was particu- 
 larly devoted ; and a little before the end she knew 
 that it couldn't be many weeks mother told my 
 father that she would like to be buried in a particu- 
 lar corner of the churchyard near to this daughter 
 of theirs. 
 
 "Father never spoke of it. He rarely spoke of 
 anything. But I suppose he took it in all the same. 
 Anyway, when she was dead, the old sexton came 
 up to see father about the grave, and he told him 
 where she had said she wanted to lie. The next 
 night the sexton came up again. I can see him 
 now a funny, old-fashioned little man with red 
 whiskers and said it couldn't be done, because the 
 soil was so shallow at that particular point. I can 
 see my father now. He hadn't been drinking; but 
 he flew suddenly into such a black rage that the 
 poor little gravedigger (Satell was his name) ran 
 out frightened for his life. I think I was pretty 
 frightened too, for father went out after him carry- 
 ing one of the great iron bars that the miners use 
 for drilling. I thought for a moment that the loss 
 of mother had turned his head. It hadn't. He just 
 went there and then, in the night, to the church- 
 yard, and worked away with his mining tools at
 
 198 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 the rock that poor old Satell said he couldn't dig. 
 He bored his holes and he blasted the rock with 
 the black powder they used in those days, and he 
 dug my mother's grave in the place where she 
 wanted it. You see what a strange man he was! 
 You may say what you like, Eddie I've often 
 thought of it since but that was a grandfather 
 worth having." 
 
 "Yes ... he was worth having," Edwin agreed. 
 
 "But I was speaking of Dr. Marshall," his father 
 continued. "He was the beginning of my new life. 
 But for the accident of my mother's illness I don't 
 suppose I should ever have met him. During the 
 last month he came fairly often : not that he could 
 do much good for her, poor thing, but because she 
 was it's a wretched phrase a superior woman, 
 and because no doubt she liked to talk to him, and 
 he knew it. Practice in Highberrow can't have 
 been very profitable; though I'm sure that my 
 father paid him every penny that he owed him. He 
 was that kind of man. 
 
 "And when she died, Dr. Marshall took a fancy 
 to me. I could tell you a good deal about him if 
 it were worth while. He was a physician of the old 
 school, learned in experience rather than in books. 
 It is probable that he made mistakes; but I'm 
 equally certain that he learned by them. The week 
 after mother died he asked your grandfather if he 
 could have me to wash bottles and make myself 
 generally useful in his surgery at Axcombe. And 
 my father didn't refuse. It would have been unlike 
 him if he had done so ; for I think his idea in life 
 was to let every individual work out his own sal-
 
 THE THRESHOLD 199 
 
 vation for himself. It was a good plan, for it made 
 the responsibility definite. . . . 
 
 "So I went to Axcombe to Dr. Marshall's house. 
 There was plenty of hard work in it. 1 think a 
 country doctor earns a poor living more honestly 
 than most men. I had to share the doctor's work 
 getting up early in the morning (that was no hard- 
 ship to a miner's son) to clean up the surgery 
 (and I can tell you it took some cleaning), to turn 
 out of bed in the middle of the night to harness 
 the pony if the message that called him took him 
 over roads, or to saddle the cob if the hill tracks 
 were too rough for wheels. 
 
 "Sometimes I had long night journeys on my 
 own; for the doctor, in spite of his practical head 
 for dealing with disease, was curiously unmethod- 
 ical and would often leave behind the particular 
 instrument that he wanted most, and in the middle 
 of the night a boy of my own age from one of the 
 hill villages would come battering at the door as 
 though his life depended on it. And they'd go on 
 battering, you know, as if they thought that the 
 sound of it would make me get up more quickly. 
 Perhaps it did : at any rate I can remember scramb- 
 ling downstairs in the dark and reading the notes 
 that the doctor sent by candlelight: and then I 
 would turn out, half asleep, and walk over the hills 
 above Axcombe when the gorge was swimming to 
 the brim with fine milky mist and a single step, if 
 one were silly enough to go dreaming, would have 
 sent one spinning down a sheer four hundred feet 
 like the hunting king in the legend. I'm forget-
 
 200 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 ting that you don't know the legend and have never 
 seen the gorge. . . . 
 
 "Stall, I shall never forget those strange night- 
 journeys. I don't think I had begun to appreciate 
 Mendip until I walked the hills at night. I found 
 that I could think so clearly, and I was just 
 beginning, you see, to have so much to think about. 
 Books. . . . 
 
 "At Highberrow, in my father's cottage, there 
 were only two books altogether: the Bible, and a 
 tract by Miss Hannah More called 'The Eeligion 
 of the Fashionable World.' But Dr. Marshall's 
 house at Axcombe was crammed with books: rub- 
 bish, most of them, I expect; but printed books; 
 and whenever I was not working I was reading. 
 It was the pure excitement of attaining knowledge 
 of any kind that made me read; and of course I 
 wasted a great deal of valuable time in ways that 
 were unprofitable. The doctor did not help me 
 much; he was far too busy to worry much about 
 my education ; but I know that he approved of my 
 eagerness, and liked to see me reading. I used to 
 sleep in the loft above the stable in those days, and 
 I know that my candles made him rather nervous 
 of fire. But he did help me, in his own way. He 
 put me on to a little Latin, with the strictly practi- 
 cal idea of making it more easy for me to dispense 
 the prescriptions that he wrote in the old manner 
 without abbreviations; and he also introduced me 
 to another book that I don't suppose you've ever 
 heard of: called Religio Medici by Sir Thomas 
 Browne." 
 
 "I know it," said Edwin.
 
 THE THRESHOLD 201 
 
 "Do you? I supposed it was merely a medical 
 curiosity. Latin, he thought, would be useful to 
 me in other ways. You see, like many of the old 
 medical practitioners that spent their lives in the 
 lanes, he was very interested in botany: not 
 scientific botany just the identification and 
 botanical names of the flowers that blossomed year 
 by year in the hedges. In the early summer he 
 would drive home with the bottom of the dogcart 
 tangled with flowers that he had picked while he 
 walked the pony up some hill ; and he would pitch 
 them over to me and tell me to learn the names of 
 them. It wasn't very difficult; for in the surgery- 
 shelves there was a fine set of Ann Pratt with ex- 
 cellent illustrations. And sometimes he would 
 come home with a small insect of some kind in a 
 pillbox and arrange it under the microscope on the 
 table under the dispensary window; and he'd say, 
 'Wonderful . . . wonderful!' not because he'd 
 made any biological observations, but just because 
 it revealed a lot of unsuspected detail. 
 
 "It was a favourite trick of his to show his pa- 
 tients a sample of their own blood corpuscles under 
 the microscope too. 'There they are,' he'd say, 'like 
 a pile of golden guineas, and if you had a millionth 
 part as many guineas as you have of these in your 
 body, you'd be the richest man in England.' This 
 sort of thing used to impress his patient's tremen- 
 dously. And he knew it. I suppose it gave them 
 confidence in him; though he didn't need any 
 superstitious aids of this kind. The whole history 
 of his life as a doctor should have been enough to 
 make them trust him. Still, I suppose it was the
 
 202 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 old tradition of the medicine man who dealt in 
 curious magic. His common sense and the crafts- 
 manship that he had won by experience were his 
 real guarantees. 
 
 "He was extraordinarily practical in everything 
 except money matters. In these, even I could have 
 taught him a good deal. It was a pathetic sight to 
 see him making out his bills. He always put off 
 the evil day, with the result that they were only 
 sent out about once in three years. I don't sup- 
 pose doctors can afford to be like that in these 
 days. . . . But then, what was the use of money 
 to him? All his tastes were simple and inexpensive. 
 He was unmarried. During all the years that I 
 was with him he never took a holiday, unless it 
 were to go to Taunton and buy a new horse. I 
 do not think there are many of his kind left. 
 
 "You can see, though, what a huge difference he 
 made to my life. If I hadn't gone to live with him 
 at Axcombe, I might still have been a miner if 
 there are any miners left on Mendip or perhaps a 
 gardener like your Uncle Will. And where would 
 you have been, Eddie? He was careful, and I 
 think very wisely careful, not to turn my head. 
 'Ambition,' he would say to me, 'is all very well 
 in moderation. But don't be too ambitious, John. 
 Happiness is more important in this life than suc- 
 cess, and very few men have a full share of both. 
 Still, you're a sharp lad, and there's no reason why 
 you shouldn't get on in the world and be happy too 
 if you don't expect too much/ As time went on we 
 began to talk a little about my future. 'Don't be 
 in too much of a hurry,' he used to say. 'You're
 
 THE THRESHOLD 203 
 
 young, and there's plenty of time ahead of you.' 
 "Of course it would be ridiculous to suppose that 
 I hadn't ambitions. Naturally enough, I had de- 
 termined to be a doctor like my master. The small 
 things that I did for him convinced me that it would 
 be an easy matter. When he was out in the coun- 
 try people who had walked in from remote villages 
 would ask me to prescribe for them, and sometimes, 
 with an immense sense of importance, I would do 
 so. It wasn't difficult. He ran his practice, to all 
 intents and purposes, on three stock mixtures and 
 half a dozen pills. But I shall never forget one 
 evening when one of my father's fellow workmen 
 from Highberrow came in with a raging toothache, 
 and I, being anxious to show off, volunteered to 
 take the tooth out for him. I remember I showed 
 him a microscopic sample of his own blood as a 
 preliminary. But when I came to take out the 
 tooth I made a mess of it. He was a tremendous 
 big fellow with jaws like steel, and though I pulled 
 hard enough to move him in the chair, I only suc- 
 ceeded in breaking the tooth and making the pain 
 worse. I got my head well smacked for my trouble, 
 and decided that whatever else I were to be, I 
 wouldn't risk dentistry as a career. 
 
 " 'There's no reason,' the doctor would say, 'why 
 you shouldn't make a good chemist in time.' Of 
 course that seemed a very small thing to me; and 
 yet . . . think what I might have been ! I was six- 
 teen, just your own age, Eddie, when he died. Of 
 course he killed himself, as many doctors do, with 
 work. People make a great fuss when a mission- 
 ary in some outlandish country lays down his life,
 
 204 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 as they call it, for his flock. But country doctors 
 are doing that every month in the year all over 
 England I don't mean the social successes in Har- 
 ley Street and from what I've seen of it their 
 widows can't count on much gratitude. 
 
 "It was a hard winter . . . the year eighteen 
 sixty-seven . . . and there happened to be a great 
 deal of illness in the hills. We were worked pretty 
 hard, both of us, but the doctor had no chance of 
 taking a rest : he was the only medical man living 
 within ten miles: and in the end he, too, caught a 
 heavy cold, and had to go on working through it. 
 In the end he had to give up. It was pneumonia ; 
 and the last thing he did was to write a letter ask- 
 ing a consultant in Bristol to come down and see 
 him. He was a kindly man, but I suppose Dr. 
 Marshall was to him only a case. The old fellow 
 refused to have any one but me to nurse him. 'John 
 and I understand each other,' he said. 
 
 "It was a terrible battle: to see a great strong 
 man like that fighting for breath. They didn't give 
 oxygen in those days. It went on for four days 
 and on the fifth, or rather in the middle of the 
 night he called to me faintly, and I found him 
 lying on his back breathing more softly, very pale 
 and drenched with sweat, 'This is the crisis . . . 
 fifth day . . .' he said. He told me to cover him 
 with all the blankets I could find, to give him some 
 brandy, and to take his temperature. It was a 
 funny job for a boy. I had never seen a great man 
 suddenly go weak like that. His temperature had 
 fallen below normal. 'Ah . . .' he said. 'I thought 
 so. . . . Brandy. . . .'
 
 THE THRESHOLD 205 
 
 "But he couldn't take it himself. Tou've got 
 to be the doctor now, John/ he said. There wasn't 
 any more fight left in him. All that day he hardly 
 spoke at all, but at night he called me to his side 
 and told me to make a bonfire of all the books 
 and the bills we'd been making out the week before. 
 ( I shan't want any more money/ he said. 'But you 
 will ... a little. . . . I've seen to that. You're a 
 good lad. Don't aim too high. And don't think 
 too much about money. Money is the root of all 
 evil. . . .' 
 
 "I scarcely took any notice of what he said. I 
 only knew that I was going to lose the only friend 
 I had. He died early next morning, and I was just 
 like a dog: I couldn't bring myself to leave him. 
 
 "I stayed in the house . . . you see, it seemed 
 as if I couldn't go anywhere else, until after the 
 funeral. Then the lawyers told me that he had left 
 me a hundred and fifty pounds in his will. It seemed 
 to me a tremendous lot of money. I didn't realise 
 what a little way it would go; but it seemed to 
 make my dreams possible. I would be a doctor, 
 like him ... as near like him as it was possible 
 to be. That was my first idea; but then I remem- 
 bered what he had told me, and decided that it 
 would be better to become a chemist first. In that 
 way I could make sure of my living. 
 
 "I left Axcombe. It was necessary that I should 
 go to some big city to study and more or less by 
 accident I chose North Bromwich. It was a tre- 
 mendous change for me who had lived all my life 
 in the country : I was very lonely and awkward at 
 first. But that wasn't the worse of it. I began to
 
 206 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 discover my own ignorance : to see that, as a matter 
 of fact, I knew nothing but the homely routine of 
 the doctor's surgery, the names of a few drugs and 
 their doses, a smattering of Latin, and the botany 
 of the local wild flowers. I knew nothing of life. 
 I couldn't even pull out a tooth without breaking it. 
 
 "It came as an awful shock to me. I began to 
 see the reasons of the doctor's cautious advice. He 
 realised that I Tiad a great deal of the dreamer in 
 me. I rather think that you have it too, Eddie. 
 No doubt it comes to both of us from those strange, 
 dark, mining-people. I saw that I should have to 
 pull myself together and drive myself hard if my 
 ambitions were not- to end in disaster. I had to 
 pinch and scrape. I had to set out and learn the 
 most elementary things from the beginning. I had 
 thought that my fortune was made. Perhaps it 
 was a wise thing that the doctor had left me no 
 more money. It taught me that nobody could make 
 my fortune but myself. 
 
 "It was a hard fight, I can tell you: for while 
 I was building my schemes for the future I had to 
 provide for the present. You see I had soon 
 realised that it wouldn't do to spend any of my 
 little capital. I won't tell you now how I lived. 
 It would be too long a story. But I can assure you 
 that I had a hard time in North Bromwich, getting 
 all my dreams knocked out of me one by one, thirst- 
 ing literally thirsting for clean air and country 
 ways. 
 
 "It sounds rather like a tract, but it's quite true 
 to say that town life has a lot of temptations too 
 for a country boy. I could see everywhere the
 
 THE THRESHOLD 207 
 
 
 
 power of money and the luxuries that money could 
 purchase without realising the work that money 
 represents, and all this was very disconcerting to a 
 boy of my temperament with more than a hundred 
 pounds in the bank. Still, as it happened, nothing 
 went wrong. In the day-time I worked with my 
 hands. At night I tried to educate myself, very 
 slowly, very hardly for in those days poor people 
 had not the opportunities of education that are 
 open to them in these. I sometimes wonder if peo- 
 ple to-day realise the difference. 
 
 "I worked on quietly for years, never wasting a 
 penny or an hour. Don't take it for virtue in me. 
 It wasn't that. It was just that the old doctor's 
 influence on me had been sound and I couldn't af- 
 ford to do otherwise. As a matter of fact I suppose 
 there must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, 
 of young men in that city in exactly the same situa- 
 tion. Only I didn't know one of them. I was lonely 
 . . . absolutely solitary. I never heard an accent 
 of my own country's speech. I never saw a patch 
 of real green or a sky that hadn't smoke in it. I 
 made my friends in books: not the kind of books 
 that you've been brought up on I hadn't time for 
 poetry or frills of that kind: books of solid facts: 
 knowledge for the sake of knowledge. You see all 
 the things that you would take for granted, hav- 
 ing known them as a birthright, so to speak, were 
 new and unknown to me." One book was a sort of 
 gospel to me. It was called Self Help, written by 
 a man named Smiles. 
 
 "So when you hear of a self-made man it may 
 not mean much; but a self-educated man, I can
 
 208 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 tell you, means a good deal. In the end, of course, 
 I gradually came within sight of my ambition. 
 From a van-driver to a firm of wholesale chemists 
 I became an assistant, an apprentice in their retail 
 house. I took my examinations. I qualified as a 
 dispensing chemist. Later, by a curious piece of 
 chance, I met your mother. We became friends. 
 She was the first person in whom I had confided 
 since I left Mendip. She seemed to understand. 
 It was a strange thing for me, after all those years, 
 to be able to talk about myself. I can't tell you 
 what a wonderful relief it was. And then we found 
 that we loved one another and married. We went 
 out into the country near North Bromwich to find 
 a village to make a home in, and we came across 
 Halesby. The place was very different from what 
 it is now twenty years ago. We were very happy. 
 No. ... I won't talk about it. But you can see 
 now, that behind your life there were quite a lot 
 of complicated things that don't appear on the sur- 
 face. It's really better that you should know 
 them." 
 
 "It makes me love you, father," said Edwin. "Be- 
 cause, of course, it is all so wonderful. I expect 
 if I had been you I should still have been in Ax- 
 combe. I don't think I could have done what you 
 did." 
 
 "You might have done a great deal more. There's 
 no knowing what's in us until we are tried. That 
 sounds like Samuel Smiles ; but it's quite true. At 
 any rate it's time we were asleep, boy. I think the 
 rain has stopped." 
 
 They said good-night, and Edwin kissed his
 
 THE THRESHOLD 209 
 
 father; but for several hours later he heard the 
 clocks of Bristol chiming. In a little time he knew 
 by the quiet breathing of his father that he was 
 asleep, and hearing this sound and thinking of the 
 grey man who lay beside him, he was overwhelmed 
 with an emotion in which pity and passionate de- 
 votion were curiously mingled. He felt strangely 
 protective, as though it were the man who had 
 fought such a hard battle who was weak, and he, 
 who had never endured anything, were the stronger. 
 
 He conceived it a kind of sacred duty to see that 
 for all the rest of his life his father should never 
 suffer any pain or even discomfort from" which he 
 could protect him. It was a more vivid version of 
 the feeling that had bowled him over once before, 
 when they had knelt together after his mother's 
 death. It was a wholly illogical sentiment and 
 yet, when he came to think it over, he came to the 
 conclusion that something of the same kind must 
 have underlain his mother's tenderness towards his 
 father. He was eager to persuade himself that 
 there was no compassion in it: only love and ad- 
 miration. 
 
 "He is the most wonderful man in the world," he 
 thought, "and I never knew it." Remorse over- 
 came him when he remembered that once, at St. 
 Luke's, he had been ashamed of Mr. Ingleby's call- 
 ing. There couldn't be another chap in the school 
 who had a father that was a patch on him. He 
 remembered a more recent cause for shame: the 
 shiver of discomfort that the landlady's revelation 
 of his Uncle Will's occupation had given him. He 
 had thought that a gardener uncle would be an un-
 
 210 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 comfortable skeleton in the cupboard of a Fellow 
 of Balliol. Instead of that he now knew that he 
 should have been proud of it : he should have been 
 proud of anything in the world that did honour 
 to his father. Everything that he was, every shred 
 of culture that he possessed had its origin in the 
 devotion and the sufferings of this wonderful man, 
 and, whatever happened, he determined that he 
 would be worthy of them. 
 
 The cathedral clock slowly chimed two. Edwin 
 turned over and fell asleep in a mood of strange, 
 exalted happiness.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE HILLS 
 
 UNDER a sky of rain-washed blue they had left 
 Bristol, and after an hour of hard riding came 
 to an easy upland plateau where the road lay white 
 and clear before them, so clean between its wide 
 margins of rough turf, that it seemed to have some 
 affinity with the sky. On their way they had met 
 few people, but the carters with whom they had 
 exchanged a morning greeting were all smiling and 
 friendly, very different from the surly colliers that 
 slouched about the cinder-paths at Halesby. 
 
 "Good-maarnin'," they said, and the very dialect 
 was friendly. 
 
 "We're over the worst of the road," said Mr. 
 Ingleby. "In a minute or two we shall see the 
 hills." 
 
 And, from a final crest, the road suddenly fell 
 steeply through the scattered buildings of a hamlet. 
 An inn, with a wide space for carts to turn in, stood 
 on a sort of platform at the right-hand side of the 
 highway, and in front of the travellers lay the mass 
 of Mendip: the black bow of Axdown with its 
 shaggy flanks, the level cliffs of Callow, and a bold 
 seaward spur, so lost in watery vapours that it 
 might well have claimed its ancient continuity 
 with the islands that swam beyond in the grey sea. 
 
 211
 
 212 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 In the light of his new enthusiasm Edwin found it 
 more impressive than any scene that he remem- 
 bered: more inspiring, though less vast in its per- 
 spective, than the dreamy plain of the Severn's 
 upper waters that he had seen so many times from 
 Uffdown. For these hills were very mountains, and 
 mightier in that they rose sheer from a plain that 
 had been bathed in water within the memory of 
 man. And, more than all this . . . far more . . . 
 they were the home of his fathers. 
 
 "Now that we are in Somerset we should drink 
 the wine of the country." 
 
 They pushed their bicycles on to the platform 
 before the inn door, and Mr. Ingleby called for 
 cider, a pale, dry liquid with a faint acridity very 
 different from the sugary stuff that comes to the 
 cities in bottles from Devonshire. 
 
 "Yes, it's good cider," said Mr. Ingleby, tasting. 
 "Where does it come from?" he asked the landlord, 
 who brought it. 
 
 "It do be a tidy drop o' zidur," said the man. 
 "It do come from Mr. Atwell's varm into Burrow- 
 down." 
 
 "In" with the accusative, thought Edwin. 
 
 "Is old Aaron Atwell still living?" asked his 
 father. 
 
 The landlord laughed. The gentleman must have 
 been away a long time from these parts. Mr. At- 
 well had been dead these fifteen years. 
 
 "The cider's the same," said Mr. Ingleby. 
 
 " 'Tis a marvellous archard, sure 'nuff," said the 
 landlord. "And last year was a wunnerful year 
 for apples. 'Tis all accardin' . . ."
 
 THE HILLS 213 
 
 They left him, and coasted gently down the hill. 
 Descending, it seemed to Edwin that the dome of 
 Axdown lost some of its mountainous quality ; and 
 by the time that they had reached the level of the 
 plain in which Wringford lay, he was hardly con- 
 scious of its imminence more than as a reminder 
 that this soft, green country was not wholly de- 
 voted to quietude and sleep, but that a cool and 
 lively air must always be rolling from the hidden 
 slopes. They came to a green, bordered by elms 
 in heavy leaf, on which a solitary donkey and a 
 flock of geese were grazing. Now the road was 
 dead level and the hedges rich with fragile dog- 
 rose petals and thickets of hemp-agrimony that 
 were not yet in flower. Superficially, the road 
 might have been part of Warwickshire; but there 
 was nothing of the Midlands in the air that moved 
 above it. 
 
 "Take the next turn to the right," shouted Mr. 
 Ingleby to Edwin, riding ahead. 
 
 In the middle of a village drenched with the 
 perfume of roses, Edwin turned to the right down 
 a narrow lane. By this time his father had reached 
 his level. "Here we are," he said. They dis- 
 mounted. 
 
 It was a small cottage with a green-painted porch 
 and carefully tended garden in front of it. The 
 place was built of the stone of the country and 
 washed with the pinkish lime of the hills. In the 
 garden roses and bright annuals were blooming, 
 and a huge acacia, hung with ivory blossom, 
 shadowed the garden gate. On the gate itself Ed- 
 win read a crudely painted name: Geranium Cot-
 
 214 JHE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 tage. Mr. Ingleby smiled. "Your Uncle Will is 
 very fond of geraniums." They opened the gate and 
 pushed in their bicycles. Everything in the gar- 
 den was so meticulously orderly that to wheel them 
 over the mown grass seemed sacrilegious. The 
 porch, at which they waited, was full of choice 
 geraniums. Their hot scent filled the air. Mr. 
 Ingleby knocked gently with a polished brass 
 knocker. Slow steps were heard within moving 
 over a flagged floor. The door was opened, dis- 
 closing a stone passage that smelt of coolness and 
 cleanliness. It was like the smell of a sweet dairy. 
 An elderly woman, with a plump and placid face 
 and grey hair, received them. All her figure except 
 her black sateen bodice was covered with a coarse 
 but snowy apron. 
 
 "Why, John," she said. -"It do be a treat to see 
 you." 
 
 She took Mr. Ingleby in her arms and kissed him. 
 "Poor fellow, too," she said. The embrace implied 
 more than any of the condolences that Edwin had 
 heard in Halesby. 
 
 "And this is Edwin," she said. "Well, what a 
 great big man, to be sure !" She proceeded to em- 
 brace Edwin, and he became conscious of the 
 extraordinary softness and coolness of her face. 
 
 "Come in and make yourselves comfortable," said 
 Aunt Sarah Jane. "We're used to bicycles in this 
 house. Our Joe has one. He goes to work on it 
 every day, and sometimes on a Sunday rides over 
 to Clevedern on it. Come in, John." Edwin fol- 
 lowed his father into the living-room. It was clean, 
 strikingly clean, and curiously homely. On the!
 
 THE HILLS 215 
 
 walls hung a picture of Queen Victoria, looking like 
 a pouter pigeon in her jubilee robes, and another 
 of the sardonic Disraeli. There were several padded 
 photograph albums with gilt clasps, and other 
 photographs decorated the mantelpiece and a side 
 table. These were all accommodated in fretwork 
 frames. 
 
 "Joe do keep us supplied with up-to-date photo- 
 graph frames," said Aunt Sarah Jane, following 
 Edwin's glances with a touch of motherly pride. 
 "He's like his father. Clever with his fingers." 
 
 Edwin found that the photographs were familiar. 
 His father was there: an ardent, younger father, 
 with black whiskers and a determined mouth. A 
 father confident in the virtue of self-help. His 
 mother, too, in a tight-fitting costume of the 
 eighties, with a row of buttons down the front from 
 the throat to the hem. And, wonder of wonders, 
 there was Edwin himself in a sailor suit. The dis- 
 covery of his own portrait did something to destroy 
 the illusion of unreality that occupied the place. 
 Obviously he really belonged to it. For years, 
 without his knowing it, his image had been part 
 of this unfamiliar room. Even though he had not 
 known of their existence he had evidently been a 
 familiar accepted person to these people. Even 
 their friends must have known him by sight. It 
 was strange. It was pathetic. "I can see a touch 
 of our Joe in him, John," said his aunt, who had 
 been examining him closely. "An' there do be a 
 look of your father as well." 
 
 "Do you think so?" said Mr. Ingleby.
 
 216 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Joe's a great boy, too," said Aunt Sarah Jane 
 lovingly. 
 
 It was clear enough who was the idol of this 
 household. 
 
 "There now, your dinner will be spoiling. Take 
 the boy upstairs, John." 
 
 She left them, and Edwin followed his father 
 up a crooked stair to a low room above the garden. 
 A cool wind was blowing down from Axdown, and 
 the filagree shadow of the lace window-curtains 
 danced on the white coverlet of the bed. The room 
 smelt faintly of lavender. It seemed to Edwin a 
 wonderful room, "full of sweet" he couldn't re- 
 member the line "peace and health and quiet 
 breathing." There was nothing quite so placid as 
 this in the life that he had known. 
 
 They washed their dusty faces and came down- 
 stairs again, and Edwin, seated by the sunny 
 window of the front room, relapsed into a state of 
 perfect drowsiness, content merely to exist and 
 drink in the sweet and simple atmosphere of 
 humble content. This, he supposed, was what his 
 father by his struggles and sacrifices had lost. Was 
 it worth while? The complications of this question 
 were far too great for Edwin to decide. 
 
 The men folk of Geranium Cottage did not re* 
 turn to dinner, and after that meal, in which suet 
 dumplings played an important part, Edwin re- 
 tired to a trellised structure at the back of the 
 garden, bowery with honeysuckle, that Aunt Sarah 
 Jane described as the harbour. Here, drugged with 
 more cider and fresh air, he dozed away the early 
 afternoon. He was asleep when his father came to
 
 THE HILLS 217 
 
 call him for tea. After all, it was not surprising 
 that he was sleepy, for they had talked into the 
 small hours the night before. Certainly Aunt 
 Sarah Jane's tea was worth waking up for. Quince 
 marmalade and clotted cream, and wheaten scones 
 that she had baked that morning. Edwin, ready 
 now for any further revelations, would not now 
 have been shocked to hear that in her young days 
 she had been a cook. In this beatific state of re- 
 freshment he was anxious to explore. 
 
 "When are we going to Highberrow, father?" 
 
 "And this was to be a restful holiday," Mr. 
 Ingleby laughed. "Why, now, if you like." 
 
 Edwin would have run to the linhay behind the 
 house for the bicycles, but his father called him 
 back. The hill was so steep, he told him, that it 
 would be easier for them to walk. 
 
 "Well, John, Will '11 be tarrable disappointed if 
 you aren't here when he comes home from work," 
 said Aunt Sarah Jane. "This young man of yours 
 do go too fast for me." 
 
 "Oh, we won't be long," said Mr. Ingleby. 
 
 And so they set off together for Highberrow, 
 making, first of all, a straight line for the base of 
 the hills and then following a green lane that 
 skirted the foot of them but was so overshadowed 
 with hazel that the slopes could not be seen. In 
 a mile or so they cut into the main road again, 
 by an iron milestone that said "Bridgwater 18: 
 Bristol 14." The road climbed along a quarried 
 terrace in the hill-side, and to the left of it lay a 
 deep valley, on the farther slope of which lay half 
 a dozen pink-washed cottages with gardens falling
 
 218 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 to the bed of an attenuated stream; and behind 
 the cottages a steep hill-side rose abruptly to a 
 bare height crowned with ancient earthworks. 
 
 "That," said Mr. Ingleby, "is Silbury camp. 
 There's an old rhyme about it. It is supposed to 
 be full of buried gold. When I was a boy I often 
 used to lie up there in the sun, gazing out over the 
 channel. In spring all the meadows between the 
 camp and Highberrow Batch are full of daffodils. 
 I often used to wish there were daffodils in 
 Halesby. . . ." 
 
 In a little while they came to the church of High- 
 berrow, placed like a watch-tower on the edge of 
 the Batch, surveying the immense relics of pagan- 
 ism on the opposite side of the valley. It was a 
 humble and not very beautiful building ; but Edwin 
 entered the churchyard with awe, for it seemed to 
 him that so much of the past that had made him 
 lay buried there. And the inscriptions on the 
 tombstones reinforced this idea; for the church- 
 yard was veritably crowded with the remains of 
 dead Inglebys. It made the past, a piece of knowl- 
 edge so recent to him that it still held an atmos- 
 phere of unreality and phantasy, so ponderable, 
 that in comparison with it his present condition 
 seemed almost unreal. His father led him through 
 the long grass, starry with yellow ragwort, to the 
 corner in which his grandmother was buried. 
 
 "This is the place that I told you about," he 
 said. 
 
 "The place where my grandfather went out at 
 night and blasted the rock?" 
 
 "Yes."
 
 THE HILLS 219 
 
 It was incredible. Until that moment the story 
 had been only a legend. Edwin wondered how ever 
 his father could have broken away from the tradi- 
 tion of centuries and left the hills. The roots of 
 their family had pierced so deeply into the soil, yes, 
 even beneath the soil and into the veins of the solid 
 rock. The conditions of his own life seemed to him 
 the tokens of an unnatural and artificial thing. 
 
 They left the churchyard by a narrow lane that 
 always climbed. They passed the village inn : a 
 long, windswept building, so bare and so exposed 
 to weather that even the tenure of the lichen on 
 the tiles seemed precarious. Over the lintel a 
 weathered board showed them the name of Ingleby 
 in faded letters. Edwin pointed to it. 
 
 "Yes," said his father. "I suppose he is some 
 remote cousin of yours. Everybody that is left in 
 this village must be related to us in some degree; 
 though I don't suppose any of them would remem- 
 ber me. You see, I went to Axcombe when I was 
 a good deal younger than you." He smiled. "I am 
 like a ghost returning to its old home. Like a 
 ghost. . . ." 
 
 And yet, to Edwin, the whole place seemed 
 familiar. He was not in the least surprised when, 
 opposite a windy farm-house, in front of which the 
 dry blades of a dishevelled dracaena shivered as 
 though protesting against its wintry exile, his 
 father turned off to the left along a road that had 
 once been gay with cottage gardens and trim build- 
 ings of stone, but was now suggestive of nothing but 
 ruin and desolation. By one of these pathetic ruins 
 his father paused.
 
 220- THE X YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "This was your grandfather's house, Eddie. It 
 was here that I was born." 
 
 Now there remained only the ground-plan of a 
 house, and the only sign of habitation in all the 
 ruin was to be seen in the smoke-blackened stones 
 of the chimney. The garden, indeed, lay beautiful 
 in decay, for there, as everywhere in this deserted 
 countryside, the golden ragwort had taken posses- 
 sion ; but within the walls of the house only nettles 
 shivered. 
 
 "You'll always find nettles in deserted human 
 habitations. I don't know why," said Mr. Ingleby. 
 "There is a rather unusual botanical curiosity to 
 be found among the workings at Cold Harbour," 
 he went on, "the Eoman Nettle. Urtica . . . 
 Urtica. . . . My memory isn't what it used to be. 
 It has a bigger leaf than the ordinary nettle and a 
 much more poisonous sting. It's only found in 
 places where the Eomans have been." 
 
 Why, in the face of this harrowing desolation, 
 should he be thinking of things like that? A 
 ghost ... with as little passion or feeling as a 
 ghost: emotions so different from the passionate 
 resentment that now filled Edwin's heart. 
 
 "Ah . . . here is the school. I suppose they 
 couldn't pull that down. I remember when it was 
 newly built. It was there that I learnt my alpha- 
 bet. . . ." 
 
 In the whole of the lane the school was the only 
 whole building. 
 
 "If you come to the edge of the Batch you will 
 see the valley bottom where I spent my childhood 
 with your great-grandmother."
 
 THE HILLS 221 
 
 They passed on, and saw, a hundred feet beneath 
 them, the valley of the little stream. More ruins, 
 many of them; but one or two cottages still in- 
 habited. The lower cottages lay close to the water, 
 and in four or five places the stream was spanned 
 by a clapper bridge. In one of the gardens ghostly 
 children were playing, and in another ghostly 
 washing flapped in a breeze that had risen with 
 the coolness of evening. Mr. Ingleby pointed out 
 to Edwin his great-grandmother's home. It was 
 the cottage in the garden of which the children were 
 playing. 
 
 From the chimney a trail of smoke dwindled up 
 against the grey hill-side. 
 
 "I should like to see inside it," said Edwin. 
 
 "Would you? No ... I don't think it would 
 be worth going down into the hollow to see it. 
 You'd only be disappointed. I don't expect there'd 
 be anything much to see. Besides, we haven't time. 
 I want to take you to a little farm it isn't really 
 big enough to be called a farm at the top of the 
 lane under Axdown. They call it the Holloway. 
 Why I can't imagine, for it is the highest point of 
 the whole village. Your aunt tells me that your 
 grandfather's sister, your own great-aunt Lydia, is 
 still living there, and I think I had better go and 
 see her." 
 
 He turned again, and Edwin followed him. It 
 seemed strange to him that his father should not 
 be anxious to look inside the house where his child- 
 hood had been spent. A ghost ... a ghost. . . . 
 
 They passed the windy farm once more. A man, 
 in muddy gaiters, was driving cows into the yard.
 
 222 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 He was the first creature apart from the ghostly 
 children in the valley that they had seen. A tall 
 man, with a gaunt, grey face, who did not even 
 turn to look at them or give them good-evening, al- 
 though they must surely have been the only living 
 people that he had seen that day. It was impossible 
 to believe from the sight of its exterior that the 
 farm was now inhabited. 
 
 "Who do you think he is?" Edwin asked. 
 
 "I don't know. I haven't the least idea. The 
 people at that farm used to be named Ingleby ; and 
 he certainly has the figure of your grand- 
 father. . . ." 
 
 "Won't you stop and speak to him?" 
 
 "Why should we?" 
 
 "But he would be awfully pleased to see you and 
 know who you are. . . ." 
 
 "I don't expect he would." 
 
 A moment later Mr. Ingleby said, 
 
 "Now, the ruins of this cottage ought to interest 
 you, Edwin." 
 
 "Why? Is it one of ours?" 
 
 "No, but the old woman who lived in it in my 
 day was always supposed to be a witch. Mendip 
 people were always great believers in witchcraft. 
 I shouldn't wonder if your aunt believes in 'ill- 
 wishing' to this day. I suppose she was really a 
 harmless old body. The story was that a daughter 
 of hers, with whom she had quarrelled, married a 
 small dairy farmer down by Axcombe, and no 
 sooner had she gone to live with him than the poor 
 man's cows went dry. His business failed. He 
 had to sell his stock. He was ruined, and took to
 
 THE HILLS 223 
 
 drink ; and in all the public-houses for miles round 
 he used to rail against his mother-in-law, and say 
 that she was responsible for the whole business. 
 She was a lonely old creature, very poor and dirty, 
 and when we were children and going up to the 
 Holloway we used to cover our eyes and run for 
 fear we should catch sight of her. No one even 
 knew when she died. They found her, I heard, 
 when she had been dead for a week or ten days." 
 
 Edwin shivered. These hill-people, it seemed, 
 were hard and cruel. No doubt he must have some 
 of their stony cruelty in his own being somewhere. 
 
 At last they reached the farm at the top of the 
 Holloway. It was a poor building, only a little 
 more hospitable than the ruins in the valley. Mr. 
 Ingleby knocked at the door, and a sturdy, middle- 
 aged man with an iron hook in place of his right 
 hand lifted the latch and stared at them. 
 
 "You don't know me, Isaac?" said Mr. Ingleby. 
 
 "Noa. ... I can't say I do know 'ee." 
 
 'I'm John Ingleby." 
 
 "John Ingleby! . . . Well, and I'm proud to see 
 'ee, John. Do 'ee step inside and see mother. I 
 can't shake hands with 'ee the way I was used to. 
 I lost en in a mowin'-machine five years back. 
 Come in then." 
 
 He led the way into a dark cabin. Everything 
 in it was dark, partly, perhaps, because the win- 
 dows were full of flower-pots ; partly because all the 
 furniture was darkened with age or smoke or 
 grime. The only bright colours in its brownness 
 were a number of shining copper utensils and a
 
 224 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 fine show of geraniums in the window. Isaac fol- 
 lowed Mr. Ingleby's eyes towards these flowers. 
 
 "Purty, ban't they?" he said with pride. "Your 
 brother Will sent mother they." 
 
 In the gloom of the fireplace, where a pile of 
 turves smouldered, mother began to dissociate her- 
 self from the surrounding brownness. She was a 
 very old woman. Edwin had never seen any one 
 so old sitting bolt upright in a straight-backed 
 oaken chair. Her face seemed to Edwin very 
 beautiful, for extreme age had taken from it all 
 the extraneous charm that smoothness and colour 
 give, leaving only the sheer chiselled beauty of 
 feature. It was a noble face, finely modelled, with 
 a straight nose, a tender mouth, and level brows 
 beneath which burned the darkest and clearest eyes 
 that Edwin had ever seen. Her hair was white and 
 scanty, but little of it was seen beneath the white 
 bonnet that she wore. Edwin felt her eyes go 
 through him in the gloom. 
 
 "Here's cousin John come to see 'ee, mother," 
 said Isaac, bending over her. 
 
 "John? What John?" said the old lady. 
 
 It struck Edwin at once that her speech was 
 purer and more delicate than that of her son. 
 
 "John Ingleby, Aunt Lydia," said Edwin's father. 
 
 "You need not raise your voice, my dear," she 
 said. "My sight and my hearing are wonderful, 
 thank God." 
 
 "Then you remember me, Aunt Lydia?" 
 
 "Of course I remember you, John. Though it's 
 many and many years since my eyes saw you. And 
 how are you, my dear? They tell me that you have
 
 THE HILLS 225 
 
 done great things in the world. You're a doctor, 
 like poor Dr. Marshall." 
 
 "No . . . I'm not a doctor. I'm in business. 
 I'm a chemist." 
 
 "I knew it was something of the kind. You 
 needn't speak so loud. And they told me you had 
 married. I suppose this is your boy. A fine boy, 
 surely. He has a look of your grandfather." 
 
 "Yes, this is Edwin." 
 
 "I don't remember that name in our family. It 
 sounds like a fanciful name. Come here, my dear, 
 and let me look at you." 
 
 Edwin went to her, and she kissed him. Her face 
 was so cold and smooth that she might almost have 
 been dead. 
 
 "And how is your dear wife, John?" 
 
 "I've had a terrible blow, Aunt Lydia. I've lost 
 her." 
 
 "Ah . . . that was bad for you, and bad for the 
 boy, too." 
 
 "I shall never get over it." Mr. Ingleby's voice 
 trembled. 
 
 "Yes, of course, you say that. It's natural that 
 you should. You're young. But when you live 
 to be as old as I am you'll know better. You will 
 get over it. When a few years have gone by you'll 
 marry again." 
 
 "Never, Aunt Lydia . . . never. . . ." 
 
 "Yes. . . . That's what you feel now. But I 
 know the family. The Inglebys are always very 
 tender in marriage. I've seen many of them that 
 have lost their wives, and they always marry again. 
 I don't suppose that I shall live to hear of it; but
 
 226 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 when the time comes you'll remember what I said." 
 
 "No, Aunt Lydia . . . never." 
 
 "Time is a wonderful thing, John. I'm glad to 
 have seen you and your boy. I hope he'll take 
 after you you were always the best of them." 
 
 She gave a little sigh. Evidently she was tired. 
 The flame that burned behind her black eyes was 
 so very feeble for all its brightness. Isaac, who 
 had been watching her with the devotion of a 
 practised nurse, saw that she could not stand any 
 more talking. 
 
 "Now, mother, that's enough, my dear," he said. 
 
 "Kiss me, John," she said. And Mr. Ingleby 
 kissed her. 
 
 "Well, now that you be here after all these 
 years," said Isaac cheerily, as he rearranged the 
 red shawl round his mother's shoulders, "you won't 
 leave us without taking something. There do be a 
 lovely bit of bacon I have cut. Do 'ee try a bit 
 now, and a mug of cider." 
 
 Edwin, who was already hungry with his walk, 
 and was rapidly acquiring a taste for the wine of 
 the country, now became aware of the fact that the 
 dark ceiling was decked with sides of bacon and 
 hams that hung there slowly pickling in the turf 
 smoke that saturated the atmosphere of the room. 
 He was disappointed when his father declined to. 
 take any of this delicacy. 
 
 . "Well, a mug of cider, then," Isaac persisted. 
 He went into an inner chamber down three stone 
 steps, with three china mugs hanging on his hook. 
 "You see, I do be pretty handy with en," he 
 laughed.
 
 THE HILLS 227 
 
 They drank their cider solemnly. It was even 
 drier than that which they had drunk for lunch 
 at Wringford, and so free from acidity that all that 
 Edwin could taste was that faint astringent bit- 
 terness. It had also a bouquet that was less like 
 the odour of apples than that of a flour-mill. A 
 wonderful drink. . . . They said good-bye, and 
 Isaac, who seemed to Edwin the most kindly and 
 patient creature he had ever met, showed them to 
 the door. 
 
 By this time the sun was setting, and the cool 
 wind from the west had freshened. Edwin saw, 
 for the first time, the huge panorama on which 
 they had turned their backs as they climbed the 
 hill to the Holloway. Perhaps it was the strange- 
 ness of all his recent experience; perhaps, partly, 
 the exhilaration that proceeded from Isaac's cider, 
 but the sight struck Edwin as one of greater 
 magnificence than any he had ever seen before. 
 From their feet the whole country sloped in a series 
 of hilly waves to the shores of the channel, and 
 that muddy sea now shone from coast to coast in a 
 blaze of tawny light: now truly, for the first time, 
 one of the gateways of the world. And beyond the 
 channel stood the heaped mountains of Wales, very 
 wild and black in their vastness. The sight was so 
 impressive that on their way down the lane they 
 did not speak. 
 
 At last Edwin said, 
 
 "I think Aunt Lydia has a very beautiful face. 
 She looks like some old grand lady." 
 
 "She is very like your grandfather," said his
 
 228 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 father. "She must be over ninety. It is a great 
 age." 
 
 And on the way home Edwin began to imagine 
 what his strange grandfather the dowser must have 
 been, with the figure of the lonely farmer, his black 
 beard and hair, and his great-aunt Lydia's noble 
 features and piercing eyes. 
 
 n 
 
 They stayed for a week at Geranium Cottage, 
 sinking without any effort into its placid life. 
 Edwin was content merely to live there, soaking 
 up the atmosphere of Wringford village, and only 
 thinking of Highberrow as a strange and ghostly 
 adventure, possible, but too disturbing to be in- 
 dulged in. The tiredness of Mr. Ingleby, who 
 never showed the least inclination to revisit the 
 place, made this abstention easier. In the whole 
 of his week at Wringford Edwin only made one 
 attempt to see Highberrow again. The impulse 
 came to him very early one morning, just at the 
 hour of dawn when the birds had fallen to silence, 
 and Joe, who happened to be working for his mas- 
 ter at a village some miles away, was splashing 
 about under the pump in the yard at the back of 
 the linhay. Mr. Ingleby was still asleep, and Ed- 
 win, dressing quietly, stole downstairs and set off 
 towards the hills, this time on his bicycle. 
 
 He followed the high road, and left the machine 
 in a quarry opposite the point where the first pink- 
 washed cottages appeared. By this time he was 
 almost sorry that he had come there: for he was 
 quite certain that the village he was now going to
 
 THE HILLS 229 
 
 visit would be a very different place from the dead 
 or hallucinated Highberrow that he and his father 
 had penetrated some days before. He felt this so 
 strongly that he wouldn't take the risk of spoiling 
 that marvellous impression, and instead of follow- 
 ing the road that they had taken before, he changed 
 his mind, crossed the valley of the pink cottages, 
 and climbed the shaley slope of Silbury. In the 
 fosse that surrounded the encampment a hundred 
 white tails bobbed at once, and, laughing, he 
 scrambled up the sides of what had once been Sil- 
 bury Camp, and now was Silbury Warren. 
 
 Here, lying full length upon the top of the 
 vallum, as perhaps a Belgic ancestor, or an ancestor 
 who held the crest before the Belgae came, had lain 
 before him, he could look over the combe' towards 
 the church of Highberrow on the Batch. And the 
 church tower was all he saw of Highberrow again : 
 a feature most unrepresentative of the spirit of that 
 pagan place. Even the church tower at this hour 
 of the morning could scarcely be seen for mist, and 
 all the time cold mist was pouring down in a dense, 
 impalpable stream from the milky coverlet that 
 spread upon Axdown and Callow and all the hills 
 beyond. In the plain nothing could be seen at 
 first ; and from the sleeping villages no mist-muffled 
 sound was heard ; but by degrees the pattern of the 
 plain's surface, with its dappled orchards, its green 
 pasturage and paler turf -moors, cut by the straight 
 bands of the rhines, the sluggish channels through 
 which the surface water drained into the sea, be- 
 came more clear, and with this the sounds of the 
 country grew more distinct : indefinite noises, such
 
 230 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 as the creaking of cart-wheels in a hidden lane, the 
 squeak of a pump-handle at Ihe back of the pink 
 cottages, the clink of a pick in the quarry. The 
 whole world awoke, and Edwin, too, found that he 
 was awake and awfully hungry. He scrambled 
 down the slope. Smoke was now rising from the 
 chimneys of the cottages in the combe. He was 
 back at Wringford in time for breakfast. 
 
 By this time he had begun to feel quite at home 
 in Geranium Cottage. He had made the discovery 
 of his cousin and his Uncle Will. The latter he 
 found wholly lovable: a creature of slow, quiet 
 speech, as leisurely and peaceful as his vocation, 
 and full of small kindnesses that surprised by rea- 
 son of their unexpectedness. 
 
 The thing that most impressed Edwin in his 
 uncle's nature was the extraordinary tenderness he 
 showed towards the green things that were his care. 
 Perhaps the west-country custom of dispensing 
 with the neuter pronoun and speaking of all in- 
 animate creatures as if they were persons, made 
 his solicitude for their welfare more noticeable. 
 But he was not only kind to them in his speech : his 
 short and clumsy-looking fingers, that seemed to be 
 built for nothing but the roughest of labour, became 
 amazingly sensitive and delicate as soon as he be- 
 gan to handle the plants in his garden, so that 
 every touch had in it the nature of a caress. 
 
 In this life, of the devoted husbandman, he was 
 evidently wholly contented; and he made it seem 
 to Edwin the most natural and human on earth. 
 The fascination of watching his uncle's hands grew 
 upon him, and in the end he would watch the man,
 
 JHE HILLS 231 
 
 who had been busy at the same work in his master's 
 garden all day, tending his own favourites at home 
 until the light began to fail, and Aunt Sarah Jane 
 would call the two of them in to supper. The spec- 
 tacle had a sort of hypnotic effect upon the boy, it 
 was so slow and measured, as slow almost, Edwin 
 thought, as the processes of germination and growth 
 which it was his uncle's vocation to assist. His 
 fingers even handled the purple soil as if he loved 
 it. 
 
 His cousin was a different matter altogether : a 
 tall, dark-haired boy, a couple of years older than 
 Edwin. He had, much more distinctly than Uncle 
 Will, the Ingleby face, the features that were to 
 be seen at their best in the old lady at the Holloway 
 farm. And he possessed in a high degree the qual- 
 ity that had carried Edwin's father out into the 
 world: a seriousness that made him anxious to 
 "get on," promptings of which were now being sat- 
 isfied in an accumulation of the periodical publica- 
 tions that have taken the place of Mr. Samuel 
 Smiles in these days : weeklies devoted to all kinds 
 of useful hobbies electricity, wood-carving, plumb- 
 ing the series that eventually culminated in the 
 gigantic illusion of the Self-Educator. 
 
 To these short cuts to power the young man 
 devoted all his evenings, and though he was quite 
 natural in his anxiousness to be friendly with 
 Edwin, with whose subtler and more contemplative 
 nature he had at present so little in -common, the 
 attempts were not very successful. Between these 
 two there lay a far more obvious gulf than that 
 which separated Edwin from the older people. In
 
 232 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 a way, he could not help admiring his cousin's 
 earnestness, probably because he knew that he 
 could never imitate it, and yet he sometimes found 
 himself examining it in a mood of absolute detach- 
 ment that made his sympathy feel artificial. 
 
 Just before he left St. Luke's he had been reading 
 Darwin's Origin of Species, and in the light of this 
 work the efforts of his father, followed by those 
 of his cousin Joe, seemed to him an excellent in- 
 stance of the tendency of ancient stocks to vary 
 or sport in definite directions. In the earnest Joe 
 Edwin found the phenomenon a little troublesome, 
 for the sight of the immense energies that the youth 
 was putting into channels that were futile dis- 
 tressed him, and the more so because to correct the 
 Waste it would have been necessary to begin again 
 from a point so distant that Joe would be faced 
 with the spectacle of more than half of his present 
 energies wasted. So Edwin thought as little as the 
 consciousness of his own selfishness would allow 
 him, of all the labours that were typified by the 
 fretwork mahogany frames that surrounded the 
 photographs of the Halesby Inglebys, listening in- 
 stead to the endless tales of his Aunt Sarah Jane, 
 in the hour when she became talkative, after supper. 
 
 By this time Edwin was so interested in his own 
 romantic origins that any story of the old High- 
 berrow would do for him; and his aunt, with her 
 soft Somerset voice, her picturesque phrasing, and 
 her unfailing memory for social details, rebuilt, 
 night after night, the life of the decayed village as 
 it had been in the old dowser's time, evolving by 
 degrees a human comedy which resembled that of
 
 THE HILLS 233 
 
 its great exemplar by the way in which the protag- 
 onists of one episode became mere incidentals to 
 another. Edwin knew them all by name, and recog- 
 nised them as if he had met them in the flesh when- 
 ever lie heard of them. 
 
 In this way, sitting in the smell of the window 
 geraniums over a leisurely supper of bread and 
 cheese, in his uncle's case literally washed down 
 with cider, he heard a story that he always remem- 
 bered with pride and pity and a degree of passionate 
 resentment: the story of how the village of his 
 fathers had sunk into decay. 
 
 Highberrow, it appeared, had been built on what 
 was then a common moorland, by the men who 
 lived in it, laboriously, stone by stone. Their right 
 to these fruits of their labour had never been called 
 into question, and the whole spirit of the village 
 had been happy and prosperous, as well it might, 
 seeing that it owed nothing to the care of any out- 
 sider and could pay its way. And during those 
 prosperous times its liberties seemed secure from 
 danger. But when the decay of the grouvier's in- 
 dustry led to unemployment and poverty, and the 
 younger men of the Highberrow families began to 
 look for their living overseas, the little community 
 became so weak that the owner of the manor-house 
 saw his opportunity. As Lord of the Manor he 
 disputed the "squatters' right" of the Highberrow 
 villagers, and through his agents demanded a rent 
 that would have made living, impossible for most 
 of them, for the cottages that they or their fore- 
 fathers had built. If they refused to pay the rent, 
 he said, they would be evicted, not in order that
 
 234 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 other people might be introduced who would pay, 
 but merely to satisfy the landlord's convictions of 
 the Tightness of his principle. That was the way 
 in which he put it. Merely out of spite would be 
 a more accurate description of his motives. 
 
 Highberrow was in a bad way. The villagers 
 were either very old or very young, and in either 
 case their feebleness made the whole organism unfit 
 to resist the inroads of the parasite. What is more, 
 they were very poor, and the very nature of the 
 Mendip mining industry had made them so far indi- 
 vidualist that the idea of combined resistance did 
 not occur to them. The landlord wisely started his 
 operations with an old woman whose cottage lay 
 nearest to the woods in which his pheasants were 
 bred. Almost incredibly poor, she had lived on the 
 products of her garden and her poultry. To pay 
 rent was out of the question. Sheer 'age and inertia 
 made it impossible for her to move, and in the 
 course of time she was evicted with her miserable 
 belongings, and went to die at the home of a mar- 
 ried daughter. 
 
 Emerging from this easy contest, the landlord, 
 or perhaps his agent, moved on to the next. It 
 was unfortunate for him, and fortunate for the 
 villagers, that he now pitched on the cottage of 
 Thomas Ingleby, the dowser, Edwin's grandfather. 
 The old man had this in his favour: that he was 
 a man of two trades, that even when the mining 
 had failed him he could make a living with the 
 divining rod, and the consciousness of this power 
 no doubt stiffened his resistance. Another eviction 
 was decreed, but this time things did not go so
 
 THE HILLS 235 
 
 easily. When the landlord's men arrived from the 
 manor to empty the house, another party appeared 
 from the Cold Harbour mines, and as soon as the 
 furniture was dragged out at the front door it was 
 seized and taken in again at the back. 
 
 "It were a proper field-day," said Uncle Will 
 quietly, "I do remember it well. I can see your 
 father now, John, standing over beyond the road 
 with his back to the wall, not speakin' a word, just 
 smokin' of his pipe." 
 
 The landlord's men saw that this sort of thing 
 might go on for ever and none the better for it, so 
 they just gave it up, but old Ingleby (Edwin had 
 already canonised him as a "village Hampden") 
 had shown the rest of the Highberrow people what 
 could be done, and gradually stirred them into com- 
 bined action. 
 
 It was a little, pitiful attempt. He himself put 
 into it all his savings, a matter of a few pounds, 
 and to this were added as many shillings as could 
 be scraped together in the village. He took the 
 money to a lawyer in Axcombe Bayliss was his 
 name an honest man with a sense of justice and, 
 one suspects, some admiration for the sturdiness 
 of his client. Bayliss worked the matter up and 
 made a case of it, and no further attempts at evic- 
 tion were made in Highberrow in the meantime. 
 The village even regained a little of its former 
 confidence, and for some time the landlord did not 
 show his face in it. But once more luck was against 
 Highberrow. Bayliss, the good lawyer, died. He 
 had been careful to keep the matter in his own 
 hands, and when it came to be considered by his
 
 236 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 successor, a partner with social ambitions, the new 
 man would not touch it: partly because there ap- 
 peared to be no more money in it (as was probably 
 the case), and partly because he was in 'the habit 
 of meeting the Lord of the Manor in the hunting- 
 field, and was on card-playing terms with the agent. 
 
 There followed an exodus of despair. The people 
 'of Highberrow, who had no more money to fight 
 with, packed up their pitiable belongings and left 
 their houses rather than face the trouble of eviction. 
 Not so Thomas Ingleby. The agent returned to the 
 attack. There were threats: a stormy interview, 
 in which the dowser faced the landlord himself. A 
 final week's notice was given, and Ingleby made 
 sure once more of the support of his friends from 
 the neighbouring villages. But no further attempt 
 at eviction was made. At the last moment the land- 
 lord climbed down. He arranged another inter- 
 view, and at this the terms for the whole village 
 were settled. For the lives of the present occu- 
 pants, or for a period of sixty years, the cottages 
 should remain rent-free. It was not everything, 
 but 'twas a famous victory. "That is why Aunt 
 Lydia do be still living up to the Holloway to this 
 day," said Aunt Sarah Jane. 
 
 "And I suppose grandfather lived there till he 
 died," said Edwin. 
 
 "No, the poor dear. When he did grow very aged 
 your uncle and I went up to Highberrow and per- 
 suaded en that he weren't fit to look after himself. 
 You should 'a seed the dirt in that house! And 
 he corned down to live along of we. But he were 
 never happy, were he, Will?"
 
 THE HILLS 237 
 
 "Noa ... he were never happy." 
 
 "He were a quare old man. Us seed very little 
 of en. Arften people would come for en from a 
 distance that wanted water found, and he did spend 
 the day roving the country cutting blackthorns for 
 his dowsing. Right up to the day when he took 
 to his bed, poor soul." 
 
 "I should like to have seen him dowsing," said 
 Edwin. "I haven't even seen the twigs that they 
 use." 
 
 "Why, that would have been easy enough. Only 
 the other day I throwed out a lot that belonged to 
 your grandfather." 
 
 Edwin blushed at this sacrilege. "And could 
 Uncle Will find water with a twig?" he asked. 
 
 "Not I," laughed his uncle. "But they do say it 
 runs in families. Have you ever tried, John?" 
 
 "I tried when I was a boy," said Mr. Ingleby, 
 "but nothing happened." 
 
 "I expect our Joe could," said Aunt Sarah Jane, 
 with infinite faith in her offspring. 
 
 "No, mother, I've tried it," said Joe, from the 
 lamplit corner where he was wrestling with the 
 science of sanitary inspection. 
 
 "I wonder if I could . . ." said Edwin. 
 
 "Well, you shall have a try," laughed his uncle. 
 
 "At this time o' night?" said Aunt Sarah Jane, 
 scandalised. 
 
 "Let the boy have a try," said Uncle Will, rising. 
 " 'Tis a beautivul moonlight night, and I'll take 
 him over the field where the new water-pipe runs." 
 
 "You'm mad, the two of you," said his aunt with 
 a sigh.
 
 238 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Edwin and his uncle went out into the garden, 
 and there the boy watched the gardener's clumsy, 
 skilful hands cut a forked twig from a blackthorn 
 bush. 
 
 "Hazel do work as well," he said, "but father 
 always used the thorn." 
 
 Then they went out together over a dewy meadow, 
 and his uncle showed him how to hold the rod: 
 with his two hands turned palm upwards, the arms 
 of the twig between the third and fourth fingers, 
 the thumb, and the palm of each hand, and the fork 
 downwards between them. Over the meadow grass 
 they walked slowly, then suddenly the tip of the 
 rod began to turn upwards by no agency of which 
 Edwin was aware. It was very thrilling, for his 
 hands were quite still. 
 
 "There you are," said his uncle, "you've a found 
 our water-pipe." 
 
 "Hold the rod down, uncle," Edwin said. 
 
 He did so, and now the mysterious force was so 
 strong that the arms of the twig snapped. 
 
 "Now, you've gone and broke it," said Uncle Will. 
 "Come in or you'll catch cold." 
 
 They went in together. 
 
 "Well . . .?" said Mr. Ingleby. 
 
 "Oh, he's a proper dowser, sure enough," said 
 Uncle Will. 
 
 Edwin was still curiously thrilled with the whole 
 business. He felt that a little more excitement in 
 his attainment was due to him; but no one, not 
 even his father, seemed in the least impressed. It 
 comforted him to think that his cousin Joe, his 
 eyes fixed on his book in the corner, had really less
 
 THE HILLS 239 
 
 in common than himself with the strange dark peo- 
 ple from whom they were both descended. It was 
 better, he thought, to be a born dowser than a 
 Fellow of Balliol. More wonderful still to be both. 
 All the rest of that evening he felt a queer elation 
 in his mysterious birthright, and when his father 
 yawned and they both w T ent up to bed he lay awake 
 for a long time listening to the drowsy music of 
 the corncrake and the wail of hunting owls, trying 
 to put himself more closely in touch with the ro- 
 mantic past that had bred him: with that mag- 
 nificent figure his grandfather, and the innumerable 
 strange and passionate ancestry that slept under 
 the shadow of Highberrow church on the Batch. 
 "Yea, I have a goodly heritage," he thought. And 
 so he came to think of his father, through whom 
 these things came to him : of his hard achieve- 
 ments, of his loneliness, of his difficulty of express- 
 ing if it were not a disinclination to express all 
 the powerful and stormy things that must lie hidden 
 in his heart. And a feeling of passionate kinship 
 carried Edwin away: an anxiety to show his love 
 for his father in unmistakable ways ; to make clear 
 to him once and for all the depth of his son's de- 
 votion. He began to think of his father as a mother 
 might think of her child. It must have been in 
 that way, he imagined, that his own mother had 
 thought of her husband. The night was so still 
 that he imagined he could hear the rusty ivory of 
 the acacia-blossom falling at the gate.
 
 240 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 in 
 
 They were in the train on their way home from 
 Bristol, passing smoothly under the escarpment of 
 the lower Cotswolds. The fortnight had passed 
 with an astounding swiftness. After leaving Wring- 
 ford they had cycled over the back of Mendip, past 
 the mines at Cold Harbour, where they had paused 
 for half an hour to look at the workings, now de- 
 serted and overgrown with ragwort and scabious, 
 and the Koman amphitheatre, to the great lime- 
 stone gorge above Axcombe; and from there they 
 had ridden to Wells, where, beyond streets that 
 flowed eternally with limpid water, they had gazed 
 on the wonder of the cathedral and seen the white 
 swans floating in the palace moat under a sky that 
 was full of peace. Only for a moment had they 
 seen the masts of Bristol and Kedeliffe's dreamy 
 spire; and now in a few hours they would be back 
 in Halesby : in another world. 
 
 As they travelled northwards Edwin was think- 
 ing all the time of the work that he would do in 
 his little room above the bed of stocks. It should 
 be a fragrant room, he thought, and a good one for 
 reading, for when his attention wandered he would 
 be able to lift his eyes to a line of gentler hills 
 crowned by the dark folds of Shenstone's hanging 
 woods. And there he would be able to dream of 
 the coloured past and of his own exciting future, 
 and the enchanted life that he would soon be lead- 
 ing among the noblest works of men in letters and 
 in stone. Oxford, his Mecca . . . the eternal city 
 of his dreams. He allowed his fancy to travel west-
 
 THE HILLS 241 
 
 ward over the rolling Cotswold and droop by the 
 slow descent of river valleys to that sacred place. 
 His father's voice dispelled his dream. They were 
 alone in the carriage and their privacy made speak- 
 ing easy. 
 
 "Edwin . . . I've been thinking a good deal about 
 your future." 
 
 "Yes, father?" 
 
 "I've been thinking it over in my own mind. I 
 talked it over a week or two ago with your Uncle 
 Albert. He's a sound man of business, you know. 
 Then I felt that I couldn't trust my judgment: the 
 whole world was upside down ; but now I feel that 
 I can think clearly, and of course I am anxious to 
 do my best for you. I've been thinking about this 
 Oxford plan. . . ." 
 
 "Yes." * 
 
 "You know quite well, Edwin, that I'm not a 
 rich man. I'm a very poor man. You can under- 
 stand that, better than you could before, after this 
 holiday. And when people have very limited means 
 and are getting on in life this business has made 
 me an old man, you know they have to be very 
 careful in their decisions. Looking at it from every 
 point of view, I don't think it would be fair of me 
 to let you go to Oxford." 
 
 "Father . . . what do you mean?" 
 
 "To begin with, there's the expense." 
 
 "But I shall get a scholarship. I'll work like 
 anything. I'll make sure of it." 
 
 "I'm sure you would. You're a good boy. But 
 that isn't everything by a long way. When you've 
 got your scholarship, supposing you do get it, the
 
 242 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 expense would begin. I shouldn't like you to feel 
 at a hopeless disadvantage with men of your own 
 year. You would have to live quite a different life 
 from them. You wouldn't be able to afford any of 
 their pleasures." 
 
 "I shouldn't want their pleasures." 
 
 "That is a rash thing to say. But I'm looking 
 even farther ahead. What can you expect to do 
 when you've taken a degree in Arts?" 
 
 "A fellowship. . . ." 
 
 "Ah, but that is a matter of considerable uncer- 
 tainty. I've seen so many men who have managed 
 to scrape through a university degree and then been 
 thrown on the world in a state of miserable poverty. 
 Look at Mr. Kelly at the grammar-school. You 
 wouldn't like to live his life; but I believe he has 
 quite a brilliant university career behind him. No 
 ... I don't think it would be fair to you." 
 
 "But mother and I always said . . ." 
 
 "Yes, I know . . . you were a pair of dreamers, 
 both of you. If you felt any very strong desire 
 to become a parson there might be something in 
 it, though that, too, is a miserable life often enough. 
 But you don't, do you?" 
 
 "No ... of course not." 
 
 "So I think that while I am living you should 
 have the chance of learning a useful profession. 
 What about doctoring?" 
 
 "But that would be expensive too." 
 
 "I know that . . . but I think we could do it. 
 We should have a little in common. I might even 
 be able to help you. And in a way ... in a way 
 I should feel that in you I was realising some of
 
 THE HILLS 243 
 
 my own old ambitions. It is a noble profession, 
 Eddie: the most humane in the world. No one 
 need ever be ashamed of being a doctor. I think 
 that a parson who professes religion for the sake 
 of a living is rather to be despised." 
 
 "Father, I'm sure it would cost too much. Six 
 years, you know. . . ." 
 
 "Five . . . only five, if you pass all your examina- 
 tions. And it need not be so expensive as you 
 think. During the last year they have turned the 
 old College in North Bromwich into a University. 
 They give a degree in medicine. And while you 
 were studying there you could still live with me at 
 Halesby. I should be glad of your company." 
 
 This appeal to Edwin's pity was difficult to re- 
 sist. It recalled to him all the resolutions that he 
 had made in the night at Wringf ord : the devotion 
 with which he had determined to devote himself to 
 his father's welfare: the determination that he 
 should never do anything that could cause the man 
 a moment's pain. It was difficult . . . difficult. 
 
 "You could still get your scholarship," his father 
 went on. "There are several endowments of that 
 kind at the North Bromwich medical school. I 
 have a pamphlet at home that gives all the particu- 
 lars. I had even shown it to your mother." 
 
 "And what did she say, father?" 
 
 "She didn't say much. She knew it would be a 
 great disappointment to you. But I think she real- 
 ised that it would be a good thing for you; and I 
 know she looked forward to having you at home." 
 
 "Yes . . . she must have known what a disap-
 
 244 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 pointment it would be. Father, I wish you would 
 think it over again." 
 
 "I want you to think it over, too. At present 
 it naturally comes as a shock to you; but I think 
 you'll see in time. . . ." 
 
 He couldn't see. He knew that he could never 
 see it in that light. It was going to take all the 
 beauty that he had conceived out of his life. It 
 was going to ruin all his happiness. In place of 
 light and cleanliness and learning it was going to 
 give him . . . what? The darkness of a smoky 
 city; its grime; the mean ideals of the people who 
 lived beneath its ugliness. Even <the memory of 
 the enthusiasm with which he had thought of the 
 life of old Dr. Marshall, his father's patron, couldn't 
 mitigate the dreariness of the prospect. The idea 
 of living for ever in company with dirt and 
 misery and harrowing disease repelled him. It 
 was no good telling him that contact with these 
 misfortunes developed the nobler faculties of man. 
 It was not the life that he had wanted. His soul 
 sent forth a cry of exceeding bitterness. And while 
 he sat there, full of misery and resentment, the 
 train was carrying them onward into the gloom 
 that always overshadowed the City of Iron.
 
 BOOK II
 
 . . . so that with much ado I was 
 corrupted, and made to learn the 
 dirty devices of the world. 
 
 THOMAS TRAHERNB.
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE CITY OP IRON 
 
 HE city of iron stands upon three hills and its 
 A valleys were once watered by two rivers; but 
 since the day when its name was humbly written 
 in Doomsday these pastoral features have disap- 
 peared, so that the hills are only known as tramway 
 gradients that testify to the excellence of the Cor- 
 poration's power station, and the rivers, running 
 in brick culverts, have been deprived not only of 
 their liberty but even of their natural function of 
 receiving a portion of the city's gigantic sewage. 
 The original market of North Bromwich has been 
 not so much debauched from without, in the manner 
 of other growing towns, as organised from within 
 by the development of its own inherent powers for 
 evil. It is not a place from which men have wil- 
 fully cast out beauty so much as one from which 
 beauty has vanished in spite of man's pitiful aspira- 
 tions to preserve it. Indeed, its citizens are objects 
 rather for pity than for reproach, and would be 
 astonished to receive either, for many of them are 
 wealthy, and from their childhood, knowing no 
 better, have believed that wealth is a justification 
 and an apology for every mortal evil from ugliness 
 
 to original sin. 
 
 249
 
 250 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 In the heart of the city the sense of power, im- 
 pressive if malignant, is so overwhelming that one 
 cannot see the monstrosity as a whole and can al- 
 most understand the blindness of its inhabitants. 
 Go, rather, to the hills beyond Halesby, to Uffdown 
 and Pen Beacon, where, with a choice of prospects, 
 one may turn from the dreamy plain of Severn and 
 the cloudy splendours of Silurian hills, to its pillars 
 of cloud by day and its pillars of fire by night ; and 
 perhaps in that remoter air you may realise the 
 city's true significance as a phenomenon of un- 
 conquered if not inevitable disease. If you are a 
 physician, you will realise that this evil has its 
 counterpart in human tissues, where a single cell, 
 that differs not at all from other cells and is a 
 natural unitln the organism, may suddenly and, as 
 it seems, unreasonably acquire a faculty of mon- 
 strous and malignant growth, cleaving and multi- 
 plying to the destruction of its fellows a cell gone 
 mad, to which the ancients gave the name of cancer. 
 
 The inhabitants of North Bromwich, who are a 
 tolerant people, and proud of the fact, w r ould smile 
 at this reflection. They are not in the habit of 
 surveying the midden in which they are bred from 
 remote hilltops, except on Bank Holidays, at which 
 time they have discovered a truth from which they 
 might learn more : that with the aid of hill air and 
 exercise, whether it be that of cocoanut shies or 
 swing-boats, or the more hazardous pursuit of don- 
 key-riding, it is possible to absorb a greater quan- 
 tity of alcohol in a given time without unduly 
 suffering than in the atmosphere of their own 
 streets. But they have not time to learn, and since
 
 THE CITY OF IRON 251 
 
 they have never known any other conditions of 
 living, they exhibit the admirable human character- 
 istic of making the best of their surroundings and 
 persuading themselves that their hallucinated ex- 
 istence is typical of human life. They are even 
 eager, pathetically eager, to find and to proclaim 
 its virtues, and that they may do this more easily 
 they 'have invented specious names for the disease 
 and its results: Industry for the first, and, for 
 the second, Progress. 
 
 In the vindication of a Municipal Conscience 
 (making the best of a bad job) they periodically 
 extend the area over which their coat of arms, a 
 reminder of days when chivalry existed, is dis- 
 played. The coat of arms itself is an unfortunate 
 symbol, for it is supported by the figure of a brawny 
 slave who carries the hammer with which his chains 
 have been forged ; but the motto at least is encourag- 
 ing. It is the word "Forward," expressing the 
 aspirations of the citizens towards the day when 
 all England may be as the Black Country. The 
 watcher on Uffdown may give it a more far-sighted 
 significance : "forward, to the day when there shall 
 be no more coal, and the evil, of its own inanition, 
 perish." 
 
 For the present, at any rate, the city showed no 
 signs of perishing. During the last year or two, 
 its tentacles had spread farther than ever before, 
 swarming into the wet and lonely valley of the 
 Dulas Fechan, a deep cleft in the mountains beyond 
 Felindre where a noisy river ran through under- 
 growth older than man's memory. From this val- 
 ley, the council had decreed, the rain of the Savad-
 
 52 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 dan watershed, which geology had destined for the 
 Wye and later for the Atlantic, must now traverse 
 eighty miles or more of conquered territory, and 
 after being defouled by the domestic usages of 
 North Bromwich, must find its way into the Trent, 
 and so to the German Ocean, as the Komans 
 thoughtlessly labelled the North Sea. "Water," 
 said the Mayor, who was also known as Sir Joseph 
 Astill, the brewer, "water is one of the necessities 
 of life. It is our duty to the public to see that 
 they have it, and that they have it pure and un- 
 adulterated." 
 
 So the Welsh water came, and the altruistic 
 baronet took the credit for it. Indeed the pro- 
 gressive spirit of North Bromwich found its incar- 
 nation in this fleshy gentleman. It was he who 
 presented the municipal art gallery with their un- 
 rivalled collection of Madox-Jones cartoons, to say 
 nothing of three portraits of himself exemplifying 
 (he had an elegant vocabulary) the styles of the 
 three greatest portrait painters of modern times. 
 It was he who saved the art of music from degrada- 
 tion by fighting, with all the weight of his personal 
 influence, against the performance of secular music, 
 music, that is, divorced from "sacred" words, upon 
 the Sabbath. It was he, again, who aroused public 
 feeling on the question of the university : "the first 
 Modern university," he called it. 
 
 He accomplished its endowment, equipped it with 
 a principal whose name was a household word in 
 the homes of the great middle classes; and finally 
 Bet the seal of modernity on his creation, less than 
 twenty years before the total prohibition of alcohol
 
 THE CITY OF IRON 253 
 
 became law in retrograde America, by instituting 
 a learned faculty and providing a degree in the 
 science of ... brewing. Just as an example of the 
 city's liberality, there was also a faculty of Arts. 
 The faculty of Science, of course, was important, 
 if only as an appendage to the brewing school; 
 those of Engineering and Mining flattered the in- 
 dustries of the district; that of Commerce taught 
 its graduates to write business letters in every 
 spoken tongue and give the Yankees what for ; and 
 lastly, that of Medicine, supplied a necessary anti- 
 dote to the activities of most of the others. 
 
 Sir Joseph Astill was proud, as well he might be, 
 of the Medical School. "In this city," he boasted, 
 "there are actually more hospital beds per centum 
 of inhabitants than in any other in the whole coun- 
 try. The North Bromwich medical student has a 
 greater opportunity of studying disease, in all ita 
 aspects, than the alumnus of any other school in 
 the world. Thousands of beds lie waiting for hia 
 scrutiny; and I am glad to say that very few of 
 them are ever empty." 
 
 Edwin's first serious acquaintance with North 
 Bromwich had begun at the end of the summer 
 holidays, through which he had worked with a good 
 deal less than the fiery enthusiam that he would 
 have put into his reading for the Balliol scholar- 
 ship. The syllabus of the examination for the 
 Astill Exhibition had amazed him by its simplicity : 
 the prescribed books were works that he had ab- 
 sorbed some years before at St. Luke's, and though 
 the mathematical side of the business worried him, 
 as it had always done, it was clear that in North
 
 254 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Bromwich the classics were regarded really as a 
 polite accomplishment rather than as an integral 
 part of a gentleman's equipment in life: so that 
 these drowsy summer months were really a period 
 of comparative idleness in which he had time to 
 brood on his regrets and become gradually recon- 
 ciled to his new fate. In this spirit he approached 
 the examination. Even the capitoline eminence/m 
 which the university buildings were placed, with 
 the tremendous renaissance buildings of the Coun- 
 cil House and the Corinthian Town Hall, did not 
 greatly impress him. He saw rather the squalid 
 slums from which these pretentious buildings rose. 
 It was so different, he thought, from Oxford, and 
 he passed the flagged courtyard with its cool foun- 
 tain and the benevolent statue of Sir Joseph Astill 
 in a frock coat and carrying a rolled umbrella on 
 which the sculptor had lavished all the feeling of 
 his art, without the least shadow of spiritual obei- 
 sance. 
 
 With two other long-legged candidates he had 
 worked through his papers in a small room whose 
 windows overlooked the quiet square and a phan- 
 tom stream of noiseless traffic beyond. The first 
 paper had been mathematical, and its intricacies 
 kept his mind so busy that he had little time for re- 
 flection. From time to time he would see one of 
 the long-legged competitors reducing the end of his 
 penholder to wood-pulp in the earnestness of rumi- 
 nant thought; and occasionally the deep boom of 
 the clock in the tower of the Art Gallery would 
 remind him that time was veritably passing; but 
 time passed swiftly, and he was almost surprised
 
 THE CITY OF IRON 255 
 
 to find himself once more in an air that for all 
 its vitiation was less sleepy than that of the sealed 
 examination room. By the end of the first evening 
 all that he feared in the examination papers was 
 over. To-morrow he would be on his own ground 
 and the modern university could do its damnedest. 
 
 Next day the classical papers were distributed 
 and Edwin, who found them easy, could see that 
 his pen-chewing friend was in a bad way. All the 
 passages set for translation were familiar: the 
 grammatical questions consisted of old catches that 
 had been drilled into him by Mr. Leeming in the 
 Upper Fourth. As far as he was concerned, it was 
 a walk over. He had time to take in more of his 
 surroundings and to watch the silent coloured 
 stream of traffic filtering through the narrows 
 where the bulk of the Town Hall constricted the 
 street. At the end of each day he found his father 
 anxiously awaiting him. He was eager to see and 
 handle the examination papers for himself. He 
 seemed impressed by their difficulty, and Edwin 
 found it hard to reassure him without appearing 
 objectionably superior. He seemed rather surprised 
 that Edwin, on the eve of such a formidable ordeal, 
 should choose to take out his bicycle and ride to- 
 wards the hills, so surprised that it became a matter 
 for serious debate with Edwin whether he should do 
 as he wanted to do and appear priggish, or affect 
 an anxiety that didn't exist merely to please his 
 father. In the end he decided to be honest at all 
 costs. 
 
 The part of the examination that he enjoyed 
 most was the viva-voce in Classics. For this trial
 
 256 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 he was led up many flights of stone steps to a room 
 full of books in which the Dean of the Faculty of 
 Arts awaited him : a kindly, nervous old man with 
 a grey beard, with whom Edwin immediately felt 
 at home. His nervousness seemed to Edwin ap- 
 propriate: it implied the indubitable fact that in 
 North Bromwich Arts was a sideshow that counted 
 for nothing, and that the professor's dignity, as 
 Dean of a learned Faculty, was a precarious and 
 ^insubstantial thing. "Your papers were excellent, 
 : . . excellent," he said to begin with. "Now, I 
 should like you to read me something." He pointed 
 to a bookshelf. "Let us start with some Greek." 
 
 "What would you like, sir?" 
 
 "Oh, it's not what I should like. What would 
 you like to read? Something that really appeals 
 to you." 
 
 Edwin felt that the dean was watching him, like 
 ia cat stalking a bird, as his fingers approached the 
 bookshelf. It was a curious responsibility, for it 
 would be an awful shame, if he chose something 
 that the old man didn't approve of. Sophocles. . . . 
 !Why not Sophocles? 
 
 He picked out the Antigone, and chose the great 
 chorus : 
 
 *Epws bvlKare ju&xcw, 1 
 
 "Epcos, 6s cv KTiyjuatri TrtTrets, . . . 
 
 "Let's have it in Greek first." 
 
 Edwin read it in the level voice which the Head 
 of St. Luke's had always used for the recitation of 
 Greek poetry. When he had finished the first 
 strophe he looked up and saw that the Dean's weak
 
 THE CITY OF IRON 257 
 
 eyes, beneath their tortoiseshell spectacles, were 
 brimming with tears. 
 
 "That will do," he said, "unless you'd prefer to 
 go on . . ." 
 
 Edwin read the antistrophe. 
 
 "Yes ... I don't think you need translate it," 
 said the Dean. He paused for a moment, then, 
 replacing the volume, went on. "In this university 
 I am known as the Professor of Dead Languages. 
 Dead languages. What?" 
 
 They passed a pleasant half-hour together. In 
 Latin Edwin chose Lucretius and a passage from 
 the Georgics, at the end of which the Dean confided 
 to him that he kept bees. "Thank you, that will 
 do," he said. "I gather that you are entering the 
 Medical School. . . . Well, it is a noble profession. 
 I don't know what we should do without doctors, 
 I'm sure." 
 
 Four days later Mr. Ingleby received him at the 
 breakfast table with unconcealed emotion. "You've 
 got your scholarship, Edwin. I'm . . . I'm as 
 pleased as if I'd won it myself. I never had the 
 opportunity of winning a scholarship in my life." 
 The hand in which he held the letter trembled. 
 He kissed Edwin fervently. "This is a great day 
 for me," he said: and Edwin, glowing, felt that 
 anything was worth while that could give such 
 pleasure to the man that he had determined to love. 
 
 On a bright morning at the beginning of Septem- 
 ber Edwin found himself one of a crowd of ten or 
 fifteen youths, waiting with a varying degree of
 
 258 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 assurance, outside the office of the Dean of the Med- 
 ical" Faculty in James Street, a sordid thorough- 
 fare in which the pretentious buildings of the old 
 College of Science hid its hinder quarters. The door 
 was small, and only distinguished from its neigh- 
 bours, a steam laundry and brassworker's office, 
 by a plate that bore the inscription, "University of 
 North Broinwich. Medical School." Inside the 
 door stood a wooden box for a porter, usually empty, 
 but in its moments of occupation surveying a long, 
 dark cloakroom with a hundred or more numbered 
 lockers and corresponding clothes-hooks, on a few 
 of which undergraduates' gowns and battered mor- 
 tar-boards were hanging. This morning the Dean 
 was holding audience of all the first year men, and 
 each of the crowd in which Edwin now found him- 
 self a negligible unit, was waiting until his name 
 should be called from the office, and, in the mean- 
 time, surveying his companions with suspicion and 
 being surveyed with a more confident and collec- 
 tive suspicion by seniors who happened to drift 
 through the corridors on business or idleness, and 
 showed evidence of their initiation by familiarity 
 with the porter. 
 
 Only one face in the company was in the least 
 familiar to Edwin : that of a ponderous young man 
 with immaculate black hair carefully parted in the 
 middle, who had sat stolidly through the Astill Ex- 
 hibition examination a few desks away from him. 
 As he did not appear to be anxious to recognise 
 this fact, Edwin abandoned his own intention of 
 doing so, and, like the rest of the company, pos- 
 sessed his soul in silence. In the meantime he
 
 JHE CITY OF IRON 259 
 
 watched the others with a good deal of interest and 
 speculation. 
 
 1 They were a strangely mixed company: a few 
 of them, of whom Edwin himself was one, mere 
 boys, to whom the air of the schoolroom still clung : 
 some obvious men of the world, scrupulously, even 
 doggily dressed, in an age when the fancy waist- 
 coat had reached the zenith of its daring; others, 
 and one other in particular, a seedy looking person 
 with a dejected fair moustache, were clearly old 
 enough to be the fathers of the youngest. It was 
 to the second of these classes, the bloods, that 
 Edwin found his attention attracted, and particu- 
 larly to a paragon of elegance, whose waistcoat was 
 the orange colour of a blackbird's bill with light 
 blue enamelled buttons, whose hair was mathemati- 
 cally bisected and shone with expensive unguents, 
 and whose chin differed from that of Edwin in being 
 shaved from sheer necessity instead of from motives 
 of encouragement. 
 
 This person exuded an atmosphere of prosperity 
 and style that took Edwin's fancy immensely, and 
 he wore grey flannel trousers as correctly turned 
 up as any that Edwin had seen upon the enchanted 
 platform of the station at Oxford. It was evident 
 that the process of waiting bored him ; for he took 
 out of the pocket of the amazing waistcoat a gold 
 hunter watch with a front enamelled in the same 
 shade of light blue. The lid flicked upon noiselessly 
 when he touched a spring, and Edwin began to be 
 exercised in his mind as to what happened when 
 he put on a waistcoat of a different pattern, as ob- 
 viously a person of this degree of magnificence must
 
 2<5o THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 frequently do. Did he change the buttons, or did 
 lie change the watch? Edwin, surveying him, 
 looked unconsciously at his own Waterbury; and, 
 as he did so, the magnificent creature glanced at 
 him with a pair of savage brown eyes, and, as Edwin 
 decided, summed him up for good and all. 
 
 "Mr. Harrop, please," said the porter. And Mr. 
 Harrop pocketed his hunter and disdainfully en- 
 tered the office. 
 
 Edwin, relieved from his scrutiny, turned his at- 
 tention to the most impressive figure of all : a young 
 man fully six feet four in height, but so broadly 
 and heavily built that his tallness was scarcely 
 noticeable. His face was good-humoured, and very 
 plain, with the look of battered obstinacy that may 
 sometimes be seen in that of a boxer. Perhaps thia 
 idea was reinforced by the fact that his short nose 
 was broken, and that he carried his whole face a 
 little forward, staring out at the world from under 
 bushy black eyebrows. He seemed made for rough 
 usage, and his undoubted strength was qualified by 
 a degree of awkwardness that showed itself in his 
 clumsy hands. These, at the present time, were 
 clasped behind his back, beneath the folds of a 
 brand-new undergraduate's gown that, because of 
 his great height, looked ridiculously small. His 
 whole aspect was one of terrific earnestness. Evi- 
 dently he was taking this business, as he would 
 surely have taken any other, seriously. That, no 
 doubt, was the reason why on this occasion he alone 
 appeared in academical dress. His clasped hands, 
 his lowered head, his bulldog neck all spoke of a
 
 THE CITY OF IRON 261 
 
 determination to go through with this adventure at 
 all costs. 
 
 "Mr. Brown," said the porter, and nearly blun- 
 dering into the returning elegance of Mr. Harrop, 
 he slouched into the Dean's office as though he 
 were entering the ring for the heavy-weight cham- 
 pionship of the world. 
 
 In the end Edwin found himself left alone with a 
 youth of his own age, a tall, loose-limbed creature, 
 with an indefinite humorous face, a close crop of 
 curly fair hair and blue eyes. Edwin rather liked 
 the look of him. He was young, and seemed ap- 
 proachable, and though his striped flannel suit was 
 more elegant than Edwin's and he wore a school 
 tie of knitted silk, Edwin took the risk of address- 
 ing him. 
 
 "We seem to be the last." 
 
 "Yes. I expect the Dean will keep me last of 
 all, bad cess to him! That's because I happen to 
 be a sort of cousin of the old devil's." He spoke 
 with a soft brogue that had come from the south 
 of Ireland. 
 
 "Mr. Ingleby, please/' 
 
 Edwin pulled himself together and entered the 
 Dean's office. 
 
 A pleasant room : at one big desk a suave, clean- 
 shaven gentleman with thin sandy hair and gold- 
 rimmed spectacles. At another a little dark man 
 with a bald head and a typewriter in front of him. 
 
 "Mr. Ingleby?" said the first. His voice was re- 
 fined, if a little too precise. 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Well, Mr. Ingleby, what are you going to do?
 
 62 JHE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Ah, yes . . . you are the Astill scholar. Very good. 
 Very good. Are you proposing to take a London 
 degree?" 
 
 "No, sir. North Bromwich." 
 
 "Well ... it is possible you may change your 
 mind later. Have you taken the London Matricu- 
 lation ?" 
 
 "No, sir. I was on the classical side at St. Luke's. 
 I was reading for a scholarship at Oxford." 
 
 "And changed your mind . . . or" (shrewdly) 
 "had it changed for you?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Is your father a doctor?" 
 
 "No." It really doesn't matter what my father 
 is, thought Edwin, and the Dean, as though answer- 
 ing his reflection, said : 
 
 "No. . . . That doesn't matter." And, after a 
 pause: "Well, Mr. ... er ... Ingleby, you have 
 made a good beginning. I hope it will continue 
 satisfactorily. That is all, thank you. Good-morn- 
 ing." He held out his hand to Edwin, who was 
 astonished into putting out a moist hand himself. 
 "Yes," continued the Dean in a suave, reflective 
 voice, "you will pay your fees to my secretary, Mr. 
 Hadley. This is ... er ... Mr. Hadley. Yes." 
 
 Mr. Hadley acknowledged the introduction with 
 a lift of the right eyebrow and Edwin left the room. 
 
 "Mr. Martin," said the secretary, as he left, and 
 "Mr. Martin, please," the porter repeated. 
 
 "I say, wait a moment for me," said the loose- 
 limbed Irishman to Edwin in passing. 
 
 It was so friendly as to be cheering.
 
 THE CITY OF IRON 263 
 
 "He seems a decent old bird," said Martin, emerg* 
 ing a few minutes later. 
 
 "I thought you said he was your cousin?" 
 
 "So he is. You see I'm Irish, and so is he; and 
 in Ireland pretty nearly everybody who is anybody 
 is related to everybody else." He plunged into a 
 lengthy demonstration of the relationships of the 
 Southern aristocracy, with warnings as to the gulfs 
 that separated the Martins from the Martyns, and 
 the Plunketts from the Plunkets, rambling away 
 through a world of high-breeding and penury in 
 which all the inhabitants called each other by their 
 Christian names, and spent their lives in hunting, 
 point-to-point racing, and elaborate practical jokes. 
 A. new world to Edwin. 
 
 They strolled down Sackville How together, and 
 cutting through the Arcades came out into the wide 
 thoroughfare of Queen Street that had been driven 
 through an area of slums in honour of Victoria's 
 first jubilee. 
 
 "By the way, what's your school?" said Denis 
 Martin. 
 
 "St, Luke's." 
 
 "Never heard of it." 
 
 "I don't suppose you would, in Ireland." 
 
 "Oh, I didn't go to school in Ireland. Nobody 
 does. I was at Maryborough. Is St. Luke's one of 
 those soccer schools?" 
 
 "Good Lord, no. ... We play rugger. We're 
 pretty good." 
 
 "Who do you play?" 
 
 "Merchant Taylors and St. Paul's, and one or 
 two others."
 
 264 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "H'm. . . . They're day schools, aren't they? Is 
 St. Luke's that sort?" 
 
 Edwin, with enthusiasm, expounded the St. 
 Luke's legend, that nobody outside of St. Luke's has 
 ever been known to believe. Martin, meanwhile, 
 looked a little supercilious and bored. He spoke 
 as from a distant world in a tone that implied that 
 the people of North Bromwich could never call each 
 other by their Christian names or hunt or race or 
 play practical jokes with an air of being born to it. 
 
 "I expect we're a pretty mixed lot here," he said. 
 
 And Edwin, with the guilty consciousness of be- 
 ing more than a little mixed himself, replied : "Yes." 
 
 "An extraordinary collection. That great dark 
 fellow looks an absolute tyke. Then there's the 
 chap with the waistcoat " 
 
 "Yes. . . . Harrop was the name." 
 
 "I don't know the name," said Martin dubiously. 
 "Never heard of the family. He was wearing an 
 Oriel tie." 
 
 "Oriel. . . . Do you mean Oxford?" 
 
 "Yes, one of my cousins was there. That's how 
 I know it. I should think they turfed him out on 
 account of that waistcoat. Still, Oxford isn't what 
 it used to be." "In the eyes of a Southern Union- 
 ist," he might have added. But the news was grate- 
 ful to Edwin. "I shouldn't wonder," Martin went 
 on, "if lots of decent people didn't end by coming 
 to schools like this. I expect it is the Dean's idea, 
 you know. I say, what about lunch? Do you know 
 of any decent place?" 
 
 In ancient days, when he had come into North 
 Bromwich shopping with his mother, Edwin had
 
 THE CITY OF IRON 265 
 
 always been taken to Battle's, the great confec- 
 tioner's in Queen Street, but now, passing the doors 
 in this exalted company, he felt that the company 
 of a crowd of shabby shopping women would hardly 
 be suitable: besides, he might even run the risk 
 of meeting his Aunt Laura, who also frequented 
 the shop, so he left Battie's prudently alone. 
 
 "I know one place," said Martin. "I should think 
 it's all right. The food's decent anyway." 
 
 He led the way up a side street to an elegant 
 resort frequented by the professional classes of 
 North Bromwich, where these was a long counter 
 set out with sandwiches like a buffet at a dance, 
 and all the customers seemed at home. In the 
 ordinary way Edwin would not have dared to enter 
 it, but Martin, with the elegant confidence of South- 
 ern Unionism, showed him the way, and seated at 
 a marble-topped table they trifled with Plover on 
 toast. Martin, of course, did the choosing, and in 
 his dealings with the tiny carcass showed a famili- 
 arity with the correct method of consuming small 
 birds that Edwin was pleased to learn. "Ever shoot 
 plover?" he said. No . . . Edwin had never shot 
 anything : he didn't particularly want to shoot any- 
 thing; but he realised that it was a great accom- 
 plishment to be able to talk about it as though he 
 had never done anything else. 
 
 "I'll pay," said Martin. "We can square up after- 
 wards." 
 
 They did so and, thawed by the process of feed- 
 ing, began to talk more easily. "Are you digging 
 in this place?" Martin asked. Edwin told him that 
 he lived in the country.
 
 266 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "In the country? I didn't know there was any 
 here. Have you any decent shooting?" 
 
 "Unfortunately, no." He remembered, however, 
 the solitary trout under the bridge below the abbey. 
 "There's fishing of sorts," he said. 
 
 "What sorts?" 
 
 "Oh, trout " 
 
 "Brown trout? There's not much fun in that. 
 White trout . . . sea trout you call them in Eng- 
 land . . . are good sport. Still, we'll have a day 
 together next spring. I'll get my rods over." 
 
 The subject was dangerous, and so Edwin asked 
 him where he was living: "With your cousin, I 
 suppose." 
 
 "Oh, no. ... I don't know the old divil, you 
 know. I've rooms with an old lady up in Alvaston. 
 She's rather a decent sort. House full of animals." 
 He didn't specify what the animals were. "I'd bet- 
 ter go and unpack some of my things. I suppose I 
 shall see you at the Chemistry Lecture to-morrow. 
 So long. . . . Oh, I forgot. . . . What's your 
 name?" 
 
 "Ingleby." 
 
 "Ingleby. . . . Eight-o." He boarded a passing 
 bus with the air of stepping on to a coach and four. 
 
 Edwin took the next train home. On the oppo- 
 site platform of the station he caught a glimpse of 
 the great bulk of the man named Brown walking 
 up and down with earnestness in his eyes and under 
 his arm a huge parcel of books. He gave Edwin 
 the impression of wanting to throw himself into the 
 adventure of the medical curriculum as he might 
 have thrown himself into a Rugby scrum, expecting
 
 THE CITY OF IRON 267 
 
 a repetition of the tremendous battering that he 
 seemed already to have undergone. 
 
 Thinking of him, and of the aristocratic Martin, 
 and of Harrop, a product which Oriel had finished 
 to the last waistcoat button, and, more dimly, of the 
 elderly gentleman with the dejected moustaches, it 
 seemed to Edwin that he himself was appallingly 
 young and callow and inexperienced. 'How was he 
 going to stand up to these people with their knowl- 
 edge of the world and its ways: men who had al- 
 ready, by virtue of their birth or experience, learned 
 how to dress and live and move without effort in 
 the crowded world? Yet with them, he knew, he 
 must now take his place. It would be difficult . . . 
 awfully difficult. He had everything, even the most 
 elementary rules of conduct, to learn. He was a 
 child who had never known another human being 
 except his mother and a few school friends of his 
 own age. He had not even the savoir-vivre of 
 Griffin. And, in this new life, it seemed to him that 
 the dreams on which he had depended must be 
 useless or even more, a positive handicap to his 
 success. 
 
 The moments of sudden spiritual enlightenment 
 that one reads of in the lives of saints, or of con- 
 verts to Salvationism, are not a common experience 
 in those of ordinary men ; and though, in the turn 
 of every tide, there is a critical period, measurable 
 by the fraction of a second, in which the waters 
 that have swayed forwards retire upon themselves, 
 to the eyes of an observer the change of motion is 
 so gradual as to be only slowly perceived. In Ed- 
 win's life the death of his mother had been the
 
 268 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 real point of crisis; but this he had only dimly 
 realised when his hopes of Oxford had been dashed 
 for ever in a third-class compartment hurtling un- 
 der Bredon Hill. Between it and the present mo- 
 ment there had hung a period of dead water (so 
 to speak) in which the current of his life had 
 seemed suspended ; but now he knew that there was 
 no doubt biht that a change had overtaken him, and 
 that he would never again be the same. 
 
 All his life, up to this point, had been curiously 
 inorganic: a haphazard succession of novel and 
 bewildering sensations: a kaleidoscope of sensual 
 impressions changing almost too rapidly to be ap- 
 preciated so rapidly that it had been impossible 
 for him to think of one in relation to another. Some 
 of them had been painful ; some enthralling in their 
 beauty ; some merely engrossing because they were 
 full of awe: yet all had been ecstatic, and tinged 
 in some degree with a visionary light. Now, as 
 always, it was clear that he must be a dreamer; 
 but, from this day onwards, it also became clear 
 that his visions must be something more to him 
 than a series of coloured impressions, succeeding 
 one another without reason and accepted without 
 explanation. In the future they must be corre- 
 lated with experience and the demands of life. In 
 that lost age of innocence the people with whom he 
 came into contact had interested him only as figures 
 passing through the scenes that were spread for 
 his delectation. They had been external to him. 
 He had lived within himself and his loneliness had 
 been so self-sufficient that it would have made no 
 great difference to him if they had not been there.
 
 THE CITY OF IRON 269 
 
 Now he was to take his part in the drama at which, 
 in times before, he had merely sat as a bemused 
 spectator. It was a stirring and a terrifying pros- 
 pect. 
 
 The train from North Bromwich stopped at every 
 station, and the whole of the journey lay through 
 the black desert that fringes the iron city, a vast 
 basin of imprisoned smoke, bounded by hills that 
 had once been crowned with woods, but were now 
 dominated by the high smoke-stacks of collieries, 
 many of them ruined and deserted. ^At a dirty 
 junction, so undermined with workings that the 
 bridge and the brick offices were distorted in a 
 manner which suggested that the whole affair might 
 some day go down quick into the pit, he changed 
 into the local train. The railway company evi- 
 dently did not consider the passenger traffic of 
 Halesby worth consideration, for the carriages 
 were old and grimy. Edwin chose a smoker because 
 the cushions were covered with American leather 
 and therefore more obviously clean. He found him- 
 self, in the middle of his reflections, sitting opposite 
 a coloured photograph of the great gorge at Ax- 
 combe, a town that was served by the same line. 
 The picture carried him suddenly to another aspect 
 of his too complicated life. Keally, the whole busi- 
 ness was hopelessly involved. He thought, grimly, 
 how he could have taken the wind out of Martin's 
 genealogical sails by blurting out the astounding in- 
 telligence that his uncle was a gardener. And what 
 would the gentleman with the waistcoat have said? 
 He laughed at the idea. 
 
 Through a short but sulphurous tunnel the train
 
 270 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 emerged into the valley of the Stour: the vista 
 of the hills unfolded, and later the spire of Halesby 
 church appeared at the valley's head. Well, a be- 
 ginning of the new life had to be made some day, 
 and now as well as ever. 
 
 Walking home along the cinder pathway beside 
 the silting fish-ponds it seemed to him that in the 
 light of his new experience, Halesby was a primi- 
 tive and almost pitiable place, and the same mood 
 held him when he made his way home by the short 
 cut through Mrs. Barrow's cloistered garden and 
 entered his father's house. Under the south wall 
 the bed of double stocks was still in flower, though 
 faded and bedraggled. Their scent reminded him 
 of what a world of experience he had traversed in 
 less than three months. He went straight up to 
 his own bedroom. On the bed lay two parcels ad- 
 dressed to him. The larger contained his under- 
 graduate's cap and gown. He put them on in front 
 of the glass and rather fancied himself. The act 
 struck him as in a way symbolical : it was the 
 token of an initiation. From that day forward he 
 was a medical student. For five or six years, prob- 
 ably for the rest of his life, he would spend his time 
 in the presence of the most bitter human experi- 
 ence; but there was something elevating in the 
 thought that he need not be a helpless spectator: 
 he would be able to effect positive good in a way 
 that no scholar and no preacher of religion or ab- 
 Btract morality could possibly attain. "This is my 
 life," he thought. Well, it was good to know any- 
 thing as definite as that. 
 
 The second parcel contained a number of tech-
 
 THE CITY OF IRON 271 
 
 nical books dealing with the subjects of his first 
 year's curriculum: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, 
 Physiology, and Anatomy. The last appeared to 
 be the most exciting. "Fearfully and wonderfully 
 made . . ." he thought. He set to work at once 
 preparing the little room for work, making it as 
 comfortable as he could with a writing table in the 
 window that looked out over Shenstone's woods 
 and dethroning the superannuated Henty and Fenn 
 from the bookshelf. He could not find it in his 
 heart to treat his poets so cavalierly, and so there 
 they stayed. Greek and Latin and English. "I 
 shall never drop my classics," he thought. A reso- 
 lution that has been forgotten nearly as often as it 
 has been made. In the Blenheim orange-tree at 
 the bottom of the garden a thrush was singing. 
 Bullfinches were fighting shrilly in the raspberry 
 canes. He threw open the window, and there 
 ascended to him the heavy, faded perfume of the 
 bed of stocks. On the mantelpiece stood a photo- 
 graph of his mother. Looking at it, it seemed to 
 him that she smiled.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD . 
 
 HE was happy : even Halesby became a grateful 
 place of retirement after his long days in 
 North Bromwich. The mornings of early autumn 
 were very beautiful, and it was with a good deal 
 of zest that he would scramble through his break- 
 fast and leave the house early to catch the eight 
 o'clock train. He usually made use of the short cut 
 through Mrs. Barrow's garden and the cinder path 
 beside the fish-ponds, and in this brisk walk, with 
 the blood of youth running happily in his veins, 
 he would catch a little of the exhilarating atmos- 
 phere of early morning in the country. When the 
 frosts began, as they do early on that high plateau, 
 the morning air seemed stronger and more bracing 
 than ever. 
 
 Circumstance, in a little more than three 
 months, had exalted him to the state of those metro- 
 politan season-ticket holders whose majesty he had 
 disturbed on the day when he left St. Luke's for 
 good. He was now in a position to appreciate their 
 exclusiveness, and to look upon all chance people 
 who intruded on the privacies of the eight o'clock 
 train with the same mingled curiosity and con- 
 
 272
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD ... 273 
 
 tempt. In every way a season ticket, in its cover 
 of dark blue morocco, was a thing superior to the 
 transitory and ignoble pasteboard. He could hardly 
 resist a sigh of bored superiority on the first oc- 
 casion when he produced it. He travelled second- 
 class, thus rising to the highest level of luxury in 
 travelling permitted to any inhabitants of Halesby, 
 unless it were the local baronet or Mr. Willis of 
 Mawne, whom even Sir Joseph Kingston could not 
 outdo. 
 
 Most of the other season-ticket holders travelled 
 second; and in this way, by making a habit of 
 taking his place in the same carriage, for senti- 
 mental reasons one that contained a series of west- 
 country pictures, Edwin began to be on speaking 
 terms with many members of this select company. 
 They included a youth articled to a solicitor in 
 North Bromwich, the son of a Halesby postmaster, 
 who was inclined to establish terms of familiarity ; 
 a gentleman with a bloated complexion and a fawn- 
 coloured bowler hat, reputed to be a commercial 
 traveller, who carried a bag in which samples may 
 well have been hidden; a superior person with a 
 gruff voice who was a clerk in a bank in the city, 
 and on Saturdays carried a brown canvas bag and 
 a hockey stick; and a withered man of fifty who 
 travelled into North Bromwich daily on some busi- 
 ness connected with brass, and, on damp mornings, 
 exhibited evidences of an asthmatic complaint that 
 aroused Edwin's budding professional interest. 
 
 It was he who first admitted Edwin to the con- 
 versation of the compartment, by confessing to him 
 that he had been the despair of doctors since child-
 
 274 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 hood : that three specialists had assured his mother 
 that she would never rear that boy : that in spite of 
 this he had always paid four times as much in doc- 
 tor's bills as in income-tax, that in his belief they 
 only kept him alive for what they could get out of 
 him, and that his life had been an unending misery, 
 as harrowing, upon his word, as that of any of the 
 sufferers who were illustrated in the papers hold- 
 ing their backs with kidney complaint, until his 
 missus had said: "Don't throw any more money 
 away on these doctors, John, I'll have a talk with 
 Mr. Ingleby," . . . and with the aid of Ingleby's 
 Asthma Cure he had become relatively whole. Evi- 
 dently he knew who Edwin was. "What do you 
 think of that now?" he wheezed, and covered the 
 embarrassment into which Edwin was immediately 
 thrown by not waiting for his reply and continuing : 
 "I suppose, now, you'll be learning to be a chemist 
 like your father?" 
 
 "No . . . I'm a medical student. I'm going to 
 be a doctor." 
 
 "Well . . . I'll be damned," said the asthmatical 
 person. He did not say why; but the looks of the 
 superior bank clerk, who immediately lowered his 1 
 paper and stared at Edwin as though it were his 
 duty to decide whether Edwin were a fit person to 
 enter a learned profession or not, and then con- 
 temptuously went on with his reading, supplied 
 the kind of commentary that might have been in- 
 tended. When the asthmatical subject said that 
 he was damned, the gentleman with the bloated 
 complexion and the fawn-coloured bowler, who al- 
 ways opened his morning paper with fingers that
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD ... 275 
 
 trembled, either with excitement or as a result of 
 the night before, at the column headed Turf Topics, 
 gave a snigger and spat on the floor to conceal it. 
 And the articled clerk, at this display of ill breed- 
 ing, turned up his nose. 
 
 It was a strange little company that assembled 
 in the second-class smoker every morning; and the 
 strangest part of it, to Edwin, was the fact that 
 each of them, entrenched, as it were, behind his 
 morning paper, affected a frigid disinterest, yet 
 eagerly listened to the conversation and eagerly 
 scrutinised the appearance of the others. All of 
 them had their little fixed habits. In one place 
 they put their gloves: in another their umbrellas. 
 Every morning they began to read their papers at 
 the same column and folded them at the same point 
 in the journey. They seemed just as regular in 
 their habits as the wheels of the carriage in which 
 they travelled, revolving and stopping and shunt- 
 ing and being braked at an identical time and place 
 for six days out of the seven. 
 
 When he had tumbled to this, Edwin found that 
 the whole of the main line train that he caught 
 every morning at the junction was occupied by per- 
 haps a hundred grouped units of the same kind. It 
 amused him to sample them; and when one ap- 
 pealed to him he would become a member of it for 
 a time and see what he could make of it. Naturally 
 there were more interesting people on the main 
 line than on the Halesby branch ; and in the end he 
 himself became such a familiar figure on the eight- 
 twenty from the junction that he could say "Good- 
 morning" to nearly every group of seasons on the
 
 276 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 train. He was even taken to the heart of the su- 
 perior gruff-voiced bank clerk in the Halesby car- 
 riage. Indeed, he knew every one of them, finding 
 them human people who, in the manner of the Eng- 
 lishman and the hedgehog, had put out their pro- 
 tective spikes upon a first acquaintance. 
 
 The only Halesby traveller of whom he could 
 make nothing was the bloated person in the fawn- 
 coloured bowler, who began the morning with turf 
 topics and then proceeded to suck a copying pencil 
 till his lips were the colour of his cheeks, and, thus 
 inspired, to underline the names of a number of 
 horses in the day's programme. Apart from his 
 habit of spitting on the floor, a custom which prob- 
 ably saved the poor man from death by poisoning 
 with copying ink, he was inoffensive. Edwin was 
 even sorry for him sometimes when he saw him 
 hung up over his forecasts. Then he would tilt the 
 fawn-coloured bowler on to the. back of his head, 
 and scratch his head under the sandy fringe of 
 hair. Edwin was sorry because, with a head like 
 that, it must have been so difficult to forecast any- 
 thing. 
 
 He did not see many women on the morning 
 train. In those days female enterprise was a good 
 deal checked by conventions that died more slowly 
 in the Midland plain than elsewhere. From 
 Halesby itself there were only four season-ticket 
 holders of the opposite sex. Two of them were em- 
 ployed in the same large drapery establishment in 
 Queen Street, and were excessively ladylike and 
 careful in all their behaviour. Edwin had never 
 spoke to either of them ; but he discovered in both
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD . . , 277 
 
 an identical physical state: that peculiar greenish, 
 waxen pallor that appears to be the inevitable re- 
 sult of serving in a draper's shop. The black dresses 
 on which their employers insisted, heightened this 
 effect of fragility, and on mornings when tiredness 
 had made them start too late for the train, so that 
 they had to hurry over the last hundred yards, Ed- 
 win would notice how they panted for breath within 
 their elegant corsets and how faint was the flush 
 that came into their cheeks. 
 
 He felt a little sorry for them ; but they were not 
 in the least sorry for themselves. In Halesby their 
 employment at a monstrous third-rate drapery store 
 gave them a position of unusual distinction as 
 arbiters of feminine fashions, and they would not 
 have exchanged their distinguished anaemia for any 
 other calling under the sun. In their profession 
 this toxic pallor, as of sea-kale blanched in a cellar, 
 was regarded as an asset. It was considered 
 French. And did not their shortness of breath, 
 upon the least exertion or emotion, cause their 
 bosoms to rise and fall like those of the heroines 
 of the serial fiction that they read, when they were 
 not too tired, in the train? 
 
 Edwin was not attracted by them any more than 
 by the other couple : a pair of pupil teachers from 
 an elementary school in one of the northern 
 suburbs, who also dressed for the part that they 
 were fulfilling in life, and wore spectacles as tokens 
 of their studiousness. The instinct of sex had as 
 yet scarcely asserted itself in him. He was a little 
 curious about it, and that was all. Subconsciously, 
 perhaps, it found expression in his anxieties about
 
 278 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Ms personal appearance. He was beginning to take 
 a considerable interest in what should or should 
 not be worn, treating it more as a matter of abstract 
 science than as one of practical politics; for he 
 had few clothes beyond those in which he had left 
 St. Luke's, and was not likely to have any oppor- 
 tunity of extending his wardrobe until these were 
 worn out. In those days the weekly called To-Day 
 had reached its most vigorous phase, and a column 
 headed Masculine Modes was a matter of earnest 
 consideration to Edwin every Thursday, when the 
 paper appeared. In the spring, he decided, he 
 would buy an overcoat with Eaglan sleeves. The 
 weekly authority, who styled himself "The Major," 
 was dead nuts on Kaglan sleeves. Beneath this 
 fashionable covering Edwin's interior defects 
 would be well hidden, and, given a natty red tie 
 (de rigueur, said the Major, with the indispensable 
 blue serge reefer suit) and a bowler hat with a 
 curly, but not too curly, brim, he should be able to 
 compete with the burly bank clerk as cynosure for 
 the eyes of the pale young ladies in the "drapery" 
 and a spectacle of awe for the studious pupil- 
 teachers. 
 
 Edwin soon became absorbed in the routine of 
 the first year student's life, and had very little time 
 to think about anything else./ He had to work hard 
 to keep pace with it, and the realisation of this was 
 a striking lesson to him. At St. Luke's he had 
 found that his advance in knowledge made the work 
 progressively more easy. Here he was breaking
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD ... 279 
 
 new ground from the beginning, acquiring knowl- 
 edge of a kind that owed nothing to general culture 
 and came to him none the easier for his possession 
 of it. The only things in his new work that seemed 
 easy and logical to him were those scientific names 
 that were derived from Latin and .Greek. Other- 
 wise the very rudiments and nature of the subjects 
 were new to him. 
 
 The most astonishing part of the whole business 
 was the way in which the formidable assembly that 
 had glared at him, as he imagined, outside the 
 Dean's office, simplified itself. He had been pre- 
 pared to find them creatures of a different tissue 
 from himself, and particularly such apparitions as 
 Harrop and the immense Brown. He soon saw that 
 as far as the career of Medicine was concerned they 
 were identically in the same box as himself: that 
 neither knowledge of the world nor elegance of at- 
 tire could help either of them to acquire the abso- 
 lute knowledge that was the one thing essential to 
 success. It made no matter that these two ap- 
 proached the same problem from essentially dif- 
 ferent angles: Brown with his earnest brows 
 knitted and a look of indomitable but baffled de- 
 termination; Harrop as though the issue didn't 
 really matter as long as the crease in his trousers 
 was in the right place; but in either case Edwin 
 saw that they had to work as hard or harder than 
 he did. 
 
 His first acquaintance, Martin, who was now be- 
 coming his friend, since the work that they shared 
 in common bridged the social gulf of which Edwin 
 alone was aware, seemed to possess the faculty of
 
 280 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 doing things and learning facts almost in spite of 
 himself. He was not in any way brilliant, but he 
 had a way with him and a certain shrewdness that 
 not infrequently underlies the superficial indolence 
 of the Celt. Above all things Edwin found him 
 good company, for the picturesqueness of his brogue 
 and a sense of humour, not of the verbal kind in 
 which Edwin himself dealt, but the broader humour 
 that arises from situations, and personal charac- 
 teristics, made his society a peculiar joy. At the 
 first lecture on Chemistry, a dull dissertation on 
 first principles, Edwin had gravitated to the seat 
 next to him, and for the rest of the term they kept 
 the same places and afterwards compared notes. 
 Edwin couldn't help liking him, even though he 
 was conscious of the radical social misunderstand- 
 ing that underlay their friendship. 
 
 The technical sciences of Chemistry and Physics 
 made no strong appeal to Edwin. They seemed to 
 him matters of empirical knowledge that must be 
 acquired according to schedule but would have very 
 little connection with the work of his profession, 
 and he found them too near to the desperate sub- 
 ject of mathematics to be congenial. He could find 
 nothing romantic or human in them ; and this fact, 
 in itself, is a sufficient indictment of the way in 
 which they were taught. 
 
 Anatomy was another matter altogether. He had 
 anticipated the beginning of this study with a feel- 
 ing in which awe and an instinctive distaste were 
 mingled. From the first day he had known that 
 somewhere up at the top of the building lay the dis- 
 secting room, a place that his fancy painted as a
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD ... 281 
 
 kind of Chamber of Horrors. On his way to the 
 theatre, in which the Dean lectured on Anatomy 
 with a scholarly refinement of phrase that trans- 
 cended the natural elegance of Martin and a fasci- 
 nating collection of coloured chalks, he had passed 
 the gloomy door and seen a blackboard on which the 
 names of the Prosectors were recorded in white let- 
 tering. But he preferred not to look inside. Mar- 
 tin, to whom all adventures came more easily, 
 settled the point for him. 
 
 "I say," he said immediately after the lecture, 
 "have you put yourself down for a part?" 
 
 "A part? What do you mean?" 
 
 "Anatomy. Dissecting. They're shared between 
 two, you know. In the first term we're supposed 
 to do an Upper or a Lower. Suppose we go shares 
 in one " 
 
 "All right," said Edwin. "Which shall it be?" 
 
 "Well, I think an Upper will be better. There's 
 less fat and mess about it. We'd better go and 
 choose one now." 
 
 "All right." 
 
 "Come along, then." Martin opened the door of 
 the dissecting room and held it while Edwin 
 entered. It was a long, irregular chamber, with a 
 low glass roof and an asphalt floor. Edwin's first 
 impression was one of light and space : the second, 
 of a penetrating odour unlike anything that he had 
 smelt before. He could not give a name to it, and 
 indeed it was complex, being compact of a pungent, 
 unknown antiseptic and another fainter smell that 
 was, in fact, that of ancient mortality. The effect 
 of the whole was strange but not nauseating as
 
 282 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 he would have expected. All down the room at 
 short intervals long zinc tables, with a tin bucket 
 at the head of each, were ranged. Most of the 
 tables were empty; but on four or five of them 
 "subjects" were either displayed or lay draped in 
 coarse, unbleached calico. One or two of them 
 sprawled on their faces, but most of them, being 
 as yet unappropriated, were supported under their 
 backs by small metal platforms from which the 
 heads rolled back and the limbs were stretched out 
 in a posture of extreme but petrified agony. To 
 Edwin's eyes it was a lamentable and terrible 
 sight. He wondered by what chain of degradations 
 the body of a man who had lived and known the 
 youth and pride of body that he himself possessed, 
 who had experienced aspirations and dreams and 
 hope and love, should descend to this final in- 
 dignity. He stood still. He did not dare, for the 
 moment, to come nearer. 
 
 "How do they get here?" he asked Martin. 
 
 "Oh, they're paupers, you know. Old men and 
 women, most of them, who die in the workhouses 
 and are not claimed by their relatives. Instead of 
 burying them they send them along here. The 
 anatomy porters collect them. Then they're pickled 
 for feo long in a kind of vat in the cellars of this 
 place, and they inject them with arsenic to preserve 
 them, and pump red paint into their arteries so 
 that they're easier to dissect. I shouldn't like the 
 job myself} but I suppose the porters are used to 
 it. You get used to anything, you know. Besides, 
 they aren't a bit like they are when they're first 
 dead. I think that's the chap for us. I had a look
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD . . , 283 
 
 at him the other day. It's always better to choose 
 an old one. The muscles are cleaner. Less work." 
 
 They approached the second table. The subject 
 was an old and withered man: his grey hair was 
 shaven, and his mouth hung open, showing that 
 he had lost his teeth. Martin had been quite right. 
 He didn't look in the least like a dead man. He 
 did not look like a man at all: only a pathetic, 
 tanned skeleton with tight-drawn sinews and 
 toughened skin: a dried mummy, from which all 
 the contours of humanity had shrunk away. It 
 wasn't so bad after all. The picture that Edwin's 
 imagination had anticipated, that of a crude and 
 horrible human shambles, was not here. No . . . 
 the idea of humanity was too remote to be in the 
 least insistent. For a moment, in spite of this con- 
 solation, Edwin went pale. Martin noticed it. 
 
 "I say, this isn't going to turn you up, is it?" 
 
 "No. . . . I'm all right. I was only . . . think- 
 ing." 
 
 "Thinking?" said Martin, with a laugh. "I 
 shouldn't do too much of that if I were you. We'd 
 better make a start to-morrow on the right Upper. 
 I'll put our names down." 
 
 He turned towards the glass case in which hung 
 notices of lectures and the printed cards on which 
 the names of dissectors were recorded, and while 
 he did so Edwin still stood thinking. He thought: 
 Was this really a man who had lived and breathed 
 and aged and suffered? Where had he been born? 
 How long ago? Had he ever loved? Had he ever 
 married? Had he ever wondered what the future 
 would bring to him? surely his fancies had never
 
 284 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 envisaged this. Perhaps he had been born in some 
 remote hamlet of the marches, some sweet smelling 
 village like Far Forest, from which the iron 
 tentacles of the city had drawn him inwards and 
 sapped his life, leaving, in the end, this dry shell, 
 like the sucked carcass of a fly blowing in a spider's 
 web. If this were the end of poverty and desola- 
 tion, what a terrible thing poverty must be. Did 
 the poor and the outcast ever dream that they 
 might come to this? And yet, after all, what did 
 it matter? . . . 
 
 He awoke from his dream. It was evident that 
 lie was the only dreamer in that long room. At 
 many of the other tables second year men were 
 sitting quietly dissecting or gossiping or thumbing 
 manuals of practical anatomy yellow with human 
 grease. It amazed him that men should be able 
 to joke and smoke their pipes and appear to be con- 
 tented in such an atmosphere; but the wisdom of 
 Martin's phrase returned to him.: "You get used to 
 anything, you know." 
 
 Among the dissectors already at work in their 
 white overalls, he saw the ponderous frame of the 
 man called Brown. He, at any rate, was not letting 
 the grass grow under his feet. Already he was en- 
 gaged in reflecting the skin from the "Lower" on 
 which he was working. His clumsy hands found 
 the work difficult, as was shown by the anxiety of 
 his partner, an immaculate smooth young man, 
 whom Edwin already knew by the name of Maskew, 
 dressed in the Major's indispensable navy serge 
 reefer, with the correct red tie and a big orchid in
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD ... 285 
 
 his buttonhole. He took an elaborate meerschaum 
 pipe out of his mouth to protest : 
 
 "Good Lord, Brown, there's another cutaneous 
 nerve gone phut. Do be careful !" 
 
 And Brown, with an exaggerated earnestness: 
 
 "I say, old man, I am sorry. I simply can't use 
 the damned things. Do you mean to say that's a 
 nerve?" He held up in his forceps a tiny white fila- 
 ment of tissue. 
 
 "Yes," said Maskew, returning to his pipe. 
 "Branch of the great gluteal. Listen to what Cun- 
 ningham* says : 'The buttock is liberally supplied 
 with cutaneous nerves : a fact much appreciated by 
 schoolboys.' " 
 
 Brown scratched his head with the handle of his 
 scalpel. "Well, I'm in an absolute fog. You'd bet- 
 ter take this job on to-morrow, and I'll do the read- 
 ing. What does 'cutaneous' mean, anyway?" 
 
 "Cutis," thought Edwin, "Skin." After all, it 
 seemed, the dead languages had their uses. By this 
 time he had recovered from the first shock of his 
 distaste; he was getting used to the odour of the 
 room, and so, ji moment later, he and Martin 
 strolled over to a table at which one of the prosec- 
 tors was engaged in preparing a specimen for the 
 Dean's lectures. It was almost pleasant to watch 
 the deftness with which he defined the line of a 
 pink, injected artery, wielding his scalpel as deli- 
 cately and as surely as a painter at work on a can- 
 vas. They watched .him working in silence. "Mce 
 part, isn't it?" he said with condescension. 
 
 "Yes," said Martin, "this sort of thing must be 
 rattling good practice for surgery."
 
 286 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Oh, surgery's quite different," said the prosector. 
 "This is a lazy job. There's no hurry about it. This 
 fellow won't bleed to death." 
 
 So Edwin and Denis Martin began to work on 
 their Upper, and the dissecting room that had been 
 an abode of horror and an incentive to philosophy 
 became no more than the scene of their daily 
 labours. Edwin accepted his new callousness with- 
 out regret for the sensitive perceptions that he had 
 lost, for he saw that his heart and his imagination 
 were not really less tender for the change; they 
 had merely come to a working agreement with the 
 demands of his new life, and had attained this satis- 
 factory state not so much by a suppression of 
 sensibility as by an insistence on the objective as- 
 pects of his work. 
 
 This fact explained to him, at the very beginning 
 of his career, the fallacy of medical callousness in 
 relation to pain or physical distress. He saw, on 
 reflection, that if a doctor exaggerated the impor- 
 tance of subjective sensations in his patient he 
 might well lose sight of his own object, which was 
 nothing more nor less than removing their cause : 
 that, for example, the fear of death, the anxiety of 
 relatives and the patient's own perception of in- 
 tolerable pain, were of infinitely less importance 
 to the physician than the presence of a focus of 
 danger in the patient's appendix. A sustained ob- 
 jectivity was the only attitude of mind in which a 
 doctor could live at the same time happily and effi- 
 ciently. 
 
 The only feature of the dissecting room that now 
 seemed objectionable was the smell of the powerful
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD ... 287 
 
 antiseptic that was used for preserving the subjects. 
 For a week or two Edwin was conscious of its per- 
 vading every moment of his life, his train-journeys, 
 his meal-times, even his sleep. But in a little time 
 his olfactory nerves became so used to it that they 
 discounted its presence, and the fact that his 
 neighbours in railway carriages did not seem to 
 shrink from him, convinced him that after all he 
 did not go about the world saturated in odours of 
 the charnel house. 
 
 The winter term went on, and to the sense of 
 hurry and frustration that had embarrassed him 
 at first and found its perfect expression in the 
 knitted brows of the monstrous Brown, succeeded 
 an atmosphere of leisure and method and ease. 
 Edwin had time for other things than work. He 
 began to know the men of his year, and to discover 
 that even the most formidable of them weren't half 
 as formidable as they had seemed. Harrop, in- 
 deed, w r as still a little remote. After the spacious- 
 ness of Oriel, where he had devoted a couple of 
 years to a liberal education in which the acquisition 
 of knowledge was of less importance than the 
 acquisition of style, North Bromwich, with its con- 
 centration on the virtues rather than the graces of 
 life and the very questionable sartorial shapes that 
 inhabited it, naturally seemed a little cheap; but 
 in a little time even Harrop became modified and 
 humble if a little contemptuous, and the most re- 
 splendent of his waistcoats retained no more 
 significance than the oriflamme of a lost cause. 
 
 Brown was the more approachable of the two, 
 and for Brown, Edwin soon conceived something
 
 288 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 that was very nearly an affection. With his impres- 
 sive physique and his experience of a rough world 
 in which Edwin had never moved, was mingled a 
 childlike enthusiasm for his new work, a rich, 
 blundering good humour, and great generosity. He 
 was not clever, and showed an intense admiration 
 for better heads than his own; but for all that he 
 was much more intelligent than he looked, and to 
 Edwin his enthusiasm and earnestness were worth 
 a good deal more than his intellectual attainments. 
 
 Once or twice, wandering into the Anatomical 
 Museum, he had come upon Brown standing rapt 
 in front of a specimen dissection or quietly sweat- 
 ing up bones with a Gray's Anatomy open before 
 him, and he had sung out to Edwin as if he were 
 an old friend of his own age and they had put in 
 an hour of work together. "You know, you're a 
 lot quicker than I am," said Brown. "I suppose it 
 comes of being decently educated. I expect that 
 when you were learning Latin and Greek I was 
 knocking about the world making a damn fool of 
 myself." Then they would light their pipes (the 
 dissecting room had made smoking necessary to 
 Edwin) and Brown would yarn on for half an hour 
 about his romantic adventures, his bitter quarrels 
 with his people, the adventures that had befallen 
 him in Paris when he went there to play football 
 for the Midlands, in all of which the passionate, 
 headstrong, obstinate and withal lovable nature of 
 the big fellow would appear. 
 
 "I expect it all sounds to you like a rotten waste 
 of time, mucking about with my life like this," he 
 said. "But you know I'm not at all sorry I've had
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD ... 289 
 
 it. ... I didn't take up this doctoring business in 
 a hurry, without thinking about it. I thrashed the 
 matter out ; and I came to the conclusion that doc- 
 toring's a good human sort of game: it's a sort of 
 chance of pulling people out of the rotten messes 
 of one kind or another that they get themselves into 
 through no fault of their own, poor devils, just 
 because they're made like you and me and the rest 
 of us. If you go on the bust, or knock about the 
 country with a football team on tour, or go on the 
 tramp and sleep in a hedge or a barn or a Rowton 
 House, as I did when I had the last flare-up with 
 the old man, you rub against a lot of people. They're 
 all just the same as yourself, you know. You can 
 see yourself in the best of them as well as the worst ; 
 and, taking them all round, they're all damned good 
 at the bottom. They've all got to fight out their 
 own way in life with their heads or their fists or 
 their feet. And the only chap that can really help 
 them in it is a doctor. That's the conclusion I've 
 come to. God! . . . you'll scarcely believe it, but 
 once I was converted. I know it's damn funny ; but 
 it's a fact that when I was a youngster and had 
 been on the periodical bust a revivalist chap got 
 hold of me and persuaded me that I was saved. It's 
 a funny sort of feeling, I can tell you. I thought 
 I was going off my nut until I went to see a doctor 
 and he put my liver right. It's a fine humane game, 
 Ingleby. You can take it from me. . . . But I can 
 tell you, with one thing and another, I've got my 
 work cut out." 
 
 He shook his head seriously, and the puzzled, 
 dogged expression of frustrate determination that
 
 290 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Edwin knew so well came into his eyes. ''We're 
 wasting time, my son," he said. "Let's get on with 
 the blasted humerus. Now, what is the origin of 
 the Supinator Longus? Come on . . ." 
 
 On one of these pleasant occasions he confided 
 to Edwin the reason why he had his work cut out. 
 His father, a stern Calvanistic Methodist, had 
 finally washed his hands of him. "I've been a bit of 
 a rolling stone, you see," said Brown, "and you 
 can't blame the poor old fellow. So he just planked 
 down six hundred and fifty pounds one day and 
 told me that I could do what I liked with it, but 
 that was the last I should get from him. It suited 
 me down to the ground. I didn't much care what 
 became of me then. It was a couple of years ago. 
 So I had a royal bust ... a sort of glorious wind- 
 up to the season . . . and then sat down to think. 
 I had just five hundred left, and so I had to think 
 what the devil I was going to do with it, and my 
 prospects seemed so putridly rotten that the only 
 thing I could do was to go on the bust again. I 
 didn't enjoy it much that time. Jaded palate, 
 you know. . . . But I had a bit of luck. I met a 
 trainer fellow in the Leicester lounge with a couple 
 of women, and he put me on to a double for the 
 Lincoln and National. I've no use for horse-racing. 
 If it was the owners that were racing there'd be a 
 vestige of sport in it; but it always seems to me a 
 shame that decent, clean creatures like horses 
 should make a living for a lot of dirty stiffs out of 
 the ruin of working men and small shopkeepers. 
 Still, I dreamed about this double, and as I'm a 
 weak superstitious sort of chap, I put a tenner on
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD ... 291 
 
 it. That's the first and the last bet I've ever had on 
 a horse. But the thing happened to come off; and 
 last spring I found myself with twelve hundred 
 pounds instead of six-fifty. So I began to think 
 it out. I remembered that doctor fellow who cured 
 me of being converted, and I thought, "By Gad, I'll 
 be a doctor.' A five year's course. Well, I'm not 
 particularly brilliant at the top end, and so I al- 
 lowed six. Six into twelve goes twice. Two hun- 
 dred a year for fees and living and clothes out- 
 size and recreation. You see, it's pretty tight. 
 Come along and have some lunch at Joey's." 
 
 m 
 
 They went downstairs to the cloak-room where 
 the porter was now a familiar of Edwin's. It had 
 been decided that it would not be becoming for a 
 really modern university, like that of North Brom- 
 wich, to impose the sight of such an anachronism 
 as academic dress on the streets, a rule that had 
 been something of a disappointment to Edwin, and 
 so they left their gowns behind. Joey's was an 
 institution of some antiquity, opposite to the 
 Corinthian town-hall, with which Brown had been 
 acquainted in his unregenerate days. It was a long 
 find noisy bar at which, for the sum of fourpence, 
 one consumed a quarter of the top of a cottage 
 loaf, a tangle of watercress, a hunk of Cheddar 
 cheese, and a tankard of beer. This combination 
 of excellences was known as a "crust and bitter," 
 and it was eaten standing at the counter. 
 
 Edwin was gradually becoming a regular cus- 
 tomer at this place ; for Martin's delicate fancy for
 
 292 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 plovers on toast and other such refinements had 
 proved too expensive for him, and apart from their 
 joint labours in the dissecting-room, they were be- 
 ginning to see less of each other not from any ill- 
 will on the part of either, but simply because Mar- 
 tin's position in the house of the old lady in Alvas- 
 ton, whose house was full of animals, had intro- 
 duced him to the social life of that elegant suburb 
 in which so perfect a carpet knight was bound to 
 shine; and Martin's social engagements with en- 
 couraging matrons and innumerable eligible daugh- 
 ters were becoming so pressing that his acquaint- 
 ance with the black heart of the city was gradually 
 becoming more and more casual. For this reason, 
 apart from his natural inclination, Edwin was 
 thrown into daily contact with Brown and his part- 
 ner Maskew. 
 
 Maskew was a more typical product of the Mid- 
 lands. His home, and all his upbringing, had lain 
 in one of the great black towns that cluster, like 
 swollen knots, upon the North Bromwich system 
 of railways. He had never lived in the country; 
 he did not even know what country was, and his 
 distinctive if provincial urbanity showed itself in 
 a hundred ways in his dress, that was a little too 
 smart, in his speech, that was not quite smart 
 enough, in a certain lack of fresh air in his mental 
 atmosphere. His people were wealthy, and his 
 tastes, without emulating the style of Harrop, were 
 expensive. He was handsome, and if his hair had 
 been shorter and not so mathematically correct he 
 would have been handsomer. Still, he was intensely 
 interested in women, and a great retailer of Rabe-
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD ... 293 
 
 laisian stories. He wore buttoned boots and was 
 very nearly a first-class billiard player. 
 
 A more unusual combination than his partner- 
 ship with the abrupt and unsubtle Brown it would 
 have been difficult to imagine; but even in his un- 
 doubted cleverness, his nature was complimentary, 
 and Edwin found himself happy in the society of 
 both. In their company he became a habitue of the 
 Dousita Cafe ; a subterranean privacy in which ex- 
 cellent coffee was served in the most comfortable 
 surroundings by young ladies whose charms had 
 already made something of a sensation in that 
 decorous city. Maskew, naturally, knew them all 
 by their Christian names, and treated them with a 
 familiar badinage that impressed Edwin, mildly 
 ambitious but quite incapable of imitation, by the 
 ease with which it was performed. The cushioned 
 seats and the mild stimulus of the coffee and ciga- 
 rettes would even rouse the massive Brown to a 
 ponderous levity by which the lady of their choice, 
 a certain Miss Wheeler, whose uncle, Maskew seri- 
 ously confided to Edwin, was a bishop, was obvious- 
 ly flattered. Edwin could understand any woman 
 being attracted by Brown, or rather, "W.G." as the 
 need of a distinction had by this time made his 
 familiar name. It also pleased him to see the way 
 in which W.G. went red in his bull neck on a cer- 
 tain occasion when Maskew had delicately over- 
 stepped the limits of good taste in his conversation 
 with Miss Wheeler. But the niece of the bishop 
 did not blush. . . . 
 
 In the intervals between lectures they would 
 congregate in their gowns in a dismal chamber,
 
 294 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 at the very bottom of the cramped building that 
 was called the Common Room, drinking tea and 
 eating squashed-fly biscuits. This place was fre- 
 quented not only by members of the Medical School 
 but by students of other faculties whom Edwin 
 regarded with some contempt. One afternoon on 
 entering this room Edwin found W.G. holding forth 
 with some indignation before a notice that had 
 been pinned on the board asking for a list of fresh- 
 men who were anxious to play Rugby football dur- 
 ing the present season. So far, only five or six 
 names had appeared: W.G.'s, naturally enough, 
 came first, for his prowess in the game was well 
 known in the North Bromwich district. 
 
 "Isn't it a damnable thing," he said indignantly, 
 "in a school of this size to see a measly list like 
 that?" 
 
 "You can stick mine down," said Edwin. 
 
 "Well ... as a matter of form, my son . . . 
 though I don't see what good you're likely to be to 
 the club except to give it tone." 
 
 "I play soccer," said Maskew. 
 
 "You would," said W.G. "Nice gentlemanly 
 game." 
 
 "Rugger isn't all beef," put in Edwin. 
 
 "No," said W.G., "but the team wants weight. 
 And this place is simply thick with great, hefty, 
 science men and brewers who've never known the 
 meaning of a healthy sweat in their lives. Upon 
 my word, it sickens me. Look at that chap." 
 
 He pointed to a corner in which a big fellow lay 
 huddled up in a deep basket chair. He had 
 shoulders that would have appeared massive by
 
 MORTALITY BEHOLD ... 295 
 
 the side of any others but W.G.'s : a fair wide face 
 marked with freckles, a sandy moustache and crisp, 
 curly red hair. "That's the kind of swine that 
 ought to be working in the scrum." 
 
 Edwin looked, and as he did so, instinctively 
 went pale. A curious survival of the instinct of 
 physical fear had shaken him. It was ridiculous. 
 "I know that chap," he said in an off-hand way. 
 "He's no good. I was at school with him. He's 
 got a weak heart. His name's Griffin."
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 CARNIVAL 
 
 /CHRISTMAS came: an old-fashioned Christmas 
 y*s with hoar frost on the fields and hard roads 
 gleaming with splintered light reflected from a 
 frosty sky. In this raiment of frozen moisture 
 even the black desert of Edwin's morning pilgrim- 
 age appeared fantastically beautiful. The vacation 
 did not suspend his work; for though no lectures 
 were given, the dissecting room was still open ; and 
 here, on icy mornings, when the asphalt floor was 
 as cold as the glass roof, he would freeze for an 
 hour at a time watching Brown and Maskew at 
 work, Martin having been whisked off to spend a 
 baronial Christmas of scratch dances in Ireland. 
 
 A few months in North Bromwich had made a 
 great change in Edwin. He had lost much of his 
 old timidity, shaved twice a week, smoked the plug 
 tobacco to which Brown had introduced him, and 
 was no longer shy with any creature on earth of 
 his own sex. With women it was different. . . . 
 Ease and familiarity with this baffling sex would 
 come, no doubt, in time; but for the present one 
 or two desperate essays at conversation with the 
 elegant Miss Wheeler in the absence of his friends 
 
 296
 
 CARNIVAi: 297 
 
 had been failures. And Miss Wheeler was not the 
 least approachable of her sex. There were several 
 women medical students in his year; but in their 
 case he had not felt the incentive to gallantry that 
 the softer charms of ^liss Wheeler suggested. Even 
 if they had not insulated themselves with shape- 
 less djibbehs of russet brown, and bunched back 
 their hair in a manner ruthlessly unfeminine, the 
 common study of a subject so grossly material as 
 anatomy would have rubbed the bloom from any 
 budding romance. 
 
 In the Biological laboratory, however, he found 
 a figure that exercised a peculiar attraction on him. 
 She was an American girl, a science student, who 
 with the severity of the medical women's dress con- 
 trived to combine an atmosphere of yielding femi- 
 ninity. She had a soft voice, for the tones of which 
 Edwin would listen, big grey-blue eyes, soft dark 
 hair, and very beautiful arms that her dark over- 
 alls displayed to perfection. Edwin would have 
 found it difficult to define the way in which she at- 
 tracted him : certainly he didn't cherish any definite 
 romantic ideas about her; but he did find her in 
 some subtle way disturbing, so that he would be 
 conscious of her presence when she came into the 
 lab. ; surprise himself listening for her voice when 
 she spoke to the professor, and find that, without 
 any definite volition, his eyes were watching her 
 profile. And one day when she passed him and 
 her overall brushed his sleeve, he found that he 
 was blushing. Maskew, with his usual easy famili- 
 arity, was already on joking terms with her, and 
 would sometimes sit on the table where she kept
 
 298 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 her microscope while they talked and laughed to- 
 gether; but though Edwin had every chance of 
 sharing in this intimacy, he couldn't bring himself 
 to do so; and when, in the end, he was introduced 
 to her formally, he wished that he were dead, and 
 could not speak a word for awkwardness. 
 
 With men, on the other hand, he was now quite 
 at his ease, even, strangely enough, with the once 
 formidable Griffin. Since the day when he had dis- 
 covered his old enemy in the Common Boom they 
 had often spoken to one another: they had even 
 sat side by side in the deep basket chairs, one of 
 which was now Griffin's habitual abode, and talked 
 of the old days at St. Luke's, and sometimes, in the 
 afternoon, they would share a pot of tea. There 
 was no awkwardness in their conversation, as Ed- 
 win had feared there might be, for Griffin appar- 
 ently took his expulsion as a matter of course, and, 
 on the whole, as rather a good joke. Of course 
 Griffin had changed. It was clear to Edwin from 
 the first that in some way he had shrunk not in- 
 deed physically, for he was fatter than ever; but 
 the air of conscious and threatening physical su- 
 periority that Edwin had found so oppressive in 
 his school days had vanished. Moreover, he was 
 now prepared to accept Edwin as an equal, and 
 make him the confidant of the amorous adventures 
 that now absorbed his time, adventures to which 
 the affair with the chambermaid at St. Luke's had 
 been the mildest possible prelude. Compared with 
 Griffin's positive achievements, the daring of 
 Maskew's relation with the young ladies of the 
 Dousita seemed a trifle thin. Griffin's father, with
 
 CARNIVAL 299 
 
 a shrewd appreciation of his son's peculiar gifts, 
 had entered him as a student at the school of brew- 
 ing; and if once he could overcome his natural 
 indolence, there was no reason why, in the future, 
 he should not become a partner in the firm of his 
 uncle, Sir Joseph Astill, and control the destinies 
 of a number of barmaids beyond the dreams of con- 
 cupiscence. On these prospects, Griffin, lounging 
 in his basket chair, brooded with a heavy satisfac- 
 tion. 
 
 "It's a funny thing, isn't it?" Edwin said one 
 day, "that we should be the only St. Luke's men in 
 this place." 
 
 "Oh, some are bound to turn up sooner or later," 
 said Griffin. "The other day, when I was up in 
 town, I ran against Widdup you remember Wid- 
 dup and he told me that his people thought of 
 sending him here to take up engineering." 
 
 "That would be rather good fun," said Edwin. 
 "And he's cut out for it too. He's got that sort of 
 head. I should rather like to see old Widdup." 
 
 "Oh, he'll roll up one of these days. Are you 
 doing anything in particular this afternoon? I 
 have to stroll down to see the stage-manager at the 
 Gaiety ... an awful good sport. Suppose we go 
 down the town and get a drink on the way ..." 
 
 In spite of the temptations of this adventure, 
 Edwin declined. In the dissecting room, half an 
 hour later, Brown hailed him : 
 
 "What the devil were you doing with that pig 
 of a brewer, Ingleby?" 
 
 "He's an old school friend of mine." 
 
 "Well, I should keep that dark, if I were you.
 
 300 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 He's a bad hat, that chap. We don't want Ingleby's 
 virginal innocence corrupted, do we, Maskew?" 
 
 "Oh, he's not a bad sort," Edwin protested. 
 
 "He's a nasty fellow, and he'll come to a rotten, 
 sticky end," said Brown. "Now, what do you think 
 of this small sciatic, you old roue, for a tricky bit 
 of dissection?" 
 
 After all, Edwin reflected, old Brown knew 
 something of the world. He had to admit to him- 
 self that there was something obscene about Griffin. 
 It was difficult to explain, for Maskew, by his own 
 account, was almost equally worldly, and yet 
 Maskew was undeniably a decent fellow while 
 Griffin undeniably wasn't. He joined his friends at 
 their work, and could think about nothing else ; for 
 Maskew's brains were as good as his own, though 
 of a different texture, and he had to be attentive 
 to keep pace with them. All through the vac. he 
 worked at anatomy with these two, sometimes in 
 the icy dissecting room, sometimes over coffee at 
 the Douaita, sometimes in the cozy, diminutive 
 diggings that Brown inhabited in Easy Kow, a 
 street of Georgian houses at the back of the uni- 
 versity buildings and near the Prince's Hospital. 
 
 They were pleasant days. Edwin, in spite of his 
 lightness, had now found a place in the scrum of 
 the second fifteen, and on Saturday evenings, when 
 both of them were drugged with their weekly 
 debauch of exercise, he and W.G. would meet at 
 the diggings in Easy Kow, and after a steaming hot 
 bath, in the process of which Edwin never failed 
 to be impressed by the immensity of his friend's 
 physique, they would set off down the town together
 
 CARNIVAL 301 
 
 and make a tremendous meal at the Coliseum grill : 
 Porterhouse steak with chipped potatoes and huge 
 silver tankards of bitter ale. Then they would go 
 on together to a theatre or a music hall, too pleas- 
 antly dulled, too mildly elated to question the 
 humour of the most second-rate comedian. After 
 the show W.G. would walk down to the station with 
 Edwin, and see him off into the last train for 
 Halesby, and Edwin, leaning out .of the carriage 
 window, would see the big man turn and go clum- 
 sily along the platform with the gait that he had 
 noticed on the very first day of his life as a medical 
 student. Brown was a wonderful fellow. In half 
 an hour, Edwin reflected, when his train was still 
 puffing away through the dark, W.G. would be back 
 in his diggings with a clay pipe stuck in his mouth 
 and a huge text-book of Anatomy open on his knees, 
 driving facts into that puzzled brain with the 
 violent thoroughness of an engine that drives piles. 
 When the last train arrived at Halesby, the town 
 would be in darkness, for, in the black country in 
 those days the only places of amusement were the 
 public houses and these had been shut for an hour 
 or more. Only from the upper windows of innumer- 
 able mean dwellings lights would be seen, and some 
 times the voice of a drunken husband heard grumb- 
 ling. But the path beside the fish-ponds was beauti- 
 ful, even on a winter night, and Edwin would feel 
 glad as he plodded along it that he didn't live in 
 North Bromwich, where the night noises of the 
 country were never heard. So he would pass quietly 
 up the empty lane, his footsteps echoing on the 
 hard pavement, and come at last to the little house
 
 302 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 set in the midst of shrubberies that smelt of winter. 
 Very humble and quiet, and even pitiable it seemed 
 after the glaring streets of the city that he had 
 left behind. 
 
 It was an understood thing that on Saturdays, 
 when he had been playing football, Edwin should 
 return by the last train; and so his father did not 
 sit up for him on these occasions. The matter had 
 been settled at the cost of some awkwardness. On 
 the first two or three Saturdays of the football sea- 
 son Edwin had come home late, to find Mr. Ingleby 
 growing cold over the embers of a fire in the dining- 
 room, sleepy but intensely serious, and his tired 
 eyes had examined Edwin so closely that he felt 
 embarrassed, being certain that his face must bear 
 signs of a number of enormities that he had never 
 dreamed of committing. It was the same, unrea- 
 sonable feeling of guilt that he had experienced at 
 St. Luke's in the middle of Mr. Leeming's pitched 
 battle for purity, and the sensation was so strong 
 that he felt it useless to try and hide it. 
 
 "Why do you look at me like that, father?" he 
 said. The quietude and humility of the little room 
 seem to him as full of accusation as his father's 
 face. 
 
 "What do you mean, boy?" 
 
 "I think you know what I mean. . . . There's 
 really no need for you to wait up for me like this." 
 
 "I like to lock the house up," his father replied, 
 with a quietness that made Edwin's voice sound 
 rowdy and violent. "I have always done so. After 
 all, it's usual." 
 
 "You are anxious about me. Why should you
 
 CARNIVAL 303 
 
 be more anxious about me when I come in at twelve 
 than when I come in at six?" 
 
 "I know you're passing a critical period, Eddie. 
 . . . I'm not unsympathetic. I've been through it 
 myself. And naturally I'm anxious for you. I 
 know that a town is full of temptations for a boy 
 of your age. I don't know what your friends are 
 like. I don't know what sort of influences you're 
 coming in contact with " 
 
 "But I don't see why that should make you want 
 to sit up for me. Keally, I don't. What good does 
 it do?" 
 
 "I like to see you when you come in." Edwin was 
 uncomfortably aware of this. 
 
 "But suppose I was drunk when I came in, 
 father " he said. 
 
 "I don't suppose anything of the sort " 
 
 "No, but supposing I was. What advantage 
 would there be in your seeing me? What good 
 would it do?" 
 
 "At any rate I should know that there was a 
 danger." 
 
 "Well, if that's all th'e trouble, we can soon get 
 over it. I promise you, that I'll tell you the very 
 first time that I am in the least drunk. Then you 
 needn't worry about waiting for it. I suppose it's 
 bound to happen some day." 
 
 "I sincerely hope it isn't, Eddie. It isn't pleasant 
 to me to hear you talk like that." 
 
 "No. ... I suppose it would be pleasanter if we 
 pretended that nothing of the kind ever happened. 
 But it wouldn't be honest, would it? I should think 
 it's the duty of every one to be drunk some time or
 
 304 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 other, if it's only to see what it feels like. Surely, 
 father, you " 
 
 "Edwin, Edwin. . . . Really we mustn't be per- 
 sonal. You forget that I'm your father." 
 
 "But I don't, father. I thought we were going 
 to be such tremendous pals, and honestly there isn't 
 much to be pals on if you aren't ever personal. We 
 ought to talk about everything. We oughtn't to 
 hide anything. I don't see much fun in it if I have 
 to do all the telling and you don't give anything 
 in return. It isn't fair." 
 
 "But, my dear boy," said Mr. Ingleby, with a 
 nervous laugh, "you seem to neglect the fundamen- 
 tal fact that I'm your father." 
 
 "I don't see why that should prevent us being 
 honest. I don't see why it should prevent you from 
 trusting me " 
 
 "I do trust you, Eddie." 
 
 "Then that's all right; so you needn't wait up 
 for me again." 
 
 Thus the matter was settled, at any rate on the 
 surface, though Edwin was always conscious on 
 the morning after his late arrivals of an anxious 
 scrutiny on his father's part. 
 
 "He doesn't really trust me," he thought, and this 
 conviction made him more anxious than ever to 
 be really intimate with his father, to make him 
 share, as much as possible, the life that he was 
 living in North Bromwich. It made him talk 
 deliberately of the men who were his friends, and 
 the work that he was doing, explaining with the 
 greatest freedom the domestic difficulties of W.G., 
 and the worldly accomplishments of Maskew: and
 
 CARNIVAL 305 
 
 this frankness gave him confidence until he dis- 
 covered that such revelations only ended by arous- 
 ing his father's suspicions. In Mr. Ingleby's mind 
 it was evident that the sterling qualities of W.G., 
 as recited by Edwin, were of less importance than 
 his potentialities as an agent in Edwin's corruption. 
 "If I'd only given him one side of W.G.," thought 
 Edwin, "he'd have been quite happy. If we're going 
 to be happy, it would be much better for me to tell 
 him nothing that his imagination can work on." 
 
 He found himself travelling round the old vicious 
 circle that appeared to be the inevitable result of 
 being honest with himself. There must, after all, 
 be something in the fundamental fact that Mr. 
 Ingleby was his father. Ridiculous though it might 
 seem, the ideal relation between father and son was 
 evidently impossible. "Well," he said with a sigh, 
 "it isn't my fault. I've done my best." 
 
 The whole artificiality of their relation only 
 dawned on him when he mentioned to his father 
 one evening that he had met Griffin and told him 
 that his old enemy turned out to be a nephew of 
 Sir Joseph Astill. "I'm glad to hear of it," said Mr. 
 Ingleby. "I hope you'll continue to be friends. 
 Sir Joseph Astill is a very distinguished man." 
 Edwin didn't see what that had to do with it ; but 
 he resisted the temptation of telling his father that 
 Griffin was a distinctly bad egg, and that in com- 
 parison with him W.G., with his herculean pas- 
 sions, was indeed a paragon of knightly virtues. If 
 it pleased his father to invest Griffin with his 
 uncle's reflected glory, why shouldn't he do so? And 
 Edwin held his tongue.
 
 306 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 In the end the atmosphere of veiled anxiety that 
 awaited him at home became definitely irksome, and 
 since the most absolute candour on his part would 
 not mend matters, he found himself gradually 
 avoiding his father's company. It was the last 
 thing in the world that he wanted to do; but it 
 seemed inevitable; and as the months passed, he 
 gave up all hopes of the sort of intimacy that he 
 had desired, and relapsed into the solitude of his 
 own room, or even, as a last resort, the company 
 of Aunt Laura, who was at least unsuspicious. 
 
 Another thing attracted him to her house. All 
 the days of his childhood at home had been full 
 of music, for his mother had been a capable pianist, 
 and he had spent long hours stretched out on the 
 hearthrug in the drawing-room listening to her 
 while she played Bach and Beethoven and occasion- 
 ally Mendelssohn on the piano. At St. Luke's, too, 
 without any definite musical education, he had felt 
 a little of the inspiration that Dr. Downton infused 
 into the chapel services. Since he had returned to 
 Halesby all these pleasures had left him; for Mr. 
 Ingleby was not in the least musical, and the piano 
 that had been closed a few days before his mother's 
 death, had never been reopened. At this period he 
 had not realised the musical possibilities of North 
 Bromwich, and in Aunt Laura's house he recap- 
 tured a little of this stifled interest. 
 
 She was really an accomplished musician, and 
 though the kind of music that she affected was be- 
 coming limited by the very character of her life 
 as the wife of an undistinguished manufacturer of 
 small hardware in a small black-country town, the
 
 CARNIVAL 307 
 
 taste, which had originally been formed in Ger- 
 many, existed and was easily encouraged by Ed- 
 win's admiration of her attainments. Here, usually 
 on Sundays, when in addition to the attraction of 
 music her admirable cooking was to be appreciated, 
 Edwin passed many happy hours. She sang well, 
 and could accompany herself with something of a 
 natural genius, and though the songs that she sang 
 were often enough the sugary ballads of the period 
 that had witnessed her musical extinction, Edwin 
 found them satisfying to his starved sense of music, 
 and would even persuade her, on occasion, to play 
 the pieces of Chopin, Beethoven, and Bach with 
 which his mother had made him familiar. 
 
 Nothing aroused in him an acute remembrance 
 of those ancient happy days more easily than music. 
 He wished, above all things, that he might some day 
 be able to taste these joys for himself; and so he 
 persuaded his aunt to teach him the notes on the 
 piano, and having an inherited aptitude, he soon 
 found that he could pick his way through simple 
 compositions, preferably in the open key, that he 
 found among his mother's music at home. Mr. 
 Ingleby, who had no ear, appeared to be unmoved 
 by these painful experiments; and to Edwin, the 
 long winter evenings were made magical by their 
 indulgence. He would sit at the piano in the draw- 
 ing-room for hours at a time, and here, in a strange 
 way, he found himself curiously in touch with the 
 vanishing memory of his mother. At times this 
 feeling was so acute that he could almost have 
 imagined that she was there in the room beside him, 
 and sometimes he would sit still at the piano in long
 
 308 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 intervals of silence, just drinking in this peculiar 
 and soothing atmosphere. Eventually these diver- 
 sions made Mr. Ingleby uneasy. 
 
 "You spend a good deal of time at the piano, 
 Edwin," he said. "I do hope you are not letting it 
 interfere with your work." 
 
 Edwin said nothing; but from that time onward 
 it seemed to him that even this, the most harmless 
 of his amusements, had become a matter for grudg- 
 ing and suspicion. At first he only felt indignation 
 and anger; but later he realised that this, along 
 with his father's other anxieties, probably had its 
 origin in financial considerations. The cost of his 
 education in North Bromwich was a big thing for a 
 country chemist to face. If once he failed, the 
 whole of his early effort might be wasted. But 
 then, he was not going to fail. 
 
 H 
 
 The terminal examinations at Christmas had 
 made him sure of this. They showed him that in 
 his own year he and Maskew were in a class by 
 themselves; and though Maskew beat him easily 
 in all the subjects of the examination, it satisfied 
 him a little to think that Maskew had probably 
 put in a good deal more work than he had, particu- 
 larly in anatomy, where he had the advantage of 
 working in partnership with W.G., for whom the 
 subject of medical education was of the most deadly 
 seriousness. 
 
 Early in the Lent term Edwin found himself 
 introduced to a new stratum of North Bromwich 
 society, through the accident of his acquaintance
 
 CARNIVAL 309 
 
 with Griffin. The new university had inherited 
 from the old college of science and the still older 
 medical school, the tradition of a pantomime night, 
 a visit en masse to one of the North Bromwich 
 theatres, where this elevating art-form flourished 
 for three months out of the twelve. The evening 
 was one of fancy dress, rowdiness, and general 
 licence, in which the stage suffered as much as the 
 auditorium, and the unfortunate players were pro- 
 pitiated for the ruin of their performance by a 
 series of presentations. 
 
 Arrangements for this function were always 
 made with a high seriousness. The committee was 
 composed of representatives from each year in the 
 school of medicine and from each of the other 
 faculties. In this affair, as in all matters of sport 
 or communal life, the older foundation of the 
 medical school took the most prominent part; but 
 the prestige of Griffin as the nephew of the Vice- 
 Chancellor and an acknowledged expert on all mat- 
 ters theatrical, had induced the brewers to run him. 
 for the secretaryship; and since the secretary was 
 the official on whom the bulk of the work fell, and 
 no one was particularly anxious to take on the job, 
 Griffin, in his first year, had been elected to the 
 post. 
 
 There was no denying the fact that it suited him. 
 To begin with, he was already on intimate terms 
 with every theatre manager and stage-doorkeeper 
 in North Bromwich, and was used to dealing with 
 the susceptibilities of theatrical people. Again, he 
 had plenty of money, a circumstance that would 
 help him in the preliminaries, which were expen-
 
 3io L THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 isively conducted in the local Bodega and other bars 
 and restaurants. Also, it gave Griffin something 
 to do ; for the life of the student in brewing was of 
 the leisurely and somnolent character that one 
 would naturally associate with malt liquors, and 
 most of his time had previously been spent sprawl- 
 ing in a deep basket chair in the Common Room, 
 playing an occasional languid game of poker, or 
 jingling sovereigns in his pocket while he waited 
 for the results of racing in the evening papers. 
 
 At the annual meeting, which Edwin had not 
 been sufficently interested to attend, there had been 
 the usual difficulty in selecting a member from the 
 unknown quantities of the first year, and Griffin, 
 full of resource, had suggested Edwin, who was 
 straightway elected, and summoned to attend the 
 deliberations that followed. His election caused a 
 good deal of amusement to his friends, and partic- 
 ularly Martin, who preserved an aristocratic con- 
 tempt for this vulgar theatrical business, and W.G., 
 who prophesied Edwin's conversion into a thorough- 
 going blood ; but it introduced him to a new and be- 
 wildering society in which he met a number of men 
 of his own faculty who had already become impres- 
 sive at a distance. 
 
 Such were the brothers Wade, the elder unap-, 
 proachable in his final year, the younger of an ele- 
 gance surpassing that of Harrop. Such was 
 Freddie St. Aubyn, a slight and immaculate figure 
 with fair hair and moustache, and the most care- 
 fully cultivated reputation for elegant dissipation 
 in North Bromwich. This Byronic person had al- 
 ready suffered the pangs of a long intrigue with the
 
 CARNIVAL 311 
 
 premiere danseme in a musical comedy company, 
 on whom he was reputed to have spent money and 
 passion lavishly but without the least suggestion 
 of grossness. 
 
 In addition to this he was a poet: that is to 
 say, he had published two volumes of verse that 
 were so eclectic as to be out of print. At the pres- 
 ent time he had stuck midway in his medical career 
 pending the issue of his unhappy passion ; and pre- 
 sented the unusual spectacle of a "chronic," not by 
 force of incompetence, but by choice. In point of 
 fact, he was an unconscious survival from the 
 nineties, and the lady of his choice resembled a 
 creation of Beardsley more than any type common- 
 ly known to nature. Edwin was impressed, for 
 the writer of the exhausted Poems of Passion was 
 the first poet that he had met in the flesh. Natural- 
 ly, St. Aubyn's attitude towards the first-year man 
 was a little patronising ; but Edwin found his mix- 
 ture of cynicism and melancholy enchanting, and 
 was particularly impressed when Freddie, languid- 
 ly supporting his sorrows in one of the Common 
 Boom easy-chairs, offered him a fill from his pipe. 
 
 "Oh, by the way, there's opium in it," he said 
 casually. 
 
 Visions of Coleridge and de Quincey invaded Ed- 
 win's mind. He stopped filling his pipe. 
 
 "Opium? Why on earth do you put opium in 
 it?" 
 
 "It is an aid to the imagination," said Freddie, 
 "and it deadens pain." 
 
 "Mental pain," he added sgnificantly, after a 
 pause. "For that alcohol is useless. I've tried it."
 
 312 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "I think I'll have some of my own, if you don't 
 mind," said Edwin. 
 
 "I quite agree with you. It would be much 
 wiser," said St. Aubyn. "Luckily you have no need 
 for it. Facilis descensus Averni." 
 
 From that day forward Edwin was always eager- 
 ly searching the face and the pupils of Freddie for 
 any symptoms of opium poisoning. He never found 
 any; and W.G., to whom he confided this thrilling 
 incident, assured him that there was nothing in it, 
 that Freddie had probably never smoked opium in 
 his life, and that the whole thing was nothing more 
 than one of the poseS that this gentleman adopted 
 for shocking the youthful and bourgeois. The im- 
 pressive Freddie, according to W.G., was a damned 
 anaemic waster. If only it had not been for the 
 exhausted Poems of Passion, Edwin might have 
 agreed with him. 
 
 The solemn meetings of the panto-night commit- 
 tee engaged Edwin three afternoons a week. As a 
 congregation of amazing bloods they were enthrall- 
 ing but as business gatherings they were more re- 
 markable still. They were held in the saloon bar 
 of a modern public house, all palatial mahogany, 
 red plush and plate-glass, called the White Horste; 
 and the principal business of the day was the con- 
 sumption of hot whisky with sugar and slices of 
 lemon in it, during which Griffin, armed with a 
 conspicuous note-book, reported on his activities, 
 ^hich appeared mainly to be social. 
 
 "On Thursday," he would say, "I took Mary 
 Xoraine to lunch at the Grand Midland, and she 
 asaid . . ." or "I saw Tommy Fane in his dressing-
 
 CARNIVAL 313 
 
 room the other night, and he said : 'Look here, old 
 boy. . . .' * Apparently all Griffin's theatrical 
 friends called him "old boy." The effect of these 
 narrations on Griffin would be so exhausting that 
 he found it necessary to order more whisky all 
 round. The manager himself would bring it in; a 
 brilliant gentleman named Juniper with red baggy 
 cheeks the laxness of which w r as compensated by 
 a waxed moustache that stuck out on either side 
 as if a skewer had transfixed them. To Griffin this 
 magnificent creature was most decorous; for the 
 White Horse was one of Astill's houses, and Griffin 
 had taken the trouble to inform him that the great 
 Sir Joseph was his uncle. In spite of, rather than 
 as a result of these meetings, the panto-night ar- 
 ranged itself. The date was fixed, the bouquets and 
 presents purchased, the announcements in the 
 papers that warned any patrons of pantomime 
 that on this particular night they could not hope 
 to see a normal performance, inserted. Griffin, in 
 the Common Room, became a centre of feverish 
 importance, and even Edwin, in spite of the super- 
 ciliousness of Martin, and the rough chaff of W.G., 
 caught a little of the reflected glamour. 
 
 Edwin now had to face the ordeal of announcing 
 the approach of panto-night to his father. If he 
 were to see the thing through, as was his duty as 
 a member of the committee, it would be quite im- 
 possible for him to catch the last train to Halesby, 
 which left North Bromwich at nine-thirty, except 
 on Thursday and Saturday night. Mr. Ingleby, 
 hearing, saw the pit gaping beneath Edwin's feet. 
 "You didn't mention this to me before. ... I sup-
 
 3H THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 pose you have had to spend quite a lot of time at 
 these committee meetings? I think it was rather 
 unwise of you to undertake it in your first year. 
 . . . There's only four months before your exami- 
 nation." 
 
 "Oh, I think the exam, will be all right," said 
 Edwin airily. 
 
 "I don't like to hear you speak like that, Edwin," 
 said his father. "Over-confidence is a dangerous 
 thing." 
 
 "But it wouldn't be any better pretending that 
 I didn't think it was all right, surely?" 
 
 "Well, humility is a great virtue." 
 
 "Not any greater than honesty." 
 
 "It's all very well to talk about honesty; but it 
 would have been more honest, wouldn't it, if you'd 
 told me that" he hesitated "this was going on?" 
 
 "There you are. . . . That's the whole point. If 
 I told you everything you wouldn't sleep for 
 imagining things that hadn't happened. It's the 
 thing that's worried me ever since I was at school. 
 If you're absolutely honest with other people, life 
 simply isn't worth living, because they don't under- 
 stand it. It isn't done. I've come to the conclusion, 
 father, that the only thing that really matters is to 
 be honest with yourself." 
 
 "If you can trust yourself " 
 
 "Well, I think I can. . . . And I wish you'd be- 
 lieve in it." 
 
 "I do, Edwin. Only naturally I'm anxious. 
 You're a child. Where is this . . . this perform- 
 ance held?" 
 
 "At the Queen's Theatre this year."
 
 CARNIVAL 315 
 
 "Well, I suppose that is better than a music hall." 
 
 His father's prejudice against the music halls, or, 
 as they were then beginning to be called, Theatres 
 of Varieties, was an old story. Edwin could hardly 
 resist the temptation of telling him that the per- 
 formers in the pantomime were nearly all music- 
 hall artistes, but Mr. Ingleby saved him, by asking 
 him where he intended to sleep. 
 
 "Oh, I expect W.G. will give me a shake-down in 
 his digs." 
 
 "I suppose," said Mr. Ingleby, with a shade of 
 anxiety, "that Brown is also on the committee " 
 
 The idea of the honest W.G. as a member of this 
 constellation of bloods tickled Edwin. He now 
 wished to goodness he'd never told his father of 
 W.G.'s family differences and of his lucky double 
 on the Lincoln and National. 
 
 "Oh, no, old W.G.'s far too sober for this sort of 
 thing." 
 
 It was an unfortunate word. 
 
 "Sober?" repeated Mr. Ingleby. "Well, I sup- 
 pose you will have to go ; but I do hope " 
 
 He didn't say what he hoped ; but Edwin knew, 
 and was content to leave it at that. 
 
 in 
 
 The great day came, and Edwin found, as some 
 compensation for the scoffing of W.G. and the super- 
 ciliousness of Martin and Maskew, that his position 
 was really one of some importance. All the first- 
 year men, even the immaculate Harrop, had de- 
 cided to go to the theatre, and up to the last minute 
 Edwin was busy selling tickets. He had asked
 
 316 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 W.G. to put him up, and W.G., as a matter of form, 
 had consented. "I don't suppose I shall see you 
 after midnight, my son," he said. With his usual 
 thoroughness in everything that he attempted, W.G. 
 had determined to make a night of it. "It will do 
 me good to make a damned fool of myself for once 
 in a way," he said, "if it's only for the sake of realis- 
 ing it afterwards . . ." 
 
 They put in a hard afternoon's work together 
 first, and then he and Edwin and Maskew went to- 
 gether to W.G.'s rooms to change. They were all 
 rather excited, and W.G. carried a bottle of whisky 
 in each of his coat pockets, the first of which was 
 broached as an aperitif while they were changing. 
 In less than an hour they emerged, W.G. attired 
 as nearly as convention would allow him, in the 
 manner of his woaded ancestry: a splendid cave- 
 man with lowering black brows and hairy arms like 
 those of a gorilla, a disguise that only called for a 
 little accentuation of his natural characteristics to 
 be made effective ; Maskew, again in character, as a 
 Restoration cavalier; and Edwin in the modest 
 guise of Pierrot. In the foyer of the theatre they met 
 Martin, who had driven down in a hansom from 
 Alvaston clothed in six feet of baby linen, with a 
 feeding bottle round his neck. The stalls were al- 
 ready full of a carnival crowd of students, and the 
 rest of the house was crowded with spectators who 
 had come to enjoy the rag, and other unfortunate 
 people who had entered in ignorance of the festival 
 and the fact that their form of entertainment was 
 to be changed for one night only. 
 
 There, among the crowd, Edwin found Griffin, a
 
 CARNIVAL 317 
 
 fleshy and unsubtle Mephistopheles, the Mephis- 
 topheles of Gounod, not of Goethe, and Freddie St. 
 Aubyn, romantically pale in a wig of black curls 
 that he had procured for his presentation of Byron. 
 Freddie, in the interests of verisimilitude, had even 
 shaved his moustache. 
 
 Only the earlier part of the performance re- 
 mained in Edwin's memory. The rest of it was no 
 more to him than a brilliant haze, from which single 
 moments of wild picturesqueness detached them- 
 selves : as when he had a vision of a prehistoric man 
 armed with a waving whisky bottle for a club and 
 feebly restrained by a flushed cavalier, flown with 
 insolence and wine, storming his way through the 
 surging crowd in front of the stalls bar and plant- 
 ing his feet upon the counter; or of the same bar- 
 barian, gently armed by a tactful manager in eve- 
 ning dress, putting his weapon to the usages of 
 peace and friendliness by uncorking it and offering 
 its contents to a firm but good-humoured police- 
 man. 
 
 "What a splendid fellow W.G. is," Edwin thought 
 to himself. "Splendid . . . splendid . . . magnifi- 
 cent." And while he was thinking this, a sombre 
 poet with shining eyes drew him aside and con- 
 fessed to him, almost with tears, that all this bril- 
 liance and colour and life meant nothing to him 
 compared with the memory of the Beardsley lady, 
 whose ankles were so thin that they might be 
 spanned with his little finger. "As light as a 
 feather," said the poet, "gossamer . . . swansdown 
 ... all soul. Of course, old fellow, I know that
 
 318 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 you can understand. I shouldn't talk like this to 
 any other person in the world." 
 
 And Edwin understood, and realised the justice 
 of the poet's choice of a confidant so sympathetic- 
 ally that he was spurred to confidences on his own 
 part. "You see, I happen to be a poet myself," he 
 said, and to prove it he felt bound to recite a sonnet 
 that he had composed a year or two before at Stt 
 Luke's. A magnificent sonnet it seemed to him, per- 
 haps more magnificent for Jlie accompaniment of a 
 song in waltz rhythm by the theatre orchestra. It 
 was flattering to find that Byron agreed with him 
 as to its excellence ; but while the poet was pressing 
 Ms hand in congratulatory brotherhood, and Edwin 
 was just deciding to recite it all over again, the 
 sinister figure of Mephistopheles appeared and 
 parted them, telling him that Miss Marie Loraine 
 was now singing the last verse of her song and that 
 in two minutes it would be his duty to present her 
 with a bouquet and a pair of silver hair-brushes. 
 Still reciting the most telling lines of his sonnet, 
 he was conducted by Mephistopheles through the 
 manager's office, where a young lady who, in her in ; 
 viting softness, resembled Miss Wheeler, was count- 
 ing the counter-foils of tickets, and through a sub- 
 terranean passage with the welcome chill of a cata- 
 comb, to the wings of the theatre, where a florid 
 bouquet was thrust into his hands. 
 
 It struck Edwin that the scent of the flowers was 
 of a suffocating heaviness, until he realised that 
 the overpowering perfume of which he was aware 
 proceeded not from the bouquet but from the scents 
 and powders of a bevy of creatures of unnatural
 
 CARNIVAL 319 
 
 loveliness who stood waiting in the wings. They 
 were the ladies of the chorus, and the nature of 
 their costume would have given them an excuse 
 for shivering; but they did not appear to be con- 
 scious of the heat that throbbed in Edwin's brain. 
 The scent and the proximity of such a huge expanse 
 of naked flesh excited him. At this moment all 
 his awkwardness seemed to have vanished. He 
 could not believe that he was the same person who 
 had blushed at "the mere contact of the American 
 girPs overall, or sat speechless in the presence of 
 Miss Wheeler at the Dousita. His old modesty 
 seemed to him to have been a ridiculous and inex- 
 cusable folly; for, at the moment, he would have 
 welcomed the prospect of making the most shame- 
 less advances to any one of these houris in competi- 
 tion with any man of his acquaintance. With the 
 air of a Sultan he surveyed them, deciding to which 
 of those blossoms the handkerchief should be 
 thrown. 
 
 "Now get along with you," said the stage-man- 
 ager, pushing him forward. 
 
 He gripped the presents in his hands, and tread- 
 ing on air, advanced on to the stage, where Miss 
 Marie Loraine was kissing her hands to the stalls. 
 The stage was very big, and sloped in such a way 
 that he felt his feet impelled towards the footlights ; 
 but, being determined that he would accomplish 
 his mission with dignity, Edwin steered a steady, 
 if resilient, course. In front of him he saw a crea- 
 ture before whose elegance and beauty the beauty of 
 the chorus was as nothing. She stood waiting for 
 Itim and smiled. For a moment Edwin faced the
 
 320 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 auditorium, a vast and dark abyss in which not 
 a single face was to be seen. It gave him a sudden 
 fright to think that so many thousands of unseen 
 eyes were fixed upon the patch of limelight in which 
 he stood. He pulled himself together. This was 
 the moment, he thought, in which it was for him 
 to make some speech worthy of the bewildering love- 
 liness that stood before him. 
 
 "Go on," said the impatient voice of Mephia- 
 topheles in the wings. "Buck up." 
 
 "Miss Loraine," said Edwin, with a flourish, "I 
 
 have the honour of " The middle of his sentence 
 
 was broken by a crash and a tremendous peal of 
 laughter from the unseen thousands. The younger 
 Wade, arrayed in the panoply of a Roman legionary 
 and balanced upon the parapet of the stage box, 
 had fallen with a clash of armour into the big drum. 
 Edwin thrust the bouquet and the hair-brushes into 
 the arms of Miss Loraine, herself convulsed with 
 laughter. With a terrific draught the curtain swept 
 down. 
 
 "Splendid," said the voice of Mephistophelean 
 
 The rest of the evening was more confused than 
 ever. He remembered a vision of this surpassing 
 beauty standing in the wings in a long silk wrapper 
 that her dresser had thrown over her shoulders, 
 and thanking him for his presentation. To Edwin 
 the moment seemed the beginning of a passionate 
 romance. He remembered other moments in the 
 auditorium, in which W.G. and Maskew figured. 
 He remembered the taste of a glass of Benedictine, 
 a liqueur that he had never tasted before, that 
 Maskew gave him to pull him together again after
 
 CARNIVAL 321 
 
 his exertions on the stage. He remembered a flash- 
 ing of lights, an uproar, a free-fight, and the sing- 
 ing of "God Save the Queen." And then he found 
 himself a member of a small but distinguished 
 brotherhood streaming at a tremendous rate up the 
 wide street that led towards the Prince's Hospital. 
 All of them were medicals, and most of them his 
 seniors. Freddie St. Aubyn, the Wade brothers, 
 W.G., and Maskew were among them. Out of the 
 main road they passed singing into the meaner 
 streets that surrounded the hospital : miserable 
 streets with low houses and courts clustered on 
 either side, from the upper .windows of which 
 astonished working men and women in their night- 
 dresses put out their heads to look at the vocal pro- 
 cession. Opposite the portico of the hospital was 
 a cab rank on which a solitary hansom was stand- 
 ing with the horse asleep in the shafts and the 
 driver taking his rest inside. The sight appeared to 
 arouse the fighting instincts of the elder Wade. 
 
 "Good God," he said, with indignation, "here's a 
 cab. What the hell does the fellow think he's doing 
 here at this time of night? He must be drunk. Look 
 at it!" 
 
 His brother, who could carry his liquor better, 
 tried to persuade him to leave the cab alone; but 
 before any one knew what was happening, he had 
 thrown himself on it and turned the whole affair 
 upside down in the road. Edwin heard a crash 
 of splintered glass ; he saw the cab on its side and 
 the sleepy horse with its legs in the air. He thought : 
 "Good God! What has happened?" And the next 
 thing he saw was a red-faced cabman, buttoned
 
 322 THE .YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 up to his ears, crawling out of the wreckage and 
 cursing fluently at Wade, who stared for a moment, 
 dazed, at the havoc his strength had created, and 
 then bolted for the shelter of the hospital. The 
 cabman, now thoroughly awakened, bolted after 
 him. Edwin glowed with admiration for Wade'g 
 achievement. It was the deed of a Titan, a splendid 
 Berserker. The cabby had burst through the con- 
 course on the hospital steps, thirsting for the blood 
 of Wade, who, by this time, was lying quietly on 
 a hooded stretcher swatched in bandages and quite 
 unrecognisable. A house surgeon in a white overall 
 confronted the cabman. The hospital porters in 
 uniform stood solemnly at his elbow. The house 
 surgeon was assuring the cabby that he was drunk : 
 the cabby telling the lot of them exactly what he 
 thought of them. 
 
 "Take hold of this fellow," said the house 
 surgeon to the porters, "and hold him while I get a 
 stomach pump." The porters, specially qualified 
 for dealing with midnight drunks, obeyed. There 
 was a splendid struggle in which the foaming cabby 
 
 was pitched out into the road, ing their ing 
 
 eyes to Hell. The bandaged Wade was carried 
 solemnly upstairs on his stretcher and brought 
 round with whisky in the house surgeon's room, a 
 chamber full of Olympian card-players, pickled 
 with cigar-smoke and the fumes of alcohol. Some 
 one, it was the cavalier, began to play the piano. 
 Edwin seized the opportunity to recite his sonnet, 
 until W.G. laid a monstrous hand on his mouth. 
 
 That vision ended, and to it succeeded one of 
 cool, deserted streets with far too many kerb-stones
 
 CARNIVAL 323 
 
 for Edwin's liking, and then the dishevelled sitting- 
 room in W.G.'s digs in which they had dressed with 
 a pale gas-jet hissing and flaring and a momentary 
 impression of W.G. asking him where he'd put the 
 damned corkscrew. Edwin remembered rising to 
 a brilliant extreme of wit. "Am I your corkscrew's 
 keeper?" he said; and while he was explaining at 
 length the aptness of his mot W.G. knocked the 
 neck off the bottle with his poker, eclipsing any 
 possible verbal brilliance. 
 
 In the middle of the night Edwin woke and 
 staggered in the dark to the washhand-stand, where 
 he drank a draught of water, so cool and sweet as 
 to be astonishing, until he remembered that it had 
 possibly come from the mountains beyond Felindre. 
 W. G. was snoring heavily on the bed that he had 
 just left. W.G.'s snoring got on his nerves so that 
 he had to prod him in the ribs and wake him, a pro- 
 ceeding that W.G. seemed unjustly to resent. 
 
 "I say, W.G.," he said, "do you think I was 
 drunk?" 
 
 "Drunk?" said W.G. "Good God, you didn't 
 wake me to ask me that? You'll know all right in 
 the morning." 
 
 Edwin only knew that his head was splitting and 
 that he was hellishly cold.
 
 CHAPTER IY 
 
 SCIENCE 
 
 WG.'S prophecy that Edwin would know all 
 about it in the morning proved correct ; but 
 it was some consolation to him to know that he 
 shared the experience with his friends. All the 
 next day he went about his work with Maskew feel- 
 ing a little light-headed, and a peculiar weakness 
 in the legs made him disinclined for any exertion 
 that could be avoided. Maskew recovered himself 
 more easily ; but W.G., who never did anything by 
 halves, solemnly embarked on a "bust" that lasted 
 for a whole week. 
 
 This defection disgusted Maskew, who, in his 
 hard, capable way, believed in moderation in all 
 things even in vice. He considered W.G.'s con- 
 duct "a bit thick"; principally because he was de- 
 prived of his company in the dissecting room ; but 
 to Edwin the big man's debauch seemed in some 
 ways heroic and in keeping with his titanic physical 
 nature : a spectacle rather for awe than for reproof. 
 It was even impressive to see W.G. returning like a 
 giant refreshed with vice, throwing his huge 
 energies into the pursuits that he had abandoned 
 as readily as he had lately squandered them in an 
 
 324
 
 SCIENCE 325 
 
 atmosphere of patchouli. In this line Edwin 
 would have found it constitutionally impossible to 
 compete with W.G., but, for all that, he could not 
 deny that he felt better, more confident, and more 
 complete for the pantomime experience. It even 
 flattered him to find himself regarded as something 
 of a blood by the humbler members of his year who 
 had witnessed his adventure on the Queen's Theatre 
 stage, though he could not conceal from himself 
 the fact that Martin, more absorbed than ever in 
 blameless but exacting relations with the eligible 
 young ladies of Alvaston, was a little supercilious 
 as to his attainments. 
 
 With the approach of the summer and the first 
 examination he found little time for anything but 
 work. The preparation for the exam, was so much 
 of a scramble that he had no time to realise the 
 imaginative significance of the subjects in which 
 he was engaged. He did not guess that the little 
 fat professor of Physics who lectured so drily on 
 the elements of his science was actually employing 
 his leisure in the tremendous adventure of weighing 
 the terrestrial globe, or that certain slender aerials 
 stretched like the web of a spider from a mast at 
 the top of the university buildings were actually 
 receiving the first lispings of wireless telegraphy, 
 an achievement to which that bearded dreamer, the 
 Principal, had devoted twenty years of his life. 
 
 To Edwin there was nothing intrinsically ro- 
 mantic in Chemistry or Physics. His mind could 
 not conceive that science was a minute and infinite- 
 ly laborious conquest of the properties of matter. 
 Atoms and Molecules and the newly-dreamed
 
 326 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Electrons, still trembling in the realms of impon- 
 derable speculation, were no more to him than 
 abstractions unrelated to the needs of practical 
 human life. They were only facts to be learned 
 by rote, symbols to be memorised and grouped to- 
 gether on paper like the letters in an algebraic cal- 
 culation ; and the whole of this potentially romantic 
 experience was clouded by his own headachy dis- 
 taste for the gaseous smells of the laboratory: the 
 choking yellow fumes of chlorine that escaped from 
 the glass cupboards in which it was manufactured, 
 and the less tolerable, if more human, odour of 
 Sulphuretted Hydrogen, in an air that was desic- 
 cated by the blue flames of half a hundred Bunsen 
 burners. These two subjects w r ere nothing more 
 than an arid desert of facts relating to dead mat- 
 ter through which he had to fight his way, and he 
 hated them. 
 
 In comparison with them, Biology was something 
 of an oasis. Here, at any rate, he had to deal with 
 life, a mystery more obvious and less academic. 
 The contemplation of its lower forms, such as the 
 Amoeba, a tiny speck of dreamy protoplasm stretch- 
 ing out its languid tentacles, living its remote and 
 curiously detached life with no aims beyond that 
 of bare mysterious existence, filled him with a 
 strange awe. The laboratory in which these re- 
 searches were conducted, was high and airy and not 
 associated with any unpleasant smells except at the 
 season when the class were engaged upon the dis- 
 section of the hideous dog-fish. It had even its 
 aspects of beauty in the person of the fair American 
 in her dark overall ; and for this reason, if for no
 
 SCIENCE 327 
 
 other, Edwin found himself becoming most pro- 
 ficient in his knowledge of the subject. 
 
 In the middle of the summer the examination 
 came. Maskew was an easy first, and carried off 
 the Queen's scholarship for the year; Edwin came 
 second with a first-class, which, even if it didn't 
 satisfy himself, was enough to make his father en- 
 thusiastic; Martin ambled through with an ease 
 that challenged Edwin's respect, and W.G., horribly 
 intense and determined through all the week of 
 the exam., scraped through by virtue of sheer bull- 
 dog tenacity. The result of the examination did 
 Edwin good if only by convincing him that Maskew, 
 for all his suburban flashiness and his inferior gen- 
 eral education, had a better head than his own. 
 Like the excellent man of business that he was^ 
 Maskew did not rest upon his oars : the week af tee- 
 the examination, and the first of the long vacation, 
 found him and W.G. back in the dissecting room, 
 plugging into anatomy, the next year's principal 
 subject, and Edwin saw at once that if he were to 
 keep pace with his rival he would have to forgo the 
 months of summery leisure to which he had looked 
 forward in the vacation. Martin was playing tennis 
 in Ireland, and so he found himself thrown once 
 more into the society of these two. 
 
 It was a pleasant time, for their leisure was their 
 own and there were no lectures to tie them to their 
 work. They did a great deal of their reading in 
 W.G.'s rooms, full of easy-chairs, and wreathed in 
 tobacco smoke that escaped through a French 
 window into a tiny garden plot green and pleasant 
 under the white Midland sky, and this room became
 
 328 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 a haven of escape from the burning brick pavements 
 in which Edwin and his friends would work to- 
 gether without strain, talking of the future and of 
 W.G.'s romantic past, and stabilising their own 
 ideas on the uncertainties of sex : a problem that so 
 far had meant very little to Edwin, but which W.G. 
 was not in a position to ignore. 
 
 "You know, it's damned funny," he said, "but 
 when you get to know more about things, when 
 you've done some anatomy and that, you begin to 
 think of sex -in a different light. It knocks all the 
 mystery out of it, and I'm sure that's a jolly sound 
 thing. Good Lord, when I think of the ignorance 
 with which I started on this sort of thing ! Finding 
 out everything by experiment, you know. . . . Why, 
 if I'd had a short course of anatomy before I left 
 school I should have been saved a lot of rotten ex- 
 periments that didn't do me or any one else any 
 good. I'd have been a damned sight cleaner- 
 minded than I ever was. A medical training's a 
 jolly good thing in that way: shows you exactly 
 where you are instead of letting you go fumbling 
 about in the dark." 
 
 "Knocks all the poetry out of it though," said 
 Maskew. 
 
 "Poetry be damned," said W.G. seriously, 
 "there's a good deal too much of your poetry about 
 it. Poetry and mystery and a lot of bunkum like 
 that . . . Male and female created He them. I don't 
 particularly admire the method. I think He made 
 rather a better job of the amceba. Think how much 
 simpler it would be to split open a chunk of proto- 
 plasm instead of having to make a ridiculous fool
 
 SCIENCE 329 
 
 of yourself if you want to propagate your species. 
 Still, there it is, and the sooner you realise exactly 
 what it means and what it's all about, the less you 
 worry your head about it." 
 
 "Well, of course, if you're going to treat it in 
 that light you're going to knock all the pleasure 
 out of life " Maskew protested. 
 
 "Oh, you're a sensualist," said W.G. "The main 
 thing that I have against it is that it wastes valu- 
 able time." He became scornful. "Think of all 
 these rotten fellows who spend their days writing 
 books on sexual problems, analysing their rotten 
 little sensations in detail and gloating over myster- 
 ies of sex. It's only their ignorance that makes 
 them like that. What they want is a thorough 
 course of anatomy and a whack of practical experi- 
 ence to cure them; and if every one else had the 
 same sort of education there'd be no sale for their 
 books." 
 
 Edwin, listening to their sparring, remembered 
 the library at St. Luke's and a certain shelf of 
 anatomical works that was always kept locked with 
 a special key that Mr. Leeming carried mysteriously 
 on his watch-chain. On the whole, he agreed with 
 W.G. and his preferences for the methods of the 
 Amoeba's parthenogenesis. He wondered, however, 
 if the kind of education that W.G. advocated would 
 have scotched the production of such works as 
 Romeo and Juliet or the love poems of Shelley. 
 
 "It would be rather rotten if you did away with 
 love, W.G.," he said. 
 
 "Oh, I'm not talking about love," said W.G. 
 "I'm talking about a fellow's ordinary physical
 
 336 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 needs. Being in love is not the same thing as that." 
 "It is usually," said the cynical Maskew. 
 "It's all a ridiculous mix-up," said Edwin. 
 
 "Thank God it doesn't worry us." 
 
 n 
 
 With the beginning of the new year these deli- 
 cious hours of leisure disappeared. Edwin and his 
 friends, with the assurance of second-year men, be- 
 came the real possessors of the dissecting room. 
 Anatomy and physiology now absorbed all their 
 time, and the leisurely interest in the first subject, 
 which had been subsidiary in the first year, was 
 now a matter of academical life and death. From 
 the simple anatomical details of the upper and 
 lower extremities that he had dissected with Martin 
 in the year before, he passed to the more vital 
 regions of the human body: the thorax, the 
 abdomen, and the head and neck. He still attended 
 the polished course of lectures on anatomy that the 
 Dean delivered in the theatre; but this process he 
 was forced to regard as a waste of time, since the 
 Dean's presentation of the subject did not differ 
 greatly from that of any text-book of anatomy, and 
 the Dean's personality, which curiously resembled 
 that of his cousin Martin, was too aristocratically 
 remote ever to seem real. 
 
 In the dissecting room, on the other hand, he be- 
 came acquainted and fascinated with the first of his 
 medical instructors who had aroused his imagina- 
 tion. This was the chief demonstrator of Anatomy, 
 Robert Moon, or, more familiarly, Bobby, a figure 
 of romantic picturesqueness. He was tall and in-
 
 SCIENCE 33! 
 
 clined to be fat, he always wore a black frock-coat, 
 and his serious face, which was of a size and pallor 
 that his surname suggested, was crowned by an 
 erect crop of black and curly hair. In Edwin's first 
 year he had always seemed to him a strange and 
 distant figure, walking slowly up and down the 
 dissecting room, on the occasions when he emerged 
 from the dark chamber which he inhabited in the 
 corner near the door, like a fat and rather sinister 
 spider. 
 
 He rarely spoke : when he did so it was with a 
 broad, north country accent and the most extraordi- 
 nary deliberation and formality in his choice of 
 words. With the men in the second year he pos- 
 sessed an enormous reputation not only for his 
 exhaustive knowledge of anatomy, by the side of 
 which the Dean's attainments seemed merely those 
 of a dilettante, but also for his excellence as a coach. 
 Edwin and his two friends became sedulous at- 
 tendants at his tutorials, where, standing in im- 
 mobile dignity behind one of the zinc dissecting- 
 room tables in front of an appropriate background 
 of blackboard, and surrounded by a ring of second- 
 year students, who came to sit at his feet volunta- 
 rily, like the disciples of a Greek philosopher, he 
 would demonstrate the details of some ragged 
 anatomical part that had lain in spirit until it was 
 of the colour and consistency of leather. 
 
 In Bobby's demonstrations there was neither 
 imagination nor romance: they were merely fas- 
 cinating in virtue of the amazing exactitude of the 
 detail which his brain had acquired through long 
 familiarity with the dismembered fragments of
 
 332 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 humanity. There was nothing in the way of minute 
 observation that could escape him, and his ques- 
 tions were so searching and unexpected that even 
 Maskew, who had himself a prodigious memory for 
 minute detail and could carry the letter of a text- 
 book in his head, was constantly floored by them. 
 It was a magnificent stimulus to Edwin ; for it be- 
 came a kind of game to master a part so thoroughly 
 that Bobby could not stump him. 
 
 By this time he was so used to railway travelling 
 that between the morning discussion of the progress 
 of the war that had just broken out in South Africa, 
 and the appearance of halfpenny papers, that multi- 
 plied like greenfly in this heated atmosphere, he 
 could read his text-books of anatomy in a crowded 
 carriage without disturbance apart from the natural 
 curiosity that a vision of luridly coloured diagrams 1 
 awakened in the minds of his fellow passengers, and 
 particularly the bank clerk, who thirsted in a way 
 that W.G. would have approved for technical in- 
 struction in the matter of certain organs. Edwin 
 prepared himself for the demonstrator's tutorials 
 as rigorously as if he had been approaching a vital 
 examination; he spent long hours in his bedroom, 
 utterly heedless of his wide prospect of wintry fields, 
 thinking of nothing but his collection of bleached 
 bones, now carefully marked with coloured chalks 
 to show the origins and insertions of muscles, and 
 particularly those intricate fretted plates that are 
 joined to form the fragile casket of the human skull. 
 
 So engrossed was he in absorbing the mere details 
 of their physical form that his mind had no room 
 for other speculations of the kind that had im-
 
 SCIENCE 333 
 
 pressed him in the days of his first acquaintance 
 with anatomy. It never struck him that the articu- 
 lated skull which grinned at him from his mantel- 
 piece when he woke each morning, had once con- 
 tained the convolutions of a human brain: a mass 
 of pulpy matter that had been the origin of strange 
 complications of movement and feeling and thought, 
 the storehouse of memories, the spring of passions 
 and the theatre of dreams. He did not even know 
 if the skull were that of a man or a woman. To 
 him it was no more than an assembly of dry bones, 
 intricate in their relations with one another, pierced 
 by the foramina of bewildering nerves and blood- 
 vessels, all of which must be visualised and stored 
 and remembered within the limits of another struc- 
 ture of the same kind the sutures and eminences 
 of which he could feel with his own fingers when 
 he rubbed his puzzled head. 
 
 He used to go back to Mr. Moon's tutorials con- 
 vinced that he knew all that was to be known of the 
 subject in hand, and then Bobby, in his slow Lan- 
 cashire voice, with broadened "a"s and "u"s, would 
 put to him some leisurely question that showed him 
 that he knew nothing. Very decorously and slowly 
 these questions would be asked; and since the an- 
 swers were concerned with the dryest and most ex- 
 act of physical facts, guessing was of no help to 
 him and silence the only refuge of the ignorant. No 
 display either of knowledge or ignorance had the 
 least effect on Bobby Moon. His wide and dreamy 
 face showed no emotion on the discovery of either. 
 On very rare occasions he would descend to a kind 
 of ponderous verbal humour, slow and elephantine,
 
 334 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 like the humour of Beethoven; but even in 
 these moments his face showed no signs of emo- 
 tion, and he would pass on without waiting for any 
 recognition of his joke to the next lethargic ques- 
 tion. "Mr. Harrop," he would say slowly, "what is 
 the fotty pod of Hovers?" And Harrop, sitting on 
 a high stool that showed his variegated socks to 
 perfection, would reply that the fatty pad of Havers 
 was a small cushion of fat set in the head of the 
 femur to lubricate the hollow of the acetabulum. 
 
 The picturesque figure of Moon soon began to 
 dominate Edwin's impressions of the dissecting 
 room. There was something provocative in the 
 remoteness of this black and solitary form from all 
 the concerns of human life. Edwin conceived him 
 to be a kind of cerebral abstraction, no man, but 
 an advanced text-book of anatomy; curiously en- 
 dowed with the powers of locomotion and speech 
 but bereft of any human characteristic. It amazed 
 him to discover, in the end, that Bobby Moon was 
 nothing of the sort, but a creature of the most deli- 
 cate human tenderness, so sensitive to the appeals 
 of beauty and humanity that he had been forced to 
 adopt the impassive mask that was all that his pu- 
 pils knew of him from an instinct of self-protec- 
 tion. 
 
 It happened in this way. During the early part of 
 his second year Edwin had become conscious of a 
 new figure in the dissecting room, that of a man 
 named Boyce, a student with a brilliant reputation 
 who had managed in some inexplicable way to fail 
 in his first examination and be left behind by the 
 other men of his year. He was a tall, fair creature,
 
 SCIENCE 335 
 
 with a long face and small, very blue eyes. The 
 society of Alvaston had made him friendly with 
 Martin, from whom Edwin's new relations were 
 gradually separating him. The only characteristic 
 that Edwin had so far noticed in Boyce was an 
 almost literary fluency in the use of foul language 
 which left even Harrop gasping. Boyce was work- 
 ing alone on a thorax a few tables away from Edwin. 
 He was a neat and laborious dissector, and Edwin 
 had been tempted to admire the skill with which 
 he had defined the network of blood-vessels, the sys- 
 tem of coronary arteries and veins, with which the 
 human heart is enmeshed. Boyce was evidently far 
 less unapproachable than Edwin had imagined, and 
 while they were examining his dissection together 
 they had not noticed the approach of Dr. Moon, who 
 had walked slowly to their table and stood gazing 
 at the specimen through his moonlike pince-nez. 
 They did not realise that he was near them until 
 they heard his voice, slowly intoning a line of 
 poetry. "The heart," he said: "arras'd in purple 
 like a house of kings. Are you acquainted with that 
 line, Mr. Boyce?" 
 
 "No, sir. Who wrote it?" 
 
 "A man named Francis Thompson. He was a 
 medical student at Manchester, several years senior 
 to me." 
 
 "Oh, I know his name," said Boyce. "He is a 
 friend of my father's." 
 
 "A great poet," said Bobby solemnly. "A great 
 poet. The contemplation of mortality in this place 
 should be full of poetical reflections. You see, this
 
 336 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 is the heart of a very old or a very dissolute man. 
 The coronary arteries are stiff with atheroma." 
 
 "I was thinking, sir," said Edwin, encouraged, 
 "of the heart of Shelley that Trelawny was sup- 
 posed to have picked out of the funeral pyre when 
 the body was burned. His account says that only 
 the heart was left. He gave it to Hunt, didn't he? 
 But you'd think the heart would be burned more 
 easily " 
 
 "Yes. . . . It's an unlikely story. Shelley's hearth 
 he looked up dreamily at the ceiling "Shelley's 
 heart. . . . It's a strange reflection." And he moved 
 away, his big head still in the air and his hands 
 behind his back. 
 
 "I say," said Edwin, "I'd no idea Bobby was like 
 that. You wouldn't associate him with poetry, 
 would you? He seems such an awfully matter-of- 
 fact chap. Dry bones, you know." 
 
 Boyce laughed. "Oh, you don't know Bobby. 
 Nobody does here except my father. He's an in- 
 curable sentimentalist. He lives an awfully lonely 
 sort of life in some digs up in Alvaston. His mind's 
 crammed with poetry and old music and a lot of 
 ethnological lumber. Do you know, he's about the 
 biggest authority in England on prehistoric man?" 
 
 "I hadn't the least idea. I imagined he dreamed 
 of nothing but bones and soft parts." 
 
 "You would. . . . But he's a wonderful chap 
 really. Are you keen on poetry?" 
 
 "Of course I am." 
 
 "There's no 'of course' about it. I don't imagine 
 that your friends Brown and Maskew are particu- 
 larly interested in it. My guvnor's by way of being
 
 SCIENCE 337 
 
 a poet, you know. Bobby's awfully keen on his 
 work. Do you know it?" 
 
 Edwin was ashamed to say he did not. 
 
 "Oh, I'm not in the least surprised," said Boyce. 
 "He's not appreciated, you know, except by other 
 poets, like this fellow Thompson. I think he's 
 rather good, as a matter of fact, quite apart from 
 the fact that he's my father. If you'll come up 
 to our place some day I can show you a lot of in- 
 teresting things in his library : first editions and 
 things like that. I'd no idea that you were keen 
 on them." 
 
 The tone implied such an appreciation of Edwin's 
 hectic past as typified by his solitary appearance 
 on the stage of the Queen's Theatre that he hastened 
 to deny the impeachment. He was tremendously 
 pleased to have struck a man like Boyce, who went 
 on to talk about music, of which Edwin knew noth- 
 ing, and exuded an easy atmosphere of culture, of 
 a kind that he envied, without ever losing sight of 
 the fact that Edwin had come to him in rather a 
 questionable shape. Edwin was thrilled to think 
 that he had reached the threshold of a new and ex- 
 citing friendship which made his association with 
 Brown and Maskew seem commonplace and shabby ; 
 but he was far too shy to force himself on Boyce, 
 and so the acquaintance remained for many months 
 at the exact stage in which it had begun, and he 
 had to be content with the sudden insight that 
 Boyce had given him into the hidden, romantic 
 qualities of Dr. Moon. 
 
 Sometimes, while he was scrubbing his hands with 
 carbolic soap, the only thing that really banished
 
 338 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 the smell of the dissecting room from his fingers, 
 he would hear Boyce discussing music, and particu- 
 larly the work of Tschaikowsky, whose sixth sym- 
 phony had just inflamed his imagination, with Mr. 
 Moon in his gloomy bunk, and he would go on 
 washing his hands until they were ridged and sod- 
 den in the hope of hearing what they were saying 
 or even of entering into their conversation, until 
 W.G. would come along and drag him off to Joey's, 
 asking him what the hell he was dawdling about. 
 Then Edwin would be almost ashamed of W.G.'s 
 company, and hated himself for it, since he knew 
 in his heart of hearts that, even if he were a Phil- 
 istine, W.G. was one of the best and soundest fel- 
 lows on earth. 
 
 The friendship with Boyce, however, was bound to 
 come. It began with the formation of a small liter- 
 ary society, that had been originated by certain of 
 the third-year men with whom Boyce was acquaint- 
 ed, and which held its meetings in the newly-opened 
 smoking room that adjoined Dr. Moon's chamber 
 of horrors. Papers were read every fortnight, and 
 discussions followed in which Edwin had scarcely 
 dared to take part, but Boyce was a polished and 
 fluent protagonist. In the end, when the first en- 
 thusiasms of the society, to which Brown and Mas- 
 kew, naturally enough, did not belong, had been 
 spent, Edwin was asked to read a paper. He chose 
 for his subject Browne's Religio Medici, a work 
 with which this medical audience seemed strangely 
 unacquainted. The paper was a success, and at the 
 end of the meeting Boyce accosted him friendlily 
 and asked him why he had never been up to see
 
 SCIENCE 339 
 
 his father's books. Edwin withheld the obvious 
 reply that the invitation had not been pressed al- 
 though he had never ceased to think of it; and 
 Boyce at once suggested that they should go up 
 to Alvaston together that evening. "We can put 
 you up for the night if that will be more conveni- 
 ent," he said. 
 
 They walked up together under the high, frosty 
 sky, talking of poetry, of all the beautiful things 
 that they had worshipped in common without know- 
 ing it. It seemed strange to Edwin that they should 
 have worked side by side for a couple of years and 
 scarcely spoken to each other when all the time they 
 had so many delights that might have been shared. 
 The unlocking of this closed and secret chamber of 
 his heart gave him a strange feeling of elation and 
 made the world suddenly beautiful. The hard and 
 wintry pavement seemed curiously smooth and re- 
 silient; the roadway ran in masterly and noble 
 curves, the black branches of plane-trees and labur- 
 nums, even the pointed gables of the smug suburban 
 villas seemed to take on a new and piercing beauty 
 against the starry sky, and they swung along to- 
 gether as triumphant in their ecstasy of youth as 
 if indeed they were treading on the stars. 
 
 "What a topping night," said Boyce. "God . . . 
 look at Vega!" He waved his long arms and 
 quoted : 
 
 "Or search the brow of eve, to catch 
 In opal depths the first faint beat 
 Of Vega's fiery heart. . . ."
 
 340 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Whose is that?" 
 
 "My guvnor's. He's a tremendous chap on astron- 
 omy." 
 
 "It's damned good," said Edwin, thrilling. 
 
 "Not bad, is it? He's a very sound man, the 
 guvnor. I think you'd like him." 
 
 But when they reached the Boyces' house they 
 found that the poet was not at home. In place of 
 him Edwin was introduced to a mild and beautiful 
 figure with a soft voice who turned out to be Boyce's 
 mother. She had her son's soft blue eyes, and spoke 
 to him with such caressing tenderness that Edwin 
 Was seized with a sudden feeling of aching empti- 
 ness for the memory of his own mother, of whom, 
 so potent is the anodyne of time, he had scarcely 
 thought for more than a year. 
 
 Boyce presented Edwin with a high social rec- 
 ommendation. "A friend of Denis Martin's," he 
 said. Mrs. Boyce smiled on him. 
 
 "Look here," said her son, "I'm afraid we can't 
 very well go into the guvnor's study. He hates any 
 one invading it when he's not there. Let's go up- 
 stairs to my own room and talk." 
 
 Edwin had a passing vision of the forbidden 
 chamber, the flanks of a grand piano in which a 
 reflection of firelight glowed red, and endless shelves 
 of gilt-lettered books. The rest of the house seemed 
 to him rather untidy, as if it were no more than a 
 dry chrysalis protecting the central beauty of the 
 poet's room; but he had not time to see much fol- 
 lowing in the rear of Boyce's long-legged progress 
 up the stairs. He found himself, at last, in a small 
 attic with a gable window that framed the starry
 
 SCIENCE 341 
 
 sky: the kind of room that satisfied all his own 
 ideals of comfort and seclusion. 
 
 Boyce was proud and willing to exhibit his treas- 
 ures. They showed a curious mixture of the school- 
 boy, represented by photographic groups of cricket 
 teams, glass cases of butterflies, and a tasseled 
 Rugby cap, and the more mature intelligence that 
 now possessed them. Edwin and he sat down oppo- 
 site one another in a couple of easy-chairs, and 
 talked and smoked incessantly all that evening. 
 They spoke of Wordsworth, the idol of Boyce's liter- 
 ary devotions, of Browning, whose claims to poetry 
 he would not allow, and of Shenstone, whose name 
 he had never met before. By this time Edwin was 
 getting rather ashamed of his early admiration for 
 Shenstone, and the fact that Boyce had never heard 
 of the Pastoral Ballad confirmed him in his decision 
 that the author was an acquaintance whom he had 
 better drop. They went on to Francis Thompson * 
 Dr. Moon's quotation from the Anthem of Earth 
 had sent Edwin searching for his works in the 
 municipal library and he now learned that this be- 
 wildering genius, w r ho had once, like him, been a 
 medical student, had actually slept in the room 
 beneath his feet. 
 
 "He never qualified," said Boyce dreamily, "and 
 yet medicine is a wonderful thing. I should think 
 the fact that the medical man is always face to 
 face with mortality" he pointed to a suspended 
 skeleton in the corner "and all the other Big funda- 
 mental things like birth and pain, ought to give 
 him a sort of sense of proportion and make him 
 sensitive to the beauties of life. Your friend, Sir
 
 342 THE YQUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Thomas Browne, is an example. Then there's 
 Kabelais." 
 
 "There are heaps of others," said Edwin. 
 
 "Well, yes. . . . Keats." 
 
 "Byron and Akenside," Edwin supplied from the 
 eighteenth century. 
 
 "I don't know the gentleman," said Boyce. 
 
 "Well, then, Goldsmith and Crabbe. Crabbe's 
 rather good, you know. And Shelley " 
 
 "Shelley?" 
 
 "Yes, Shelley walked a hospital when he was in 
 London with Harriet." 
 
 "I'd no idea of that," said Boyce, "but there's a 
 modern fellow that the guvnor's rather keen on, 
 named Bridges. Kobert Bridges, who's a physi- 
 cian." 
 
 "I've never heard of him." 
 
 "No . . . he's not well known, but I believe he's 
 pretty good." 
 
 And so they talked on, deciding that the world 
 was ripe for great poetical achievement, awed to 
 think that perhaps they were living, without know- 
 ing it, in the beginning of a great age of literature ; 
 convinced, to a degree of enthusiasm, of the splen- 
 dour and magnanimity of the calling that they had 
 adopted; conscious thrillingly conscious of the 
 fact that the whole world lay before them full of 
 undreamed delights as mysterious and yet as clear 
 as the wintry sky. 
 
 Edwin had to run for his train. He didn't mind 
 running. On a night like this he felt that violent 
 exercise was a mode of expressing the curious ela- 
 tion that his talk with Boyce, and his excitement
 
 SCIENCE 343 
 
 in the new friendship that promised so many hours 
 of happiness, had given him. At the gates of the 
 station he paused to buy an evening paper. It con- 
 tained the news of Buller's defeat at Colenso and 
 the result of a cup-tie between North Bromwich 
 Albion and Notts Forest, but he had no room in his 
 mind for football or for this African war in which 
 W.G., to the ruin of his future finances, was itching 
 to enlist. Edwin's thoughts were of the great names 
 and the great works of which he and Boyce had 
 been talking. The newspaper lay folded on his 
 knees; the flares of the black country swept past 
 him in the night, unseen. He was not even aware 
 of the other occupants of the carriage until he sud- 
 denly found himself staring straight into the eyes 
 of his opposite, whom he recognised as Edward 
 Willis, the son of Walter Willis of the Great Mawne 
 Furnaces. 
 
 All Aunt Laura's attempts, heroically made in 
 the interests of social advancement, had so far failed 
 to bring about a friendship between these two. 
 Edwin, on his side, could never get out of his head 
 an unreasonable prejudice against the Willises, the 
 natural result of Aunt Laura's adulation of their 
 wealth, and even a knowledge of his own humble 
 origins had not affected his traditional distrust of 
 people whom he regarded as flashy and self-made. 
 In Edward Willis he found a creature even more 
 shy than himself, and the very fact that Mrs. Willis 
 and Aunt Laura, putting their heads together, had 
 decided to throw them into each other's arms, was 
 enough to create an atmosphere of distrust and un- 
 easiness. The sudden recognition in the railway
 
 344 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 carriage was merely an embarrassment. Edwin 
 was startled into saying "Hallo," and Willis replied 
 in exactly the same way ; then both of them retired 
 with precipitation to the cover of their evening 
 newspapers, from which they listened to the con- 
 versation of a commercial traveller who was return- 
 ing home from London and had all the latest and 
 most authentic gossip on the South African situa- 
 tion. 
 
 "Mind you," he said, "they're wily fellows, these 
 old Boers ; we may not be up to their dirty tricks : 
 I'm proud to say we aren'.t. We shouldn't be Eng- 
 lish if we were. But one thing, sir, you'll see in 
 the end, and that is that dogged British pluck will 
 come through. You mark my words." 
 
 Edwin felt an overpowering impulse to say that 
 dogged British pluck pretty obviously hadn't come 
 through at Colenso; but Edward Willis's presence 
 made him far too self-conscious to commit himself, 
 and at the next station the traveller and his friend 
 picked up their bags and departed, breathing the 
 word "Buller" as if it were an incantation war- 
 ranted to fortify and console. Edwin and Willis 
 were alone. 
 
 When their silence had become altogether too 
 ridiculous, Edwin plucked up his courage and said, 
 "Kotten thing this war." 
 
 "I don't know," said Willis. "It's all right for 
 my old man." 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "Iron. . . . We're chock full of Government work 
 for South Africa: gun-carriages and rifle barrels. 
 Yon're doing medicine, aren't you?"
 
 SCIENCE 345 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Lucky devil. You're learning to cure people 
 while I'm learning to make things to kill them." 
 
 He stared out of the window towards a patch of 
 sky in which the glow of his father's furnaces pul- 
 sated as though it registered the beatings of a 
 savage, fiery heart, and relapsed into gloomy si- 
 lence. The tunnel swallowed them, and in a moment 
 they pulled up at Mawne Hall. Willis prepared 
 to go. "I say," he said, "we're giving a dance 
 next week " and hesitated. 
 
 "What for?" said Edwin, for want of something 
 better. 
 
 "I don't know . . . unless it's to celebrate the 
 Colenso casualties. I believe you're invited. I hope 
 you'll come." 
 
 "Thanks," said Edwin. But Willis was gone.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 ROMANCE 
 
 MB. INGLEBY wanted to know why he was so 
 late. 
 
 "I read a paper at the Literary Society," he said, 
 "and then went back to Alvaston with a man named 
 Boyce. He's a son of Arthur Boyce." 
 
 "The auctioneer?" asked Mr. Ingleby. 
 
 "No . . , the poet." 
 
 Mr. Ingleby's features showed a faint anxiety, as 
 though he doubted if such an influence were 
 healthy. "Well, I hope your paper was a success," 
 he said. 
 
 "Oh, I think it went all right. Any letters?" 
 
 "Yes . . . two. Here they are." He handed them 
 to Edwin. 
 
 One of them was the invitation from Mawne. He 
 showed it to his father. 
 
 "A dance " said Mr. Ingleby. 
 
 "Yes. ... I suppose I'd better go." 
 
 "Your Aunt Laura told me about it. If it won't 
 interfere with your work, I don't see why you 
 shouldn't." 
 
 "I haven't any proper clothes. Evening dress, 
 you know.*
 
 ROMANCE 347 
 
 "I snppose that is quite necessary," said Mr. 
 Ingleby regretfully. 
 
 Edwin could see that the question of expense 
 was troubling his father's mind. He wished to 
 goodness he would say so outright, instead of look- 
 ing vaguely distressed. It would be so much more 
 satisfactory. As it was, he could only feel indefi- 
 nitely in the wrong, as if the dance were a piece 
 of reckless and inexcusable levity in which he had 
 no right to take a part. The dress suit, the acquisi- 
 tion of which had been anticipated with some 
 satisfaction, now appeared to him in the terms of 
 an accumulation of small change hardly earned 
 in his father's dusty shop : as the outcome of penny- 
 worths of Epsom Salts, sticks of liquorice, or teeth- 
 ing powders. It was humiliating, and even distress- 
 ing to realise that every single comfort or luxury 
 that he enjoyed even the prime necessities of life, 
 had to be accumulated, literally scraped together 
 from this incredibly humble source and by the per- 
 sonal exertions of this simple and pathetic person. 
 With these conditions in his mind he could not bear 
 accepting money from his father, the weight of hi8 
 obligation was so overwhelming. Now he found it 
 difficult to face the idea of a tailor's bill that might 
 represent the profit on at least three days of small 
 trading in the shop. 
 
 "I don't think I'd better go, father," he said. 
 
 "It would be rather ungracious if you didn't, 
 Edwin," his father replied. "It was extremely kind 
 of the Willises to ask you. I think you'd better 
 go and be measured to-morrow by Mr. Jones." 
 
 The idea of a Halesby tailor's cut was not inspir-
 
 348 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 ing and made Edwin inclined to press his refusal ; 
 but Mr. Ingleby went on to explain that Mr. Jones 
 owed him a bill that he had begun to look upon as 
 a bad debt, and that Edwin's dress suit would be 
 a way of working it off. This circumstance made 
 the order less shameful, except in so far as it ap- 
 plied to the hateful penury of Mr. Jones, whom 
 Edwin remembered as a man with a beard, as 
 shabbily unlike a tailor's dummy as it was possible 
 for a man to be. The occurrence was unfortunate 
 in another way ; for such an addition to his ward- 
 robe would almost certainly scotch the idea of ask- 
 ing for a dress allowance, a plan which had been 
 maturing in his brain for some months and only 
 needed a callous frame of mind for its performance. 
 
 Next evening, however, he went to see Mr. Jones, 
 who measured him obsequiously, and assured him 
 that in the happy days before he was his own mas- 
 ter, he had actually cut morning-coats for Sir 
 Joseph Astill, a gentleman who was very difficult 
 to fit on account of a 'slight ... er ... fullness in 
 the figure. Edwin, primed by the observations of 
 The Major in To-Day, was able to tell Mr. 
 Jones exactly what he wanted, and Mr. Jones's 
 manner, when he rubbed his hands over Edwin's 
 instructions, did not suggest for a moment the fact 
 of which Edwin was all the time aware : that this 
 was not a bona-fide order, but a rather shabby way 
 of making him pay a bill that he had scamped for 
 a couple of years. 
 
 Stepping out of Mr. Jones's melancholy shop, 
 Edwin thanked heaven that his father had not 
 wanted him to follow in his footsteps ; for it seemed
 
 ROMANCE 349 
 
 to him that the life of a struggling tradesman in a 
 small town must be the most humiliating on earth. 
 He was awfully sorry for all of them as he walked 
 down the street and read their names on the boards 
 above Jheir windows. He had never quite realised 
 their condition before he smelt the particular odour 
 of lower middle-class poverty, vaguely suggestive 
 of perambulators, aspidestras, and boiled mutton, 
 that moved down the linoleum floored passage at 
 the back of Mr. Jones's shop. 
 
 In due course the clothes arrived. On the whole, 
 Mr. Jones had not done badly ; but even so, Edwin 
 was still scarcely qualified for the business in hand. 
 He had never learned to dance, and it was neces- 
 sary to acquire this accomplishment in a little more 
 than a week. At first he had decided to pull his 
 courage together and approach Martin, whose eligi- 
 bility compelled him to be an expert dancing man ; 
 but, at the last moment, he funked a confession 
 that would expose such depths of social ignorance, 
 and went instead to a certain Professor Beagle, 
 who advertised classes in dancing and deportment 
 at the hour of five on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and 
 Saturdays, in the Queen's Assembly Rooms, next 
 door to the theatre of the same name. 
 
 On the next Tuesday afternoon Edwin presented 
 himself to Mr. Beagle at the advertised hour. He 
 found him alone sitting on a platform at the end 
 of a long room that smelt of dust and moth-eaten 
 rep curtains. When Edwin appeared at the other 
 end of the room the professor dismounted, cleared 
 his throat, clasped his hands in front of him, and 
 made a formal bow. He was a little man, and very
 
 350 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 fat. He wore a navy blue coat that was cut very 
 short at the back, so that it ruckled up over his 
 round haunches, and his collar rose so high and 
 stiff above a white Ascot tie, that he was forced to 
 carry his head tilted backwards in the direction of 
 his waxed moustache. His face was purple and his 
 watery eyes stared, whether as the result of the 
 collar's asphyxiation or his past manner of life it 
 was difficult to say. His feet were excessively small, 
 and his striped grey trousers tapered to the ankles 
 in such a way that every step he made seemed a 
 nice feat of balancing. He bowed to Edwin, and 
 Edwin explained the urgent circumstances of his 
 mission. 
 
 "I see," said Professor Beagle. "I quite under- 
 stand. You must not, 'owever, expect me to be 
 able to turn you out as I should wish to in the 
 time at our disposal. Perhaps you will be good 
 enough not to mention my name in this connection, 
 and keep my instructions, as it were, dark?" 
 
 Edwin assured him of secrecy, and the professor 
 proceeded to ask him where the dance was to be 
 held. "I do not wish to teach you anything that 
 will not be useful," he said. "In some circles the 
 Quadrille, which I myself consider the most digni- 
 fied of dances, is still in favour. In others the 
 Valeta is coming into vogue. In different planes 
 of society different conditions prevail." 
 
 In the end the professor decided that Edwin's 
 case called for the Waltz, the Lancers, and the 
 Polka, with the possible addition of the Pas de 
 Quatre. He demonstrated to Edwin the position
 
 ROMANCE 351 
 
 in which his feet should be placed, and then invited 
 him to have a try at the waltz. 
 
 "You will take my harm, please, in the following 
 way ... so. ... Now, neither grarsping nor 
 clarsping, let the lady's 'and lie gently in yours, 
 with the fingers 'alf bent, and under no circum- 
 stances squeeze the figger. So ..." 
 
 Edwin placed his right arm above the ruckles in 
 Professor Beagle's broad back: into his left hand 
 a podgy fist descended like a lump of moist dough, 
 and from the little man's back-tilted, strangled head 
 a faint sound of whistling proceeded that raked 
 Edwin's own nostrils with a cross-fire of whisky 
 and cachous. Then the professor began to revolve 
 like a peg top, and Edwin felt himself swept round 
 by the arm that lay upon his shoulder, to the 
 rhythm of the whistled tune, which was sometimes 
 suspended and replaced by: "Wonn-two-three. 
 Wonn-two-three. Wonn-two-three. Gen-tly now. 
 Keep-on-the. Tips-of-your. WONN-two-three. Toes." 
 
 In this manner they circled the room several 
 times. Edwin was getting out of breath; but the 
 professor, to whom this form of exercise was so 
 usual as to be negligible, showed no signs of fa- 
 tigue, except that his eyes became a little more 
 glassy and his cheeks more purple. Indeed, the 
 power by which he swung Edwin round the room 
 was a thing of mystery; for his little feet did not 
 eeem to move, and the upper part of his body was 
 rigid. He moved like a cyclone or a dust-storm, Ed- 
 win thought, revolving terrifically on its own axis. 
 
 "I am afraid," said Professor Beagle formally at 
 the end of the first lesson. "I am afraid you have
 
 352 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 no great natural gift. It is better that I should 
 be candid with you. You will need half a dozen 
 lessons at least before you can take your place 
 with the young ladies in one of my advanced 
 classes." 
 
 Edwin stuck to it. On six more occasions he 
 visited the Assembly Kooms, where, with exactly 
 the same formalities, Mr. Beagle received him. 
 With Mr. Beagle in his arms, prevented by sheer 
 physical bulk from, in any circumstances, squeez- 
 ing the figger, he revolved in the vortex of the 
 waltz. In the Lancers he set to imaginary part- 
 ners, or went "visiting" with Mr. Beagle's hand 
 lying gently in his, with the fingers 'alf bent. In 
 the Pas de Quatre, where the draught of whisky 
 and cachous was happily directed forwards, he 
 pointed an awkward toe alongside Mr. Beagle's 
 tapered and elegant extremity. In the end the 
 professor pronounced himself satisfied with him. 
 
 "If I were you," he said, "I think I should come 
 along to my advanced class this evening and fa- 
 miliarise yourself with the proximity of young 
 ladies. The fee is a purely nominal 'alf-crown." 
 
 Edwin decided to do so, and walked up in the 
 evening with his patent leather pumps in his 
 pocket. He felt very shy. The place was lighted 
 with flaring gas jets, and in a room marked Gentle- 
 men, that he had always taken for a lavatory, a 
 number of young men, who looked like shop assist- 
 ants, were putting on white kid gloves. They all 
 seemed to know one another and to look upon 
 Edwin as an intruder. No one spoke to him, and 
 he waited in the cloak room until the last had dis-
 
 ROMANCE 353 
 
 appeared before he dared to emerge. From the 
 room on the opposite side of the passage there 
 issued a breeze of concentrated perfumes, and a 
 round of subdued titters. This room was labelled 
 "Ladies." 
 
 While Edwin stood waiting and wondering if he 
 dare risk an encounter, the door opposite opened 
 and a bevy of bloused figures appeared. The sight 
 of the first took him by surprise : it was the elder 
 of the two anaemic young ladies in the drapery who 
 travelled in the morning train with him from 
 Halesby. She gave him a smile of recognition that 
 revealed her defective teeth. This prospect was 
 altogether too much for him. An acute shyness 
 drove him back into the cloak room, and, as soon 
 as he had taken off his pumps and put on his shoes 
 again, he left the Queen's Assembly Rooms and 
 bolted down Sackville Row to his train. 
 
 The Willis's dance, to which Edwin had looked 
 forward with such mingled pleasure and anxiety, 
 was destined to bring forth a violent emotional ex- 
 perience. Mr. Jones had not undergone the experi- 
 ence of cutting for the undulant figure of Sir Joseph 
 Kingston for nothing. Apart from the fact that 
 the sleeves were rather too long for his arms, 
 Edwin's dress coat was a success, and, as Aunt 
 Laura benignantly pointed out, it was just as well 
 that some allowance should be made for future 
 growth. Mr. Jones had been extremely anxious 
 that Edwin should be supplied with a magenta silk 
 handkerchief, an ornament which, he was assured,
 
 354 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 all the best people wore stuffed in the corner of 
 their waistcoats. 
 
 On this problem the Major had never delivered 
 judgment, so Edwin mustered sufficient courage to 
 approach Denis Martin for advice. Martin scorn- 
 fully told him that the idea was preposterous. "It'a 
 the kind of get-up that your friend Maskew would 
 adopt," he said. He also impressed upon Edwin 
 the fact that the infallible index of a bounder in 
 evening-dress was a ready-made tie. No doubt the 
 advice was excellent; but it let Edwin in for an 
 hour of agony on the evening of the dance, when 
 the tie refused to answer to the Major's printed in- 
 structions, and finished up by making him look as 
 if he had gone to bed in his boots and slept on it. 
 
 He had never been to Mawne Hall before. That 
 pretentious mansion with its castellated facade 
 set on a steep bank above the valley of the Stour, 
 in which the works that maintained it lay, was so 
 brightly lit upon this evening that it glowed like 
 a lantern through the bare boughs of the hanging 
 wood beneath. In the gun-room at the side of the 
 hall in which the hats and coats of the guests were 
 being received by Bassett, the Willises' coachman, 
 he recognised a number of incredibly elegant crea- 
 tures of his own sex with shining white waistcoats, 
 pearl studs, and immaculate ties. He knew scarcely 
 any of them, for they were mostly neighbouring 
 ironmasters or professional people to whose society 
 the Willises' money had proved a sufficient introduc- 
 tion. Among them he recognised Sir Joseph Kings- 
 ton, playing ducks and drakes with his aitches, and 
 wearing, to Edwin's encouragement, a flagrantly
 
 ROMANCE 355 
 
 ready-made tie. In this particular, at any rate, he 
 was one up on the baronet. He hoped that some 
 one else would realise this fact. In the middle of 
 these reflections he thought he heard a voice that 
 he recognised, and turned to find himself rubbing 
 shoulders with Griffin. Edwin said, "Good-eve- 
 ning." 
 
 "Good Lord, Ingleby, are you here? I haven't 
 seen you since the pantomime night. What are you 
 doing here? Do you know these people?" 
 
 It struck Edwin that he spoke rather contemptu- 
 ously of his hosts. 
 
 "Yes. ... I live near here, you know," he re- 
 plied. "I didn't know the Willises were friends 
 of yours." As a matter of fact he knew nothing 
 about the Willises' friends; but it sounded rather 
 well. 
 
 "No ... I don't know them," said Griffin, "but 
 the old man is a business friend of my uncle's, and 
 apparently they were rather hard up for men.' ? The 
 sound of waltz music was heard, and Griffin left 
 him hurriedly. "See you later," he said. 
 
 Edwin, anxious not to be left behind, pulled on 
 his gloves and split the thumb of one of them. He 
 passed through the hall, where his name was an- 
 nounced, rather contemptuously, as he thought, by 
 Hannah, the Willises' tall and starchy servant, and 
 was received in a manner that was reassuring and 
 homely by Mrs; Willis. She spoke for a moment 
 of his mother, and tears gathered in her rather 
 watery eyes ; then she introduced him to her small 
 daughter Lilian, very self-conscious in a white 
 party frock with a pale blue waistband, and an-
 
 356 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 other dark girl with beautiful grey eyes and a 
 creamy rather than pale complexion, who was 
 standing beside her. Miss Dorothy Powys, she said. 
 Edwin, hedging for safety, booked a dance with 
 Lilian, who took the matter as seriously as him- 
 self. Next, no doubt, he must have a shot at Miss 
 Dorothy Powys, in spite of the disturbing beauty 
 of her eyes ; but when he came to ask her for a 
 dance, he saw that Griffin was talking to her. 
 
 "May I have another number sixteen?" Edwin 
 heard him ask easily. She smiled and nodded. Her 
 smile seemed to Edwin very beautiful : so beautiful, 
 indeed, that he couldn't possibly bring himself to 
 approach her when Griffin turned away. It was 
 awfully silly of him, he thought. 
 
 The evening was not exactly a success. He pol- 
 kaed with Lilian, and took his place in the Lancers 
 with several mature ladies to whom Mrs. Willis 
 introduced him. Luckily none of these belonged 
 to Halesby, a circumstance that must be attributed 
 to Mrs. Willis's tact, so that the question of his 
 origin never arose. He danced according to the 
 letter of Professor Beagle's instructions. Neither 
 grasping nor clasping, he let the ladies' hands lie 
 gently in his with the fingers half bent, and in no 
 circumstances did he squeeze the figger. What he 
 missed was the terrific motive power that the un- 
 ladylike Professor Beagle had applied to his revolu- 
 tions. It now appeared to him that to supply this 
 was the part of the male ; and as most of the matrons 
 with whom Mrs. Willis supplied him were bulky, 
 he had his work cut out. Once, returning thor- 
 oughly blown from one of these adventures he
 
 ROMANCE 357 
 
 caught the eye of Dorothy Powys; and he thought 
 she smiled. Could this be true? He wondered. 
 . . . During the greater part of the evening when 
 he had not been dancing he had found himself fol- 
 lowing her movements with his eyes. He had de- 
 cided that she must be at least a year or two older 
 than himself ; but that didn't really matter, for she 
 seemed to him a creature of such very perfect grace, 
 and her eyes, in the moment when he caught them, 
 had been so wonderful. After the next dance, which 
 was the one that she had booked with Griffin, he 
 watched them disappear into the library. 
 
 It made him feel sick with himself that he hadn't 
 taken the opportunity of his introduction. What 
 a damned fool he was! And afterwards, when he 
 watched her, she did not smile at all, either for 
 him or for any one else. Indeed, she seemed pale, 
 and anxious, as if something had happened to up- 
 set her. In despair Edwin wandered off into the 
 card-room, where he saw Lady Kingston, who was 
 partnering Mr. Willis at bridge, revoke three times 
 in two games, to the intense annoyance of her hus- 
 band. From the card-room he strolled on to the 
 buffet, where he found Griffin absorbing quantities 
 of whisky and soda. He begged Edwin to join him ; 
 but Edwin, who was particularly anxious to be- 
 have himself, struck to claret-cup. 
 
 "Well, have you struck any cuddle?" said Griffin 
 brutally, with his mouth full. 
 
 "Any what?" 
 
 "Cuddle. . . . Girls. . . . What the devil do you 
 think one comes to a dance for?" 
 
 "No. ... I haven't," said Edwin.
 
 358 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Well, they are a pretty scratch lot," Griffin con- 
 fessed. "That Powys girl's all right though." 
 
 Edwin blushed furiously. He suddenly wanted 
 to throw his glass of claret-cup at Griffin's head. 
 Why? . . . He calmed himself. 
 
 "Do you know her?" he asked. 
 
 "Never met her before to-night. She's got a top- 
 ping figure. She must be pretty well connected. 
 Lord Alfred Powys is one of their directors here." 
 
 "But you don't mean to say " Edwin began. 
 
 "The night is yet young," said Griffin, gulping 
 another whisky. "God, there's number twelve! I 
 must hook it." 
 
 Edwin wandered back to the ballroom. He 
 couldn't keep away from it, but, at the same time, 
 he was anxious not to appear disengaged, for fear 
 that Mrs. Willis should induce some other heavy 
 partner to abandon her arm-chair for his amuse- 
 ment. He hung about the pillars of the folding 
 doors that led into the supper room, just out of 
 range of Mrs. Willis's maternal gaze. From this 
 point he could watch the beautiful Miss Powys, and 
 wonder, with a sort of bitter excitement, exactly 
 what Griffin had meant by his suggestions. Watch- 
 ing her, he could not believe that she could be any- 
 thing but graceful and beautiful in everything she 
 did. The band started to play the music for waltz : 
 number sixteen. He remembered it was the second 
 dance that Griffin had booked with her. For some 
 reason that he couldn't imagine, he felt that he 
 wanted to be near when Griffin came for her : per- 
 haps he could tell her attitude towards him by 
 something that she might say. He went over to
 
 ROMANCE 359 
 
 the place where she was sitting next to Mrs. Willis. 
 He tried not to look at her. 
 
 In a moment he heard Griffin's voice. "Ours, I 
 think." The tone was a little blurred by Griffin's 
 potations. 
 
 "I think you've made a mistake," she said. 
 
 Edwin turned round, and at the same moment 
 she looked towards him. "Surely I am dancing this 
 with you, Mr. Ingleby." 
 
 "But look here, I'm sure these are your initials 
 on my programme, Miss Powys. Let me look at 
 yours." 
 
 He tried to take the programme from her fingers, 
 but she moved it away. 
 
 "Really, we mustn't contradict each other, Mr. 
 Griffin. The dance is Mr. Ingleby's. Will you take 
 me, please?" she said to Edwin. ; 
 
 In an ecstatic dream Edwin found himself walk- 
 ing away with her on his arm. It was a miracle, 
 an astounding, beautiful miracle. She picked up 
 her skirt by the loop of ribbon with which it was 
 suspended and looked him full in the eyes, smiling. 
 "Shall we start?" she said. 
 
 They started. In one fatal moment Edwin, who 
 hadn't been doing badly at the beginning of the 
 evening, forgot every single precept that Professor 
 Beagle had taught him. 
 
 "I say, what a shocking dancer you are," she said 
 with a laugh. 
 
 "I'm most awfully sorry, I only learnt this week." 
 Now that his mind was diverted fey speaking to her 
 the steps came more naturally*
 
 360 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 "That's better," she said. "Who on earth taught 
 
 He confessed to Professor Beagle, and she ap- 
 peared to be amused. 
 
 "You see you're dancing away from me all the 
 time. Just as if you were afraid of me. You ought 
 to hold me closer. It upsets the what d'you call 
 it ... centre of gravity." 
 
 "I was told never under any circumstances to 
 - " He couldn't very well repeat Professor Bea- 
 gle's formula. 
 
 "Now you're getting on beautifully. Don't think 
 about it. That's the idea. Just dance." 
 
 The music ended. "Where would you like to go?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "Out into the hall, if you don't mind ... on 
 the stairs. I want to explain to you. It was really 
 awfully good of you to take me on." 
 
 "It was a wonderful piece of luck for me." 
 
 They sat together on the shallow oak staircase 
 and she proceeded to tell him that Griffin had up- 
 set her in the dance before by trying to kiss her 
 shoulder. "I really couldn't stick a repetition of 
 that," she said. "Besides, I think the man had 
 been drinking. So I just pitched upon your poor 
 innocence and lied for all I was worth. Who are 
 you, by the way? I only just remembered your 
 name when Mrs. Willis introduced us. She's rather 
 a dear, isn't she?" 
 
 The music of the next dance struck up. "Are 
 you dancing?" Edwin asked eagerly. 
 
 "I don't know, I expect so. Just look at my 
 programme. It's too dark for me to see."
 
 ROMANCE 361 
 
 Edwin took the programme from her fingers. It 
 was a thrilling moment. In the dusk he deciphered 
 two initials, "E.W.," he said. 
 
 "Oh, that's only Edward Willis. He's very shy 
 of me. If you've nothing better to do I think we'll 
 stay here." 
 
 It was so easy to talk to her. To Edwin, indeed, it 
 seemed as if he had now become articulate for the 
 first time in his life. She did not speak very much 
 of herself ; but she asked him many questions about 
 his life at school, where, he confided to her, he had 
 first known Griffin, and then again about his new 
 work in North Bromwich. And when she did speak 
 her voice was low, and her speech, to his ears, of 
 an amazing limpid purity, more beautiful than any 
 human speech he had ever heard. Edwin would 
 have liked to listen to it for ever. He felt that 
 he wanted words to describe its peculiar music, but 
 no words came to him. He could only remember 
 a line in Browning's Pauline: 
 
 "Her voice was as the voice of his own soul 
 Heard in the calm of thought. . . ." 
 
 That was the nearest he could get to it; but th% 
 words, although they expressed a little of his ab- 
 sorption, did not convey the musical qualities that 
 he wanted to describe. He tried to compare it with 
 the tones of some instrument that he knew, but 
 neither wood-wind nor strings suggested what he 
 wanted. No ... it was a sound nearer to nature 
 than any man-made instrument. It was the voice 
 of a Naiad : the sound of running water in a clear 
 brookland. And all the time that he listened to
 
 362 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 her he was thrillingly conscious of her physical 
 presence. She was sitting on the stair beneath 
 him, and fortunately she could not see that he was 
 gazing at her in the gloom, thinking how beauti- 
 fully shaped was the nape of the neck from which 
 her dark hair was drawn upwards; overcome by 
 the loveliness and smoothness of her curved shoul- 
 der. 
 
 "I'm talking all the time," he said, "and you're 
 saying nothing. It's rather a shame . . . because 
 you speak so beautifully." 
 
 "Whatever do you mean?" For a moment her 
 eyes were on his. He dared not look at them. He 
 could not answer her, for the moment seemed full 
 of such an overpowering sweetness. 
 
 "Do tell me." 
 
 "Oh, I only mean that when you say a thing like 
 that, it ... it suggests that everything about you 
 
 is marvellously clean and clear and musical " 
 
 He paused, for he felt that she might laugh at him. 
 
 "Yes ... go on," she said. 
 
 "Like water in a hill country. It makes me feel 
 as if I weren't within a hundred miles of North 
 Bromwich." 
 
 She laughed softly, but not unkindly. 
 
 "No, I'm not a bit like that. I'm really awfully 
 hard and worldly I wish I were the least bit what 
 you imagine. You're most awfully young, aren't 
 you?" 
 
 Perhaps she did not mean the word cruelly, but 
 it seemed very cruel to Edwin. It was quite pos- 
 sible that she was a few years older than himself, 
 if age were to be counted by years ; but in reality
 
 ROMANCE 363 
 
 he knew that she was beautifully young, certainly 
 young enough to love and to be loved. 
 
 "Don't let's talk about me," she said. 
 
 "But I want to talk about you." 
 
 He wanted to talk about nothing else. His head 
 was full of words that he wanted to throw before 
 her like jewels, but he did not know how much he 
 dared to say. He knew it was impossible for him 
 to express a hundredth part of his delight in her. 
 It would be nearly as bad as kissing her neck in 
 the manner of Griffin, to say that the curve of it 
 sent him delirious with joy. It would be indecency 
 rather than candour to say that the faint scent of 
 her intoxicated him. He was silent with tremulous 
 emotion. He wondered if she could be conscious 
 of it; and he could not guess, for she, too, did not 
 speak. From the ballroom they heard the music 
 of another dance begin. Two shadowy couples 
 emerged from the passage beneath them. A cur- 
 tain of Indian beading made a sound like dead 
 leaves driven over a dry pavement by the wind. 
 The intruders' voices died away. 
 
 "I suppose we must go too," she said with a sigh. 
 
 "Why must you go? Are you dancing?" Edwin 
 asked, with a catch in his throat, 
 
 "No, I don't think I shall dance any more. I 
 was rather upset. It was silly of me. But I think 
 we'd better go." 
 
 Edwin offered her his arm in the best manner of 
 Professor Beagle. 
 
 "Thank you," she said in a low voice. For a 
 moment she hesitated. She was smiling, and her 
 eyes were wonderful in the gloom. Their faces
 
 364 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 were level with each other. And, suddenly, amaz- 
 ingly, she kissed him. 
 
 "I'm going," she said. Edwin tried to take her 
 hand as she moved away from him. For a second 
 it lay in his, soft and small and warm. Then, 
 before his arms had time to follow the impulse of 
 his flaming brain, she had slipped away from him 
 and passed into the shadow of the passage. He 
 stood there at the foot of the stairs alone, his heart 
 thudding like a steam-hammer in a bewildered, in- 
 toxicating elation. Why had she left him? Why? 
 . . . unless it were only a part of her adorable 
 modesty. That must be the reason : and yet it was 
 hardly consistent with an exalted ideal of modesty 
 to kiss a young man, whom she had only known 
 for fifteen minutes, on the lips. A new aspect of 
 the miracle presented itself to him. Was it possi- 
 ble, after all, that Griffin had been right, that she 
 was really exactly what he had insinuated, a fast 
 little baggage who had determined, in a sudden 
 caprice, to throw Griffin over and try a new experi- 
 ment? 
 
 He could not believe it. Everything that he had 
 noticed and adored in her, her grey eyes, the de- 
 licious quality of her speech, her fragrance, the in- 
 describable fineness there was no other word for 
 it of her, denied the possibility. He found it diffi- 
 cult to realise that she had gone in the moment of 
 such an astounding revelation. Such was the way 
 of a Naiad, melting away out of her sweet mortality 
 in the moment of possession. Standing alone at 
 the foot of the gloomy staircase, listening in a 
 dream to the luscious music of the Choristers' waltz,
 
 ROMANCE 365 
 
 he tried to recreate his dream out of memory. Noth- 
 ing of her was left but her delicate perfume. On 
 the stairs he saw a small crumpled muslin hand- 
 kerchief from which the perfume came. He picked 
 it up with the reverence of a pilgrim touching a 
 relic, eagerly triumphant that he had managed to 
 rescue a fragment of his dream. It did not strike 
 him that this tiny square of scented muslin was 
 presumably the instrument with which divinity 
 blew its nose: and indeed its dimensions scarcely 
 fitted it for this material function. He placed it 
 in the satin-lined pocket of Mr. Jones's creation. 
 It pleased him to think that it lay near his heart. 
 
 This, of course, was only the beginning of a 
 romance. No doubt, in the course of the evening, 
 he would see her again. Somehow he must per- 
 suade her to see him alone, and then he would be 
 able to do all the magnificently passionate things of 
 which her flight had cheated him. He would kiss 
 her; he would hold her exquisiteness in his arms; 
 he would tell her all the glorious things that he had 
 been fool enough to withhold. 
 
 He went back into the ballroom. Nobody seemed 
 to notice him there. It pleased him to think that 
 these ordinary people were too dull in their per- 
 ceptions to guess at the wonder in his heart. It 
 was a secret that he shared with only one other 
 person in the world, and that secret had altered 
 his whole outlook on life. He was no longer the 
 timid boy, conscious of his social disadvantages and 
 of his new dress clothes, who had entered the 
 Willises' house a couple of hours before, but a man, 
 a lover, to whose passion the whole beauty of the
 
 366 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 world ministered, a creature miraculously placed 
 beyond the reach of envy or of scorn. He was 
 happy to wait patiently for the supreme moment 
 whenjie should see her again. And so he waited, 
 "mildly tolerant of Griffin, over whom he had scored 
 so easily, of Edward Willis, who performed with a 
 set face his penitentiary programme of duty-dances, 
 of Mrs. Willis, who watched the joy of her small 
 daughter Lilian with the proud but anxious eyes 
 of a mother hen, of Mr. Willis circulating among 
 his guests with an expansive smile, of poor Lady 
 Kingston, still revoking automatically in the card- 
 room. 
 
 But Dorothy Powys never returned to the seat 
 that she had occupied under the shadow of Mrs. 
 Willis's wings. She had told him that she didn't 
 mean to dance any more, but surely that didn't 
 mean that he was not to see her again. He grew 
 uneasy. Of course she could easily escape if she 
 wanted to do so, for she was staying in the house. 
 He wondered if he dared ask Mrs. Willis what had 
 become of her, but decided that this would certainly 
 give him away. 
 
 Instead of doing this he posted himself in a cor- 
 ner from which he could hear everything that was 
 said in Mrs. Willis's circle. This was not a very 
 profitable pursuit, for Mrs. Willis was not an inter- 
 esting talker, and the only excitement that pene- 
 trated the broody calm that surrounded her was the 
 arrival of her husband, very excited over a telephone 
 message, that had no foundation in fact, announc- 
 ing the relief of Lady smith by General Buller. 
 Edwin was beginning to give the business up as
 
 ROMANCE 367 
 
 a bad job when he saw a tall, languid man, whom 
 he considered to be rather shabbily dressed, ap- 
 proach Mrs. Willis and ask her what had happened 
 to his niece. 
 
 "Oh, she was here half an hour ago," said Mrs. 
 Willis. "The poor child told me that she had a 
 headache and was going to bed. I told Hannah 
 to take her a hot water bottle. ... I do hope 
 you're quite comfortable, Lord Alfred," she went 
 on. "It is nice, isn't it? to see all these young people 
 enjoying themselves. At least it would be, if one 
 didn't have to think of all the pojor creatures in 
 South Africa being fired at by these treacherous 
 Boers." 
 
 And the tall, shabby man mumbled, "Yes . . . 
 yes, certainly. . . . Very," in his beard. 
 
 It was enough for Edwin. He said good-bye to 
 Mrs. Willis, who seemed only mildly surprised at 
 his departure, and left the house. There was no 
 reason now why he should stay. On the stone ter- 
 race he paused, listening for a moment to the 
 muted music from within the house. In the upper 
 stories only one window was lighted. He could 
 see the glowing yellow pane beyond a bough of one 
 of the cedars with which the lawn was shaded. He 
 wondered if that window were hers. He would 
 like, he thought, to stay there all night in the black 
 shadow of the cedar, gazing at that window and 
 feeling that he was near her. Later on, no doubt, 
 the light would be extinguished, and then he would 
 imagine her lying there asleep. How beautiful 
 she must be when she lay there sleeping! 
 
 He sighed, and went on his way, under the won-
 
 368 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 derful night. He climbed the steep slope of Mawne 
 Bank, under the smouldering pit-fires, in a dream, 
 and found himself, surprised, beneath the walls of 
 the cherry orchard at the back of Old Mawne Hall. 
 Inside the walls the cherry-trees lay locked in a 
 wintry sleep. He stopped, for the steepness of the 
 hill had stolen his breath. He remembered a day 
 when he walked there with his mother. "How 
 mother would have loved her!" he thought. Yes 
 . . . she was more wonderful than his mother. On 
 the day that he remembered, so many years ago, 
 it had been spring. The branches had been full of 
 billowy bloom. Now, in the wintry night, he felt 
 that spring was near : spring was in his blood, stir- 
 ring it to new and passionate aspirations as in a 
 few months time it would stir the dreamy sap of 
 the cherry-trees. A strange, unseasonable miracle. 
 Glorious, indefinite words formed themselves in hia 
 mind. Spring, with its warm, perfumed breath, 
 triumphing beautifully over the powers of winter 
 and death. Death at Colenso under those tawny 
 kopjes. Love in his heart. A sublime, ecstatic 
 muddle. . . . The Mawne furnaces leapt into a 
 sudden flower of fire that made the sky above them 
 tawny. Love was like fire ... an exultant leap- 
 ing flame. 
 
 He did not know where he was going until he 
 found himself at home in his little shabby room 
 taking off his dress-suit and staring at himself as 
 a stranger in the dusty mirror. "Who am I?" he 
 thought, "that this should have happened to me? 
 I do not know myself. I am greater and more 
 wonderful than the image that I see in the glass."
 
 ROMANCE 369 
 
 He placed his precious talisman of muslin under 
 his pillow, and wondered if he might be blessed 
 with a dream of her. "She kissed me," he thought. 
 "She kissed my lips " 
 
 m 
 
 It was evident that if he were to see her again 
 he must make friends with Edward Willis. He was 
 sorry that he had not done so before. For once 
 in a way the recommendations of Aunt Laura had 
 been prophetically right. His self-consciousness 
 made it difficult for him to do so, for he felt certain 
 that this cold, calculating young man would see 
 through him. For two days he debated with him- 
 self on the various ways in which Mawne might 
 be approached without coming to any satisfactory 
 conclusion. On the third he was so lucky as to 
 meet his victim on the Halesby train. Willis did 
 not seem in the least anxious to renew their ac- 
 quaintance ; and it was at the expense of some awk- 
 wardness that Edwin managed to drag him into 
 conversation. 
 
 They talked a little about the war, which Willis 
 seemed to view from a remote and pessimistic 
 angle. From that, by way of Mr. Willis's Lady- 
 smith rumour, they passed on to a discussion of the 
 dance. Edwin was enthusiastic. 
 
 "I'm glad you enjoyed yourself," said Willis. "I 
 hate dancing." 
 
 "I rather admired that Miss Powys," said Edwin. 
 
 "Dorothy Powys? Yes, she's a pretty girl, isn't 
 she?" 
 
 "Who is she?"
 
 370 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Oh, she's a niece of Lord Alfred Powys, one of 
 our directors. Lives with him, I believe. I don't 
 really know her." 
 
 "Isn't she staying with you?" 
 
 "Oh, no. . . . She only stayed at Mawne for 
 the night of the dance. Her uncle happened to 
 be coming over for a directors' meeting, and the 
 governor asked him to bring her along with him 
 as there was a dance on." 
 
 This was all very discouraging. 
 
 "Where do they live?" Edwin asked. 
 
 "Somewhere over in the Teme valley, I think. 
 Lord Alfred's a great fisherman. He's a nice chap." 
 
 "And she lives with him?" 
 
 "Yes. ... I think he's sort of adopted her. But 
 I understand she's going to India sometime next 
 month." . 
 
 "India? What on earth is she going to India 
 for?" 
 
 "Going to be married to some fellow in the In- 
 dian army. A major, I think he is." 
 
 "To be married " said Edwin. 
 
 And the train pulled up at Mawne Hall. 
 
 IV 
 
 He took it very hardly. On the face of it, it 
 seemed that her kiss had been, no more than a piece 
 of mad, cynical trifling; but his respect for him- 
 self which was considerable, as became his years 
 would not allow him to believe this. He decided, 
 instead, that Dorothy Powys's kiss had been the 
 symbol of a great and noble passion, fated, in the 
 melancholy manner of nearly every legendary lore,
 
 ROMANCE 371 
 
 to frustration. He was convinced ttiat the un- 
 known major in the Indian army would never be 
 loved ; that the memory of that intense moment on 
 Mr. Willis's back stairs would haunt his wife 'for 
 ever, and temper with romance the vistas of an un- 
 happy marriage. The main result of the incident 
 in Edwin's case was a spate of passionate but imita- 
 tive verses, a new devotion to such music as re- 
 pressed his particular portion of weltschmerz, and 
 an anxiety to confide the story, with elaborations, 
 to some sympathetic friend. He turned it on to 
 W.G. 
 
 "Well, W.G., what do you think of it?" he asked, 
 when he had finished. 
 
 W.G. sucked at his pipe and smiled good- 
 humouredly. 
 
 "Better luck next time, old chap," he said.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DRESSER 
 
 IN the following June the second professional 
 examination was held. On a stifling morning, 
 when the blue brick pavements of North Bromwich 
 reflected a torrid heat, and a warm wind, blowing 
 like a sirocco from the black desert outside, swept 
 the streets with clouds of dust, Edwin, Maskew, 
 and W.G. waited in the cloakroom outside the 
 Dean's office to see the results of the examination 
 posted. Maskew was the only one of the three 
 who showed no signs of nervousness; for W.G. 
 could never overcome the difficulty of expressing 
 his thoughts on paper, and Edwin had passed ten 
 minutes of purgatory with an outside examiner in 
 the anatomy viva. He knew, on the other hand, 
 that his Physiology had been extraordinarily good, 
 and put his faith in the general impression of in- 
 telligence that he hoped he had created. 
 
 The porter came out with the lists, and W.G., 
 striding to meet his fate like some Homeric hero, 
 snatched the paper from his hands. He went very 
 white as he read it. 
 
 "Good God " he said. "Well, I'm damned " 
 
 "Rotten luck if you're down, W.G.," said Maskew 
 sympathetically. 
 
 372
 
 THE DRESSER 373 
 
 "Down? . . . I'm not down. I'm through." 
 
 He still looked bewildered. Edwin took the 
 paper from his trembling hands. As he had ex- 
 pected Maskew was first, but he saw that he him- 
 self was second on the list. Martin had ambled 
 through respectively somewhere about the middle. 
 W.G. and Harrop were last and last but one. He 
 pinned the list on the notice-board. It was an 
 exhilarating moment in which he was conscious of 
 the herculean, sweaty handgrip of W.G., who was 
 muttering: "Well, I'm damned if we don't all de- 
 serve it." 
 
 Talking and laughing together, they went out 
 to lunch at Joey's and caught the next train down 
 to Evesham, where the coolness of the glassy Avon 
 made the June heat more tolerable, and in the eve- 
 ning, blistered with rowing and sunshine, they 
 came back to North Bromwich, dined together, and 
 afterwards went to a music-hall. It was wonder- 
 ful to Edwin to see the physical elation of W.G. 
 The big man wanted to dance like a child, and it 
 was with difficulty that Maskew restrained him 
 from smashing a plate-glass window in Sackville 
 Row. "You're a cold-blooded swine, Maskew," he 
 said indignantly. "God, man, don't you feel you 
 want to do something? You must let off steam in 
 some way, and it's just as well to do it decently." 
 
 Next morning the Dean sent a message to Edwin 
 and Maskew, asking them to call at his office dur- 
 ing the morning. They went together, and were re* 
 ceived with his usual urbane politeness. 
 
 "Good-morning, Mr. Maskew . . . Mr. Ingleby. 
 . . . You had better sit down. I am very pleased
 
 374 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 to see your names at the top of the list. Yes . . . 
 very pleased. I've consulted Dr. Moon, and he ap- 
 proves your appointment as prosectors. It is an 
 office that you will be very wise to undertake if 
 you have any surgical ambitions, and I am very 
 pleased to offer it to you. Perhaps you will let 
 me know to-morrow? Thank you, gentlemen. . . . 
 Good-morning." 
 
 "Shall you take it?" said Edwin, as soon as they 
 were outside. 
 
 "Of course I shall. I'm rather keen on Anatomy. 
 It only means putting one back a year, and it's 
 worth it a hundred times over, if one gets the pri- 
 mary Fellowship. You'll be a fool if you don't do 
 it. We should have a topping time together. No 
 lectures . . . just a year of research work." 
 
 "I shall have to think about it," said Edwin. 
 
 It was the financial side of the question that had 
 to be considered. To add another year to a course 
 that was already expensive in pursuit of an elusive 
 Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons: was 
 it worth while? To begin with, he might easily 
 fail. The primary examination was notoriously 
 fluky, the results depending on the individual 
 caprices and preferences of examiners. Edwin 
 knew very well that better men than himself had 
 failed in it. If, after draining his father's pockets 
 for another year, he should be ploughed, the situa- 
 tion would be altogether too pathetic. 
 
 Anything that affected his father's purse seemed 
 to Edwin, in those days, a matter for delicacy and 
 shame. He hated to receive money from him. It 
 was an acute embarrassment to see him write a
 
 THE DRESSER 375 
 
 cheque. He wrote slowly, with a regular, formal 
 hand, and all the time Edwin, watching him, would 
 think how many small, degrading sales of tooth 
 paste and castor oil and pennyworths of camphor 
 had gone to the making of that tenuous bank-ac- 
 count, and how easily and carelessly the painful 
 accumulations would be spent. He hated asking 
 his father for money, and for this reason had com- 
 pelled himself to refrain from asking for the per- 
 fectly reasonable and necessary allowance that he 
 had been wanting to settle for the last year. 
 
 And so he did not dare to tell his father that he 
 had been offered the prosectorship and the oppor- 
 tunity of taking the Fellowship. If he had done so 
 he was almost certain that Mr. Ingleby would have 
 consented, and his father's sacrifice would have 
 thrown such a weight of obligation on him that life- 
 would not have been worth living. Indeed, if, in 
 the end, he should have failed, his shame would have 
 been intolerable. These reflections on the humility 
 and penury of his father always plunged Edwin into 
 a debauch of sentiment in which he would return 
 with the zeal of a prodigal to the resolutions that 
 he had made at the time of his mother's death. 
 They filled him with a kind of protective fervour 
 that might easily have been mistaken for love, but 
 was, in reality, an excuse for its absence. Still, 
 even if the sentiment harrowed, it consoled, and 
 Edwin was heroically elated by the performance 
 of a sacrifice that he had not been brave enough 
 to refuse. 
 
 It pleased him also to find that W.G. was thank- 
 ful for his decision. "You see, it would have been
 
 376 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 rotten for me," he said, "if you and Maskew had 
 both been left behind. When you've got into the 
 habit of working with a fellow in your first two 
 years, it's a bit of a break to have to go on by 
 yourself. Of course, I should never have the least 
 earthly chance of getting the Fellowship, and even 
 if- 1 had, I couldn't afford to waste a year over it. 
 I'm damned glad you're coming on with me, 
 Ingleby." 
 
 The tribute was flattering. Edwin, always rather 
 pathetically anxious for friendship, was particular- 
 ly pleased to have it offered so frankly by a creature 
 as unlike him in every way as W.G. There was 
 something stable and reliable about the big man's 
 simplicity. He felt that he would be as loath to 
 give offence to W.G. as to his father; and though 
 he still felt some indefinite hankerings after the 
 atmosphere of culture that he would have enjoyed 
 in the society of Boyce, he couldn't deny the fact 
 that W.G. was a sound and splendid fellow, and a 
 good man to have by his side in an emergency. 
 Together they plunged into the new world of 
 hospital life. 
 
 n 
 
 Two general hospitals supplied the clinical needs 
 of the North Bromwich Medical School. The older, 
 from which the school had originated, was a small 
 institution, the Prince's, with which Edwin had 
 become acquainted on -the occasion of his first panto- 
 night. It stood in the upper and healthier part of 
 the city, in the middle of the slums that lie upon 
 the fringe of the fashionable suburb of Alvaston:
 
 THE DRESSER 377 
 
 a solid building of early Victorian red brick, with 
 a stone portico facing upon a thoroughfare of rather 
 older houses that had once been reputable but had 
 now degenerated into theatrical lodging-houses. 
 
 The hospital itself was small enough to be homely, 
 and W.G. and Edwin soon became accustomed to 
 its narrow entrance hall, and the lodge in which 
 porters, who already knew all that was to be known 
 about the reception of casualties, were housed. 
 
 Edwin would arrive at the hospital early in tho 
 morning, when no sign of life was to be seen in 
 the "professional" lodgings sleeping with drawn 
 blinds upon the other side of the road. At this time 
 of the day the hospital porch smelt clean and anti- 
 septic, for the stream of stinking humanity had not 
 yet begun to trickle through. He would hang his 
 coat in the narrow passage that served for cloak- 
 room and lounge with a cigarette in his mouth 
 before the glass-fronted notice-boards on which the 
 lists of operations for the day were exhibited, and 
 exchange greetings with the night porter departing 
 in a state of drowsy ill-temper, or the day-porter 
 coming on duty with a military swagger and his 
 grey hair plastered down with vaseline, from the 
 casualty department, and cold water. 
 
 Here, too, the members of the consulting staff 
 would arrive in their frock-coats and top-hats : great 
 men, such as Lloyd Moore, the outstanding surgical 
 genius of the Midlands; old Beaton, the professor 
 of surgery, with his long, grey beard, and Hartley, 
 the ophthalmologist, whose reputation was Eu- 
 ropean. These giants would pass on through the 
 swinging doors to their wards or consulting rooms,
 
 378 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 and on the very stroke of nine, W.G., who was a 
 bad riser, and always cut things fine, would plunge 
 in, carrying with him the strenuous atmosphere of 
 a cold sponge and breezy enthusiasm. Then the 
 clock would strike nine, and they would pass on 
 together arm in arm, into the huge, airy waiting- 
 hall with innumerable benches set crosswise like 
 the pews in a church ; and, at the same moment, the 
 military porter, who had been marshalling the 
 queue of out-patients, would release them, and a be- 
 wildering crowd of poorly-clad human wreckage 
 would drift in behind them, settling patiently into 
 the benches opposite the door of the department 
 from which they were seeking relief. 
 
 The work of Edwin and W.G. lay in the Casualty 
 Department, a small room full of pleasant morning 
 light. On one side of it ran a long counter with 
 shelves for bottles, and drawers in which plasters, 
 dressings, and ointments were kept. On the other, 
 half a dozen chairs were ranged for the reception 
 of patients. The medical staff consisted of four 
 persons only: two professionals, a young and en- 
 thusiastic surgeon named Mather who held the post 
 of Assistant Surgeon to Out-patients, and an elderly 
 sister who had been on the job for years, and two 
 amateurs in the shape of Edwin and W.G. 
 
 All of them were clothed in white overalls; for 
 the work of the casualty department was of a dirty 
 nature, and these long garments also served as some 
 protection from the swarming parasites that lived 
 upon the bodies of their patients. Edwin, who suf- 
 fered agonies of irritation from their attacks, also 
 armed himself with a glass-stoppered bottle of ether
 
 THE DRESSER 379' 
 
 with which he would drench the seat of irritation 
 in the hopes of inflicting death or at least uncon- 
 sciousness upon his tormentors. i 
 
 Then, one by one, the patients would file in, and 
 plant themselves upon the wooden chairs : old men 
 whose skins were foul with the ravages of eczema 
 and dirt combined; women, exhausted in middle 
 age by child-bearing, and the accepted slavery of 
 housework; sturdy mechanics who had been the 
 victims of some unavoidable accident; pale young 
 women, made anxious for their livelihood by illness 
 that its conditions had caused, and, more terrible 
 than all, the steady stream of wan, transparent 
 children, the idols of maternal care, the victims of 
 maternal ignorance. 
 
 In the human wreckage of the casualty depart- 
 ment there was no great variety; but all of it was 
 new to Edwin and W.G., and they threw themselves 
 into the labour with enthusiasm, working so hard 
 from nine o'clock till one, that their backs ached 
 and they lost all sense of the passage of time. 
 Mather himself seemed to them a prodigy of skilful- 
 ness, so swift in his decisions, so certain and adroit 
 in the work of his hands. Even the sister, whom 
 Edwin had originally regarded as a mere woman, 
 aroused their admiration by the ease with which she 
 worked and her invincible good humour. Edwin 
 found that she could teach him more than his male 
 superiority would ever have dreamed. 
 
 Little by little the astounding confusion of their 
 work began to seem more simple. Bandages, that 
 had seemed condemned to unsightly ruckles, or 
 liable to fall unrolled upon the dirty floor, began to
 
 380 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 fold themselves in symmetrical designs. Edwin and 
 W.G. vied with one another in the neatness of their 
 dressings. The smell of the place, that had seemed 
 at first to fester beneath an unconvincing veil of 
 carbolic and iodoform, now seemed natural to their 
 nostrils, even pleasant in its familiarity., 
 
 Edwin began to have time to look about him, 
 to form individual attachments to the patients who 
 came there every day, to take a particular interest 
 in cases that he regarded as his own. Gradually, 
 from the mass of evil-smelling humanity, person- 
 alities began to emerge and even intimacies that 
 were flattering because they implied a trust in his 
 own imperfect skill. 
 
 He did not know the names of his patients any 
 more than they knew his. To him they were 
 grouped under conventional generics: Daddy, 
 Granny, Tommy, Polly, and the like. To them he 
 was always "Doctor"; but the thing that made 
 them human and lovable to him was the sense of 
 their dependence on him; and the preference for 
 his attentions that was sometimes timidly ex- 
 pressed, gave him a flush of gratification deeper 
 than any he had ever known. It pleased him to 
 think that it was true when his patients told him 
 that he dressed them more gently than the other 
 workers in the casualty department. Such confi- 
 dences almost convinced him that he had found a 
 vocation. 
 
 After lunch Edwin and W.G. would talk over 
 their cases together in the lounge of the Dousita. 
 Maskew, who still met them every day at this 
 resort, found their conversation boring, and fell
 
 THE DRESSER 381 
 
 back more and more upon the charms of Missi 
 Wheeler, who did. not seem to have varied by a 
 single hairpin since the day of their first acquaint- 
 ance. And from the discussion of their individual 
 cases, W.G. would sometimes pass on to the more 
 general questions that their work aroused. 
 
 "This life's worth living/' he would say. "When 
 you first take up medicine and spend a couple of 
 years over learning the atomic weights of heavy 
 metals or dissecting the stomach of an earthworm, 
 you begin to wonder what the devil you're getting 
 at; by Gad, this hospital work opens your eyes. 
 You're doing something practical. What's more, 
 you're doing a job that no professor of classics or 
 stinks could touch, and you see the actual results 
 of your treatment on your patients." 
 
 "Thank God, I'm not one of them, W.G.," said 
 Maskew morosely. "As a matter of fact, it's no 
 more than when an electrical engineer finds a short 
 circuit and makes a new connection, or when a 
 carpenter makes a job of a rickety staircase." 
 
 "That's all you know about it, my friend," said 
 W.G. "In our job you're dealing with human life ; 
 you're relieving physical pain and sometimes you 
 get thanked for it, which is damned pleasant. And 
 you've a responsibility too. If you make a slip the 
 poor devil you're experimenting on is going to 
 suffer. You may even kill him. And the extraordi- 
 nary thing is that he trusts you . . ." 
 
 To Edwin also that was the most extraordinary 
 thing, and, indeed, the most pathetic. It showed 
 him that the practice of medicine imposed an 
 actual moral discipline on those who followed it:
 
 382 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 an obligation of the most meticulous honour and 
 devotion. But if the discipline of practice de- 
 manded much, it repaid a thousandfold. He had his 
 reward not only in the thanks of the scabrous old 
 men whose varicose ulcers, or "bad legs/' as they 
 called them, he dressed, but in the rarer conscious- 
 ness of actual achievement which came to him more 
 frequently as the scope of his work extended. 
 
 One case in particular he always remembered, 
 principally because it was the first of the kind. She 
 was a little Jewish tailoress who laboured at piece- 
 work in some sweater's den in the rookeries on the 
 southern side of the hospital. She was not beauti- 
 ful. Her face had the peculiar ivory pallor, and 
 her whole body the unhealthy brittleness, of plants 
 that have sprouted in a cellar. But her voice was 
 soft, and her hands, the fingertips of which were 
 made callous by the plucking of threads and rough 
 with innumerable needle pricks, were beautifully 
 shaped. A week or so before she had stabbed her 
 left forefinger with an infected needle, and lit a 
 focus of suppuration in the tendon sheath. She 
 had to live, poor thing ! and so, for a week she had 
 worked in a state of agony, while the tissues grew 
 tense and shiny with compression, and the pain 
 would not let her sleep. At last, when she could 
 work no longer, she had come to the casualty de- 
 partment, nursing her poisoned hand in a bandana 
 handkerchief. She had not slept for four nights, 
 and was very near to tears. 
 
 Edwin, who saw that surgery was needed, showed 
 the case to Mather. The surgeon stripped the sleeve 
 from her thin, transparent arm and showed him
 
 THE DRESSER 383 
 
 the red lines by which the poison was tracking up 
 the lymphatics towards the glands of the axilla that 
 stood like blockhouses in the way of bacterial in- 
 vasion. 
 
 "Why didn't you come before?" he said, with a 
 roughness that was not unkind. How many times 
 was Edwin to hear those very words ! 
 
 "I couldn't, doctor. There was my work " 
 
 "There'd be no more work for you, my dear, if 
 you went on much longer," said Mather: and then, 
 to Edwin, "Yes . . . you'd better incise it at once, 
 I'm busy putting up a fracture. Straight down in 
 the middle line. Don't be afraid of it." 
 
 "Oh, you're not going to cut me, doctor?" she 
 said. "Not till to-morrow. . . . Oh, please . . . 
 when I've had a night's sleep." 
 
 He was very nervous. He assured her that he 
 would give her no pain; but while he left her to 
 fetch the scalpel and the dressings he heard a queer 
 drumming noise and turned to see that it was made 
 by the heels of his patient trembling on the floor. 
 He was nearly as tremulous himself. 
 
 "I promise you I won't hurt you," he said, and 
 she returned him a painful smile. It was a look 
 he knew. "Just like the eyes of a dog," W.G. had 
 said. 
 
 He sprayed the finger with ethyl chloride, that 
 froze into a crust like hoarfrost on the fingertip and 
 blanched the skin that was already pale with the 
 pressure inside it. All the time the girl was mak- 
 ing little nervous movements, and sometimes her 
 heels began to drum again until she tucked them 
 Tinder the bar of her chair.
 
 384 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "I'm sorry, doctor, I can't help it," she said. 
 
 Then, with his scalpel, he made a clean longi- 
 tudinal cut through the tense skin down to the 
 bone of the phalanx. She gave a start and clutched 
 his hand so that he nearly gave it up. "I've got to 
 do it/' he thought. "I must do it." It was the first 
 time that he had ever cut with a knife into living 
 flesh. A strange sensation. . . . But the bead of 
 matter that escaped showed him that he had got 
 to the root of the trouble, and the sight of it filled 
 him with a new and curious exultation. 
 
 It was a long business, for the neglected pressure 
 had impaired the vitality of the bone and the wound 
 would not heal until the dead spicules had been 
 separated from the living tissue. Edwin dressed 
 the finger every morning. The patient would have 
 been a poor subject at the best of times, and he 
 knew that the fact that she was now out of work 
 probably meant that she was starving. It would 
 have been easy for him to tell her that she must 
 have plenty of nourishing food; but he knew well 
 enough that the words would have been no more 
 than a mockery. In the hospital wards, he reflected, 
 she might have been well fed; but the wards at 
 the Prince's were full of more serious cases who 
 could not walk to the hospital to receive their treat- 
 ment. On occasions of this kind he wished that 
 he were a millionaire: an extravagant idea for 
 doctors are never millionaires. He could only ram 
 iron into her and dress her and try to get her well 
 so that she might travel back around the vicious- 
 circle to the conditions that had been responsible 
 for her illness. It seemed to him that people who
 
 THE DRESSER 385 
 
 were not doctors could never really know anything 
 about life. 
 
 In a little while there were others, many of them, 
 in whose cases he knew that he had been privileged 
 to effect some positive good : notably an old woman, 
 always dressed in black and loaded with crepe as 
 though she were attending her own funeral, who 
 had fractured her wrist by slipping on an icy pave- 
 ment one evening when she was fetching her hus- 
 band's supper beer, an office that she appeared far 
 too ladylike ever to have performed. She had put 
 out her hand to save herself, and a Colles fracture 
 of the ulna and radius had been the result. 
 
 She called Edwin "My dear," and the first thing 
 that he noticed about her was the amazing cleanli- 
 ness of her withered skin. He remembered the 
 fortitude that she had shown when first he reduced 
 the fracture ; how her bony fingers, on one of which 
 was a wedding-ring worn very thin, had clasped his. 
 For some curious reason he felt very tenderly to- 
 wards her, and when the bones were set and he had 
 passed her on to the massage department, he felt 
 quite lost without her early "Good-morning !" That 
 was another strange thing about medical practice: 
 the way in which people with whom he was thrown 
 into an intimate sympathy for a few days passed 
 completely and irrevocably out of his life. 
 
 W.G. and Edwin found their experience so in- 
 triguing that they took turns to visit the casualty 
 department in the afternoons when the work was 
 light, and the absence of Mather gave them a free 
 hand in the performance of minor surgery. At 
 this time of the day the work of the department
 
 386 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 was more suggestive of its name; for the people 
 who came there were nearly all the victims of sud- 
 den illness or accident that needed diagnosis and 
 immediate treatment. It pleased Edwin to deal 
 with these off his own bat, and he spent the long 
 afternoons that were free from lectures in suturing 
 wounds, removing brass filings or specks of cinders 
 from eyes, extracting teeth, gaining confidence 
 every day and suffering the mingled emotions of 
 pain, pity, and violent indignation. Not infre- 
 quently the last . . . for he saw so much suffering 
 that might easily have been prevented but for the 
 ignorance or callousness of humanity. These things 
 aroused his anger; but he soon realised that anger 
 was the one emotion that a doctor is most wise to 
 suppress. 
 
 Sometimes a woman from one of the neighbour- 
 ing slums would enter in a state of hollow-eyed 
 terror, carrying in her shawl a child that was 
 obviously dying from broncho-pneumonia. 
 
 "Why, in the name of Heaven, didn't you come 
 up before?" he would ask indignantly. 
 
 "The neighbours said it was only the teething, 
 doctor," she would reply. 
 
 Edwin would try to suppress an inclination to 
 damn the neighbours upside down. "Surely you 
 could see the child was ill?" he would say. 
 
 "Yes, doctor, but how could I get away? There's 
 seven of them, bless their hearts, and me going 
 with another, and the house looking like a pig- 
 sty, and the master's dinner to cook. I haven't got 
 no time to spare for hospitals." 
 
 And he knew that she spoke the truth, contenting
 
 THE DRESSER 387 
 
 himself, as he filled in the form for admission to 
 the children's ward, with telling her that the diet 
 of bread-crusts soaked in beer, which she had been 
 giving it, was not ideal for a baby eight months 
 old. 
 
 "Take the baby along to ward fourteen," he would 
 say, "they'll do what they can for it," and be met, 
 as likely as not, with a volume of tigerish abuse 
 from a wild-eyed woman who swore that if her 
 baby was going to die it wasn't going to do so in 
 any bloody hospital, was it, my pretty? the last 
 words sinking to a maternal coo and being accom- 
 panied by a paroxysm of kisses on the baby's lips 
 that were already blue for want of breath. And 
 then Edwin would control his indignation and re- 
 sort to wheedling and coaxing, feeling that if the 
 baby were left to the mercies of maternal instinct, 
 he himself w r ould be little better than a murderer. 
 
 Indeed, the responsibilities of his calling and its 
 immense obligations impressed themselves on him 
 more deeply every day. He saw that this profession 
 of medicine was not to be taken lightly; that his 
 work in it would be -useless, almost impious, if it 
 were not religiously performed. Even from the 
 earliest ages this had been so. One day, idly read- 
 ing a back number of the Lancet, he came upon a 
 historical article that contained a translation of 
 the Hippocratic oath, which had been administered 
 to all those who were initiated in the mysteries of 
 medicine two thousand years ago. It seemed to 
 him that it might have been written on the day 
 that he read it. Thus it ran :
 
 388 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "I swear by Apollo the Healer, and ^Esculapius, 
 and Hygieia, and Panacea ; and I call all Gods and 
 Goddesses to witness, that I will, according to my 
 power and judgment, make good this oath and 
 covenant that I sign. I will use all ways of medical 
 treatment that shall be for the advantage of the 
 sufferers, according to my power and judgment, 
 and will protect them from injury and injustice. 
 Nor will I give to any man, though I be asked to 
 give it, any deadly drug, nor will I consent that it 
 should be given. But purely and holily I will keep 
 guard over my life and my art. 
 
 "And into whatever houses I enter, I will enter 
 into them for the benefit of the sufferers, departing 
 from all wilful injustice and destructiveness, and 
 all lustful works, on bodies, male and female, free 
 and slaves. And whatever in practice I see or hear, 
 or even outside practice, which it is not right should 
 be told abroad, I will be silent, counting as unsaid 
 what was said. 
 
 "Therefore to me, accomplishing this oath and 
 not confounding it, may there be enjoyment of life 
 and art, being in good repute among all men for 
 ever and ever: but to me, transgressing and 
 perjured,, the contrary." 
 
 Fine reading, Edwin thought. . . . The only 
 deity of whom hef was not quite certain was 
 Panacea. Obviously the classical representative of 
 Mother Siegel. It seemed to him a pity that the 
 modern student was not bound by the formulae of 
 the Physician of Cos. 
 
 His three months in the casualty department
 
 THE DRESSER 389 
 
 passed away quickly, and in the spring of the year 
 he found himself attached as dresser to that 
 startling surgeon, Lloyd Moore. The appointment, 
 as he soon realised, was a privilege; for Lloyd 
 Moore was the one man of unquestionable genius in 
 the North Bromwich Medical School. At first the 
 experience was rather alarming, for the vagaries of 
 his chief, and, not least, his genial vulgarity, seemed 
 at first as though they were going to destroy the 
 pretty edifice of ideals that Edwin had constructed 
 on the basis of the Hippocratic oath and his ex- 
 perience in the casualty department. Lloyd Moore, 
 to begin with, was no respecter of persons, ancient 
 or modern; his wit was ruthless and occasionally 
 bitter, as Edwin had reason to know ; his language, 
 particularly in moments of stress, was unvarnished 
 and foul, even in the presence of w r omen. 
 
 On the surface, indeed, he seemed a person whom 
 Hippocrates would have regarded as undignified 
 and improper.- Sometimes in the out-patient de- 
 partment Edwin would blush for his chief's violence 
 and cruelty, but, in the end, all these things were 
 forgotten in the realisation that the little man was 
 a great surgical genius, to whom diagnosis was a 
 matter of inspired, unerring instinct, and practice 
 a gift of the gods. Nor were his virtues merely 
 professional. L.M. (as he was always called) was 
 a man of the people, one who had fought his way 
 inch by inch into the honourable position that he 
 held as the greatest of surgeons and the wealthiest 
 practitioner in the Midlands. The unpaid work of 
 the hospital absorbed him even to the neglect of 
 private practice, and every doctor in the district
 
 390 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 knew that he could count on the very best of the 
 great man's skill for a nominal fee in any case of 
 emergency. Far more than any consultant in the 
 Midlands, he was regarded as the general practi- 
 tioner's friend, and, as a result of this confidence, 
 all the most interesting surgical material of the 
 district found its way into his clinic. 
 
 In a little time Edwin became wholly subject to 
 the spell of this amazing personality, until it seemed 
 strange to him that he could ever have doubted 
 the propriety of anything that L.M. said or did. 
 He wondered more and more at the man's titanic 
 energy, for Lloyd Moore was a little fellow, so pale 
 that he always looked as if he were fainting with 
 exhaustion. His patients also adored him, and 
 more than once Edwin was told in the wards by 
 elderly female admirers that Mr. Lloyd Moore was 
 the very image of Jesus Christ. 
 
 In the days of the casualty department Edwin's 
 main concern had been with the alleviation of im- 
 mediate pain. The problem of the wards was 
 graver, being no less than the balance of life and 
 death. In the achievements of L.M.'s scalpel, he 
 saw the highest attainment of which surgery was 
 capable. In a hundred cases offhand he could say 
 to himself that but for Lloyd Moore's skill the pa- 
 tient would have died, and when he saw the fragile 
 figure of the surgeon with his pale face and burn- 
 ing eyes enter the theatre, Edwin would think of 
 him as a man worn thin by wrestling with death 
 * . . death in its most cruel and invincible moods. 
 
 But in the theatre, at the time of one of L.M.'s 
 Emergency operations, there was no time for dream-
 
 THE DRESSER 391 
 
 ing or for romantic speculation. An atmosphere 
 of materialism, of pure, sublimated action filled the 
 room as surely as the sweet fumes of chloroform 
 and ether. Everything about the place was clean 
 and bright and hard, from the frosted glass of the 
 roof and the porcelain walls to the shining instru- 
 ments that lay newly sterilised in trays on the 
 glass-topped tables. Even the theatre sister, in 
 her white overall, gave an impression of clean, 
 bright hardness. Indeed, in this white temple of 
 sterility, everything was clean except those parts 
 of the patient's body that the nurses in the wards 
 had not scrubbed with nail-brushes and shaved and 
 painted with iodine, and the language of L.M., 
 whose physical lustrations had no effect whatever 
 on his vocabulary. 
 
 Even L.M.'s language was at times a relief, for it 
 seemed to be the only human thing that ever gained 
 admission to the theatre, and the sister was so in- 
 human as never to take the least notice of it. Not 
 a smile, nor even the least compression of the lips 
 marked her appreciation or disapproval of the 
 surgeon's sallies. Physically she was an extremely 
 attractive woman, with very beautiful eyes that 
 were not without their effect upon Edwin ; but the 
 influence of the place robbed her of any sexual at- 
 tributes, so that she became no more than a 
 monosyllabic automaton, intent, devoted, faultlessly 
 prepared for any of the desperate emergencies of 
 surgery. From the first Edwin had noticed that 
 the more embarrassing physical details of the pa- 
 tients had no disturbing effect upon her modesty. 
 He soon saw that if she had permitted herself for
 
 392 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 one moment to be a woman she could not have re- 
 mained the wholly admirable theatre-sister that she 
 was. "But I can't imagine," he thought, "how any 
 man could marry a nurse " 
 
 From such reflections he would be roused by the 
 anaesthetist's laconic "Ready." On one side of the 
 ^operating table he would stand, and on the other 
 L.M. with the theatre-sister ready at 'his elbow. 
 The surgeon would pick up a scalpel carelessly, as 
 a man picks up a pencil to write, and then, ap- 
 parently with as little thought, he would make a 
 long, clean incision through the skin and superficial 
 fatty tissues of the abdomen, putting his head on 
 one side to look at it like an artist whose pencil 
 has described a beautiful curve. Then, sharply: 
 "Swabs . . . Ingleby, what the hell do you think 
 you're doing?" And Edwin would press a swab 
 of gauze to the incision to absorb the blood that 
 escaped from the subcutaneous veins. 
 
 "Eight." 
 
 Layer by layer the various planes of fascia, 
 muscle, and peritoneum would be opened and neatly 
 laid aside, every one of them slipped in its own 
 pair of artery forceps. Then, from the gaping 
 wound, that L.M. probed with his thin finger, a 
 sickening odour would rise . . . one that Edwin 
 never remembered apart from the other sickening 
 smell of ether. 
 
 "Pus. ... I thought so," L.M. would say. "The 
 brute's perforated, damn him." And Edwin knew 
 that yet another creature had been snatched out 
 of the jaws of death. 
 
 In the hands of L.M. surgery seemed so simple.
 
 THE DRESSER 393 
 
 His scalpel for he used fewer instruments than 
 any surgeon Edwin ever knew was a part of him 
 in the same way as a perfect rider is part of his 
 horse. There was never any hesitation in his 
 surgery, never any room for doubt ; everything was 
 straightforward and self-evident from the first in- 
 cision to the last suture; and he was at his best 
 when he threw into it a touch of bravura, rejoicing 
 in the amazing virtuosity of his own technique and 
 playing, a little, to the gallery. 
 
 "There you are," he would say, "you see there's 
 nothing in it. Nothing at all but a working knowl- 
 edge of anatomy and a dollop of common-sense. 
 That's all surgery. Why on earth should they pay 
 me a hundred guineas for doing a simple thing like 
 that? There's nothing in it, is there?" 
 
 Edwin knew that there was a great deal in it: 
 genius, and more than genius: a life of devotion 
 to one end only; infinite physical strains; cruel 
 disappointments; harrowing mistakes. For even 
 L.M. had made mistakes in his time ; and a doctor 
 pays for his mistakes more heavily than any other 
 man. 
 
 Apart from the performance of emergency opera- 
 tions, that might take place at any hour of the 
 day or night, the surgeon only occupied his theatre 
 on three mornings in the week; and the greater 
 part of Edwin's time was devoted to the work of 
 the wards. Here he performed his proper function 
 as dresser, being, under the house-surgeon, respon- 
 sible for the after-treatment of the patients on whom 
 L.M. had operated. This business kept his hands 
 full. Nearly all the acute surgical cases needed
 
 394 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 dressing daily, and some more than once a day. It 
 was usual for the dresser to leave the second dress- 
 ing to be done by the house-surgeon on his evening 
 round, or by the sister of the ward, who would 
 doubtless have performed it as well as either of 
 them ; but nothing could induce Edwin, in his new- 
 est enthusiasm, to drop a case into which his teeth 
 were fixed. 
 
 The morning visits were ceremonial. The great 
 floors of the wards shone like the faces of such 
 patients as were fit to be scrubbed with a soapy 
 flannel ; the rows of beds were set with a mathe- 
 matical correctness, the sheets turned down at 
 exactly the same level; the water in the jugs stood 
 hot, awaiting the dresser's hands, his towel lay 
 folded in the jug's mouth ; a probationer, pink-faced 
 and red-armed, stood waiting to do his professional 
 pleasure ; morning sunlight flickered over the leaves 
 of aspidestras that flourished in pots on the central 
 tables, and on the trays of dressing instruments 
 that were ready for his hand. 
 
 At ten o'clock precisely, Edwin, an older and 
 more experienced Edwin whose shaves were no 
 longer a luxury, whose clothes no longer looked as 
 if he were in the act of growing out of them, and 
 whose collars were adorned by the very latest thing 
 in ties, would enter the ward, roll up his shirt- 
 sleeves, and be helped on with a white overall by 
 the obedient probationer whose main function in 
 life this office seemed to be or sometimes by the 
 sister herself. The new Edwin, product of six 
 months in hospital, was no longer afraid of these 
 attentions because they happened to be performed
 
 THE DRESSER 395 
 
 by women. In a mild way he was even an amateur 
 of the physical points exhibited by the genus pro- 
 bationer, and had arrived at a touching intimacy 
 with the sisters, who found in him a clean and 
 pleasant mannered youth, and on occasion hauled 
 him out of the difficulties into which his inexperi- 
 ence landed him. Thus attired, he would begin his 
 progress of the ward, followed, wherever he went, 
 by the females who had robed him, the junior push- 
 ing before her the wheeled glass table on which the 
 dressings and instruments were kept, For the time 
 being he was, or imagined himself to be, the most 
 important person in the ward, until, perhaps, the 
 house-surgeon entered, and his attendants forsook 
 their allegiance and hastened to put themselves at 
 the service of this superior person. 
 
 In the duties of the wards Edwin became far 
 more familiar with his cases than in the casualty 
 department. The work was less hurried, and the 
 patients themselves were less fully armed with the 
 conventional social gestures by which men and 
 women protect and hide themselves. They lay in 
 bed helpless, dependent on the hospital staff for 
 every necessity and amusement; and the stress of 
 physical pain or the catastrophe of a major opera- 
 tion had generally shaken from them the little 
 superficialities that they had gathered to them- 
 selves in the course of everyday life. Edwin noticed 
 that, even at their worst, the women were hardly 
 ever too ill to be a little concerned for their per- 
 sonal appearance, and, as they grew better, the 
 patients of both sexes would make an heroic attempt 
 to appear as they wished themselves to seem rather
 
 396 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 than as they were; but he realised, none the less, 
 that the doctor gets nearer to the bed-rock of human 
 personality than any other man who ministers to 
 humanity. With him, the person into whose hands 
 their suffering bodies were committed in an almost 
 pitiful confidence, they were concerned to hide 
 themselves far less than with any other; and in 
 this triumphant discovery Edwin flattered himself 
 that he was becoming richly learned in human 
 nature. He did not realise how little he had 
 learned. 
 
 One thing, however, that these days taught him, 
 he never lost in after life : an intense appreciation 
 of the inherent patience and nobility of human 
 beings, the precious ore that the fire of suffering 
 revealed. Even the worst of his patients in North 
 Bromwich as elsewhere disease is an impartial 
 enemy, falling on the virtuous and abandoned alike 
 revealed such amazing possibilities of good. In 
 these hospital wards the fundamental gregarious 
 instinct of mankind, with the unselfishness and 
 sympathy that go along with it, asserted itself. 
 The common life of the ward was happy, extraordi- 
 narily happy. Removed from the ordinary re- 
 sponsibilities of wage-earning and competition, fed 
 and housed and tended without question, the pa- 
 tients lived together as happily as a community 
 of African savages, supported by the female labour 
 of the nursing staff, obedient to the unquestioned 
 authority of the sister in charge. 
 
 And in Edwin's eyes these, too, were wonderful 
 people. At first he had taken them more or less 
 for granted; but gradually he realised the tremen-
 
 THE DRESSER 397 
 
 dous sacrifices that their life implied: the long 
 hours : the unceasing strain of keeping their temper : 
 the clean, efficient materialism for which they must 
 have sacrificed so much of the obvious beauty of 
 life, committing themselves for most of them were 
 middle-aged to an abnegation of the privileges of 
 marriage and motherhood in a cloistral seclusion as 
 complete as that imposed on the useless devotee 
 of some mystical religion. He took it for granted 
 that the life of a nun was useless to any one except 
 herself. . . . Well, this was a religion worth some 
 sacrifice: the religion of humanity. They them- 
 selves would only have called it a profession. At 
 first it had seemed to him that their interests were 
 narrow and their lives, of necessity, mean. He 
 had been astonished at the small things that gave 
 them pleasure: a bunch of primroses from a grate- 
 ful patient; a ride on the top of a bus; a word of 
 commendation from one of the consulting staff; a 
 house-surgeon's or even a student's compliment; 
 and, above all, the passionate attachments and 
 enmities that made up the life of the nunnery in 
 which they lived : but in the end he began to sym- 
 pathise with them in the humility of their pleas- 
 ures, to feel that anything might be forgiven to 
 creatures who had made so great a sacrifice. In a 
 mild way he idealised them; and for this reason 
 they decided that he was "quite a nice boy." 
 
 m 
 
 In the winter of his third year Edwin's newly 
 formulated enthusiasm for humanity in the bulk 
 suffered something of a check. The hospital ab-
 
 sorbed him so completely that in those days he saw 
 very little of the city, going to and from his lectures 
 and his work in the Pathological Laboratory at the 
 University without taking any real share in the life 
 of North Bromwich, or being aware of the passions 
 and interests that swayed the city's heart. Coming 
 down from the hospital, one evening in December, 
 he suddenly became conscious of a constriction in 
 the traffic which grew more acute as it reached the 
 narrows that debouch upon the open space in front 
 of the town hall ; and while he was wondering what 
 could be the cause of this, a huge rumour of voices, 
 not unlike that which proceeds from a Midland foot- 
 ball crowd when it disapproves of a referee, but 
 deeper and more malignant, reached his ears. 
 
 He wondered what was the matter, and since it 
 looked as if the traffic were now completely blocked 
 on the main road, he Cut down the quiet street that 
 faces the university buildings and overlooks the 
 paved court in which the statue of Sir Joseph Astill 
 inappropriately dispenses water to a big stone 
 basin. Almost immediately he found himself upon 
 the fringes of an immense crowd over which the 
 waves of threatening sound that he had heard at 
 a distance were moving like cats-paws on a sullen 
 sea. The windows of the town-hall itself blazed 
 with light, making the outlines of the Corinthian 
 pillars that surrounded it almost beautiful. He 
 edged his way into the black crowd. It was com- 
 posed for the most part of workers in iron and 
 brass, and exhaled an odour of stale oil. In a mo- 
 ment of relative silence he asked the man who stood 
 in front Of him, a little mechanic who had not
 
 THE DRESSER 399 
 
 troubled to change the oily dongarees in which he 
 worked, what was the matter. 
 
 "It's Lloyd George ... the b ," he said, and 
 
 spat fiercely. 
 
 Edwin was not sure where he had heard the name 
 before. He seemed to remember it as that of a 
 Welsh member of Parliament who had come into 
 notoriety during the debates on the South African 
 War. He inquired what Lloyd George was doing. 
 
 "Come to speak agen' Joe," said the mechanic 
 savagely ; and, as a wave of sound that had started 
 somewhere in the middle of the crowd came sweep- 
 ing towards them, he suddenly began to squeal 
 hoarsely like a carnivorous beast in a cage: a 
 ridiculous noise, that seemed, nevertheless, to ex- 
 press the feelings of the multitude. From scraps 
 of conversation that he heard beneath the crowd's 
 rumour, Edwin began to understand that this 
 beggarly Welshman, who had spent the last few 
 years in vilifying the workmen of Xorth Bromwich 
 generally, and their political idol in particular, had 
 actually dared to bring his dirty accusations to the 
 political heart of the city: the town-hall in which 
 their favourite had delivered his most important 
 speeches; that, at this very moment, the meeting 
 which popular feeling had proscribed, was begin- 
 ning behind the Corinthian pillars, and that the 
 just indignation of North Bromwich had deter- 
 mined that he should not escape with his life. 
 
 It struck Edwin that whatever else the Welsh- 
 man might be, he was certainly not lacking in cour- 
 age; but, for all that, he found it difficult to pre- 
 vent his own feelings in the matter from being
 
 400 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 swamped and absorbed and swept away by the 
 crowd's vast, angry consciousness. Almost in spite 
 of himself, his heart palpitated with vehement 
 malice against the intruder. He felt that he would 
 have experienced a brutal satisfaction in seeing him 
 torn limb from limb. 
 
 A yell of extraordinary savagery, in which he 
 found it difficult not to join, rose from the square. 
 
 The meeting, it seemed, had begun. Edwin saw 
 members of the crowd scattering in all directions. 
 A cry of "stones !" was raised, and he saw that men, 
 women, and children were streaming towards an 
 area of slum that was being dismantled to make 
 room for some monument of municipal grandeur, 
 returning with caps and hands and aprons full of 
 stones and broken brick. Soon the air was full of 
 flying missiles, and though the crash of glass could 
 not be heard, ragged holes were torn in the frosted 
 glass of the town-hall windows. 
 
 A body of police, tremendous strapping fellows, 
 marched by, followed by impotent jeers and hoot- 
 ing, and planted themselves in front of all the doors 
 with truncheons drawn. Their presence seemed to- 
 enrage the crowd, inflaming that suppressed hate 
 of the forces of order that slumbers in most men's 
 hearts. The volleys of stones increased as the sup- 
 plies of ammunition grew more plentiful. A little 
 dark man with a red tie monotonously shouting the 
 words: "Free speech!" was caught up, and, as it 
 seemed to Edwin, trampled to death. Somewhere 
 in the middle of the struggling masses people be- 
 gan to sing the revivalist hymn : "Shall we gather 
 at the river?" It reached Edwin in an immense
 
 THE DRESSER 401 
 
 and gathering volume, with words adapted for the 
 occasion : 
 
 "Shall we gather at the fountain, 
 The beautiful, the beautiful, the fountain? 
 We'll drown Lloyd George in the fountain, 
 And he won't come here any more." 
 
 The very volume of sound was impressive and 
 inspiring. 
 
 Suddenly the crowd was parted by the arrival of 
 a new body. It was a phalanx of university stu- 
 dents who had dragged an immense beam of oak 
 from the debris of the dismantled slum and were 
 hurling it forward as a battering ram against one 
 of the principal doors. Edwin could see amongst 
 them the towering shoulders of W.G., and the mouth 
 of the elder Wade, the hero of the hansom cab, wide 
 open and yelling. It seemed as though the savagery 
 of the crowd had reached its height: they tore a 
 way through it, trampling the fallen as they went. 
 And then the police, who had been held in reserve, 
 charged at right angles to them, hitting out right 
 and left with their loaded batons. The less coura- 
 geous part of the crowd tried to scatter. The wave 
 of a stampede spread outwards till it reached the 
 edge on which Edwin was standing. He was thrown 
 violently from his feet into the chest of a stranger, 
 who shouted, "Hallo, Ingleby " It was Mat- 
 thew Boyce. "I think we'd better get out of this," 
 lie said. 
 
 The words seemed to pull Edwin back into sanity. 
 Together they forced their way into a street that 
 was empty but for a stream of people hurrying to
 
 402 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 the square with stones. They stood panting in 
 the quiet. 
 
 "God . . . what animals men are!" said Boyce. 
 "I suppose it was something like this a hundred 
 years ago, when they burned Priestley's house." 
 
 "Yes, it's pretty rotten," said Edwin, "but didn't 
 you feel you wanted to join in it?" 
 
 "Yes, that's the amazing part of it," said Boyce. 
 "What's happening to you in these days? We seem 
 to have lost sight of one another." [>bu8 
 
 They walked down to the station together. 
 "It's an extraordinary thing, isn't it?" said Ed- 
 win, "that ordinary peaceable men should go mad 
 like that?" 
 
 "They aren't men," said Boyee. "They're a 
 crowd." . ' n; , . ; > . 7/ 'k> a-t v I > [no-. . tU i ftorft 
 
 D moBJimJ yrft to o'.iofl 9if> M>Ji77 -jyi 
 v-i^^i;-;/^ oifi ihjnoiM a is jirifOr/ bne neqo 
 
 : itlji.i'K[ aii taif-m^t Dial ir^o-io 9(U lo 
 if I KK nsflfit ')([t ^uil(f(.i- 
 iti Jbbil fi'.)S)(J bud oifv/ ,'V)iro<{ Mf(t nod) F:A. 
 
 :il)h{ ,moil' .</; JfbJ'f ?u f>4i 
 
 -E'lf tfT 
 
 /i.'i) fjv/'O'i-o ydt 1o 
 otft ti lift Bfmv/1i/o b.Bti-rqK 'jirj({m/;ta Ho 
 
 1.1 //o'ji't ^r.v/ ^H .v.inbiiBJa'Rttw aivAbM ifoiif-^ no" 
 
 / II 
 
 nr /hiiift r* /rv/o<l v/ei() 
 a sd 
 ffia otirr >l-)B({ frfv^bH flnq oi Iwn'w ^.iViov/ 9rfT 
 
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 - 
 
 }r>d] 
 
 CHAPTER VTI 
 
 hm; 
 
 THE CLERK 
 
 - 
 
 boo..' 
 
 
 
 WITH this chance encounter, the friendship 
 of Edwin and Matthew Boyce really began ; 
 and during the fourth year, that now opened before 
 him, the figure of W.G., who had dominated his 
 stage by sheer physical magnitude, gradually re- 
 ceded. It was inevitable ; for the atmosphere of the 
 Boyces' house at Alvaston, with its air of culture 
 and refinement, was far more in keeping with Ed- 
 win's inclinations than the obtuse, if honest, com- 
 panionship of W.G. Edwin felt some misgivings 
 for his desertion; but Maskew, who had now bril- 
 liantly taken his Primary Fellowship, began his 
 hospital career and rejoined his old partner. So, 
 seeing that the needs of W.G. were provided for 
 and his responsibilities of friendship at an end, 
 Edwin drifted into a happy intimacy with the poet's 
 son. 
 
 They were both so young as to be convinced that 
 they were very old. The world was theirs ; for they 
 were full of health and contentment and, at pres- 
 ent, so free from complication that they could en- 
 joy to the full the treasures of the past and shape 
 the future into splendid dreams. In the beginning 
 they had found a field of common interest in great 
 
 403
 
 404 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 works of literature; but these enthusiasms did not 
 carry them very far, for the appreciation of literary 
 masterpieces is at its best a solitary pleasure that 
 is not increased by the joy of sharing. It was in 
 the enjoyment of music that their friendship found 
 the most intense of its pleasures. 
 
 Edwin's musical development had been slow. 
 The first seeds had been planted in his babyhood 
 when, without understanding, he had listened to his 
 mother's playing. The chapel services at St. Luke's 
 made interesting by the exotic harmonies of Dr. 
 Downton, had nursed his interest in the beauty of 
 organised sound. The closed piano in his mother's 
 drawing-room had been the symbol of an instinct 
 temporarily thwarted, and from this he had escaped 
 by way of Aunt Laura's late Victorian ballads 
 which had seemed to him very beautiful in their 
 kind. Luckily his mother's library of music had 
 been good if old-fashioned, and when he amused 
 himself, more or less indiscriminately, by trying to 
 learn the piano at home, he had been forced to do 
 so by way of the sonatas of Beethoven, Schubert, 
 and Mozart, and the Wohltemperiertes Klavier of 
 Bach. 
 
 The emotional disturbance of his strange adven- 
 ture with Dorothy Powys had thrown him into an 
 orgy of verse-making which produced such poor 
 results that he was forced to turn to the love-poetry 
 of the Elizabethans and of Shelley, which he em- 
 broidered with musical settings that gave him more 
 satisfaction. These attempts at song-writing 
 pleased him for a time; but it was not until he 
 became friendly with Boyce that he began to realise
 
 THE CLERK 405 
 
 what music was. Not only were the Boyces the 
 possessors of a grand-piano on which his homely 
 tinklings became magnificently amplified, but his 
 friend's father, the poet, was intimately acquainted 
 with the best of modern music. 
 
 Boyce introduced Edwin to the great German 
 song-writers from Schubert and Schumann to Hugo 
 Wolf, and laid the foundations of a feverish devo- 
 tion to Wagner, whom the friends approached per- 
 force by way of Tannhauser and Lohengrin, the two 
 operas that the Moody Manners company ventured 
 to present to provincial audiences. Edwin dis- 
 covered that North Bromwich, a city that takes its- 
 music as a boa-constrictor takes food, in the tri- 
 ennial debauch of a festival and then goes to sleep 
 again, supported or rather failed to support a 
 society for the performance of orchestral music. 
 The concerts were held fortnightly in the town-hall, 
 the windows of which had now been repaired, and 
 to these concerts Edwin and his friend went to- 
 gether, always sitting in the same two seats under 
 the gallery at the back of the hall. In this way 
 they heard a great deal of good music : the nine sym- 
 phonies of Beethoven, with the Leeds Choir in the 
 last: the usual orchestral extracts from the Ring, 
 the Meistersingers Overture, and the Siegfried 
 Idyll : the fourth, fifth, and sixth symphonies of 
 Tschaikowski : the tone-poems of Strauss, and a 
 small sprinkling of modern French music. These 
 were ambrosial nights to which they both looked 
 forward, and Martin, who had developed an unex- 
 pected inclination for music, sometimes went with 
 them.
 
 406 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 The concerts became the central incident in a 
 kind of ritual. At seven o'clock the two, or some- 
 times three, would meet in the grill room behind 
 the bar at Joey's and consume a gross but splendid 
 repast of tripe and onions together with a pint or 
 more of bitter Burton. All the best music, they 
 had decided, was German, and beer was the only 
 drink on which it could be fully appreciated, de 
 Quincey's preference for laudanum notwithstand- 
 ing. Pleasantly elated, they would cross the road 
 to the town-hall and take their familiar seats, 
 pleased to recognise the people who, like themselves, 
 were regular attendants or subscribers to this un- 
 fashiojiable function ; and Boyce, who, by virtue of 
 his distinguished parentage, knew every one in 
 North Bromwich who was interested in music, 
 would point out to them all the distinguished people 
 who were present : Oldham, the critic of the Mail, 
 whom Arthur Boyce declared to be the soundest 
 living writer on musical subjects, and Marsden, who 
 did the musical criticism for the Courier. Matthew 
 knew them both. Oldham, he said, was a wonder- 
 ful fellow, who wrote with a pen of vitriol that 
 made such short work of baser metals that the gold 
 of beauty appeared brighter for his writing. Old- 
 ham became Edwin's prophet; but, on the whole, 
 he preferred the looks of Marsden. 
 
 * rl , . ,_ , ... , . , )Hi 
 
 "What is Marsden like?" he asked. 
 
 ' iU> M8 
 
 "Marsden? Oh, well, as a matter of fact, Mars- 
 den's a bit of a gas bag. The governor says that he 
 always reminds him of an old hen. Didn't you 
 notice him in Joey's talking nineteen to the dozen
 
 THE CLERK 407 
 
 to that queer fellow with a face like a full moon 
 who sits in front of us?" 
 
 The fellow with the face like a full moon was 
 only one of twenty or thirty people with whom the 
 friends experienced a sort of comradeship on these 
 nights. Perhaps the most wonderful time was the 
 end of the concert when they would walk out to- 
 gether into the spring night, parting at the corner 
 of the town-hall; and the memory of great 
 musical moments would accompany Edwin home 
 through miles of darkling country, and even fill his 
 little room at Halesby with their remembered glory 
 or wander through his dreams. 
 
 His life at home was the least satisfactory part 
 of these enchanted years. There were moments, 
 indeed, when it seemed as if the ideal relationship 
 with his father, that had been his early ambition, 
 were being realised. Sometimes, on a Sunday 
 morning, they would walk round the garden to- 
 gether in the sun, and Edwin would experience a 
 return of the passionate good-will and anxiety to 
 please that had overwhelmed him in the moment of 
 their bereavement; but their two natures were 
 radically so different that such moments were rare, 
 and, when they came, were really more of an em- 
 barrassment than a pleasure. 
 
 He felt that, on his side at any rate, the relation- 
 ship was artificial; that, however unnatural it 
 might seem, he really had to whip himself up to a 
 proper appreciation of his father's virtues. A sense 
 of veiled but radical antagonism underlay all their 
 dealings with each other ; and at times this hidden 
 thing, that Edwin held in such dread, came so
 
 408 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 perilously near to the surface as to threaten an 
 open rupture. 
 
 The question of Edwin's allowance created one of 
 these dangerous situations. Edwin knew that it 
 was impossible for him to live the ordinary life of 
 a medical student in North Bromwich without one ; 
 but the distaste for speaking of money matters, 
 which arose from his delicate appreciation of his 
 father's finances, had made it difficult to approach 
 the subject. At last he had screwed up his courage 
 to the point of making a very modest demand, and 
 his father, instead of realising the difficulty he had 
 found in doing so, had hedged in a way that made 
 Edwin feel himself a hard and mercenary parasite. 
 
 "All right, father, we won't say anything more 
 about it," he said, comforting himself with the as- 
 surance that in a couple of years he would be 
 qualified and in a position to earn his own living 
 and pay his way. On the strength of this, and 
 with his eyes wide open, he ran up a number of 
 small tailors' bills in North Bromwich; and all 
 would have been well if Mr. Ingleby, in a fit of ab- 
 sent-mindedness, had not opened these incriminat- 
 ing documents and leapt to the conclusion that his 
 son was going rapidly to the dogs. An unfortunate 
 scene followed. 
 
 "I suppose you realise, Edwin," he said, "that 
 you are a minor, and that while you are under age 
 I am responsible for these bills ?" 
 
 "I've not the least intention of letting you pay 
 them," said Edwin. 
 
 "I'm afraid I have no alternative. I want you 
 to tell me truthfully if there are any others."
 
 THE CLERK 409 
 
 "Of course there are others. Please don't bother 
 about them. In a little while 'I shall be able to 
 pay them." 
 
 "This is a great blow to me/' said 'Mr. Ingleby 
 solemnly, overwhelming Edwin with a picture of 
 virtuous poverty staggering from a cowardly blow 
 in the dark; and the obvious distrust with which 
 his father regarded him made his position at home 
 almost intolerable. It seemed to him that his 
 father now looked upon all his pleasures, with sus- 
 picion ; and, as a natural result, he lived more than 
 ever to himself, only returning to Halesby late at 
 night or at times when he knew that his father 
 would be busy in the shop. One circumstance came 
 to bridge the gap between them, a course of 
 pharmacology that Edwin took early in his fourth 
 year. He was delighted to find a subject in which 
 his father was more learned than himself, and spent 
 a number of hours that were almost happy in the 
 shop answering the questions that Mr. Ingleby put 
 to him on pharmacopoeial doses and searching the 
 little nests of drawers for rare drugs to identify 
 in their raw state. But the pharmacology course 
 was short, and the subject that was so important 
 in his father's life was small and unimportant in 
 Edwin's. In addition to which he could not help 
 feeling a sort of ethical prejudice against the com- 
 placency with which his father discharged patent 
 medicines that he knew to be worthless if not harm- 
 ful. 
 
 Every circumstance tended to isolate him from 
 the influences of Halesby. His sudden attempt to 
 be friendly with Edward Willis had withered un-
 
 410 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 der the humiliating denouement of his adventure 
 with Dorothy Powys; the new fields of music that 
 he explored with Matthew Boyce had made him 
 discontented with Aunt Laura's ballads; the gen- 
 eral air of elegance and refinement with which he 
 had become acquainted in one or two Alvaston 
 houses to which the Boyces had introduced him, 
 made everything in Halesby, even his own home, 
 seem a little shabby and unsatisfactory. North 
 Bromwich, and his work there, claimed him more 
 and more. 
 
 ii 
 
 Even when his first enthusiasms and the inspir- 
 ing generalisations that arose from them were ex- 
 hausted, he found that he could not escape from the 
 fascination of the studies which he now pursued, 
 for the most part, in the company of Matthew 
 Boyce. His third year had not only introduced him 
 to the romance of surgery and the human interests 
 of hospital life. He had spent long hours in the 
 pathological laboratory and had made acquaintance 
 with bacteriology, a science that was still in its 
 infancy. 
 
 In this work he had shared a desk with Boyce, 
 to whom it was particularly attractive, and between 
 them they had developed a bacteriological technique 
 rather above the average, taking an imaginative de- 
 light in the isolation of the microscopic deadly 
 forms of vegetable life that are responsible for 
 nearly all the physical sufferings of mankind. 
 When they looked together at the banded bacilli of 
 tubercule, stained red with carbolfuchsin, they saw
 
 THE CLERK 411 
 
 more than a specimen under a coverglass : they saw 
 the chosen and bitter enemies of genius, the malig- 
 nant, insensate spores of lowest life that had 
 banished Keats to fade in Rome, Shelley to drown 
 by Via Reggio, Stevenson to perish in Samoa: the 
 blind instruments of destruction that were even 
 then draining ttie last strength from the opium- 
 sodden frame of the author of The Hound of 
 Heaven. Here, in a single test-tube, they could see 
 enclosed enough of the organisms Of cholera to 
 sweep all Asia with a wave of pestilence; here, 
 stained with Indian ink, the dreamy trypanosome 
 that had wrapped the swarming shores of the 
 Nyanzas of dark Africa in the sleep of death. 
 
 Both of them were seized with a passionate fever 
 for research, to rid humanity of this insidious and 
 appalling blight. Now, more than ever, they felt 
 the supreme responsibilities of their calling; and 
 when, in their fourth year, they passed on to their 
 work in the medical wards, as clerks to the senior 
 physician at the Infirmary, and saw the effects of 
 bacterial havoc on the bodies of men and women, 
 their enthusiasm rose to a still higher pitch. 
 
 The canons of the new university decreed that 
 students who had learnt their surgery at one hos- 
 pital should study medicine at the other. It was 
 something of a disappointment to Edwin to ex- 
 change the homely atmosphere of Prince's, where 
 everything was familiar, for the colder and more 
 formal wards of the Infirmary. This hospital, 
 which was nearly twice the size of the other, was 
 situated in the lower and less healthy part of the 
 city. At Prince's there had been a way of escape
 
 412 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 westwards through the pleasant suburban greens of 
 Alvaston to the country and the hills. The Infirm- 
 ary, in its terra-cotta arrogance, had been set down 
 in the heart of unreclaimed slums, in such a way 
 that its very magnificence and efficiency were de- 
 pressing by contrast. Edwin disliked the palatial 
 splendour of its shining wards which, for all their 
 roominess, were full of an air that suffocated; for 
 the windows were never opened, and the atmosphere 
 that the patients breathed had been sucked into the 
 place by an immense system of forced .ventilation, 
 filtered until it seemed to have lost all its nature, 
 heated, and then propelled througli innumerable 
 shafts into every corner of the building. In the 
 basement of the hospital the machine that was re- 
 sponsible for this circulation of heated air made a 
 melancholy groaning; and this sound made the 
 whole structure seem more like an artificial as- 
 sembly of matter than a real hospital with a per- 
 sonality and a soul. 
 
 It is possible that the teaching methods of the 
 Infirmary were superior to those of Prince's; and 
 the supporters of the institution prided themselves 
 on the fact that the nursing staff was drawn from 
 a higher social stratum; but for a long time Ed- 
 win felt considerably less at home there than he 
 had been at the older hospital. The ward work, 
 however, was even more fascinating, for the reason, 
 no doubt, that his wonder was now tempered with 
 a higher degree of erudition. 
 
 He found his new chief an inspiring figure. In 
 the first place, the fact that he was a gentleman 
 and a man of culture made him an effective con-
 
 THE CLERK 413 
 
 trast to that dynamic but plebeian genius, L.M. 
 He was a graduate of one of the older universities, 
 and though this counted for little in the mind of 
 Edwin, who now affected to despise the city of his 
 broken dream, it did lend an air of distinction to 
 Sir Arthur Weldon's discourses. He had a quiet 
 voice, an admirable manner with women patients 
 or nurses, and beautiful hands, on one of which he 
 wore a signet ring embellished with his crest and 
 a motto which his presence merited : "In toto teres 
 atque rotundus." The rotundity, it may be added, 
 was so mild as to do no more than accentuate the 
 elegance of a gold and platinum watch-chain that 
 he wore. He was a great stickler for the traditions 
 and dignity of his profession, and no word that was 
 not infallibly correct disturbed the urbanity of his 
 slow and polished periods. For this reason his 
 tutorials in the wards were models of academic 
 dignity, and much frequented by students who knew 
 that he was far too anxious for the form of his dis- 
 course to break its continuity by asking awkward 
 questions. He treated his clerks, and indeed every 
 member of his classes, as if they were gentlemen 
 nurtured in the same fine atmosphere as himself. 
 He inspired confidence, and demanded nothing in. 
 return but correctness of behaviour and speech. 
 
 All these things made it easy to work for him; 
 and the fact that over and above these social quali- 
 ties he was a particularly sound physician, with a 
 reputation that was already more than provincial, 
 made Edwin sensible of the privilege of acting as 
 his clerk. 
 
 His specialty was disease affecting the heart or
 
 4H THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 lungs, and though his wards at the infirmary were 
 open to all sorts of general medical cases, these 
 two types of tragedy came most frequently under 
 Ms care and Edwin's observation. Sir Arthur 
 exacted from his clerks the preparation of accurate 
 and voluminous notes on all his cases, and Edwin 
 spent many hours in the wards extracting from his 
 patients the details of family and medical history 
 and moulding them into a balanced and intelligible 
 report. The emotions that the study of the tubercle 
 bacillus had aroused in him in the laboratory were 
 reinforced a hundred times in the wards devoted 
 to phthisical patients, too far advanced in dissolu- 
 tion for sanatorium treatment, that were his chief's 
 especial care. 
 
 They were most of them creatures of intelligence 
 and sensitiveness above the average of the hospital 
 patient ; their eyes shone between their long lashes 
 with a light that may have been taken for that of 
 inspiration in those of dead poets ; even in the later 
 stages of the disease, when their strength would 
 hardly allow them to drag up their emaciated limbs 
 in their beds, and their bodies were wrung nightly 
 with devastating sweats or attacks of haemorrhage 
 that left them transparent and exhausted even 
 then they were so ready to be cheerful and to let 
 their imagination blossom in vain hope, that Edwin 
 found them the most pitiful of all his patients. The 
 spes phthisica seemed to him the most pathetic as 
 well as the most merciful of illusions. 
 
 In this ward he became acquainted with one pa- 
 tient in particular, a boy, the son of labouring par- 
 ents whom heredity and circumstance alike had
 
 THE CLERK 415 
 
 marked down from the day of his birth to be a 
 victim of the disease. His mother and two sisters 
 had died of it, and all his short life had been spent 
 in a labourer's cottage made deadly by the family's 
 infection, at the sunless bottom of a wet Welsh 
 valley. 
 
 As a child he had been too delicate to enjoy the 
 fresh air that he would have breathed on the way 
 to the village school. He had lived, as far as Ed- 
 win could make out, in the single room in which his 
 mother had lain dying, and had learned to read and 
 write at her side. Then she had died ; and as soon 
 as he was old enough he had been sent out to 
 work on the farm where his father was employed, 
 an occupation that might well have saved him if 
 the work and the exposure had not been too severe, 
 or if he had not returned at night to the infected 
 hovel. As it was, in the rainy autumn weather of 
 the hills, he had caught a chill and sickened with 
 pleurisy, and thus the inevitable had happened. 
 
 He was only fifteen. Education had never come 
 his way, and he had never read any books but the 
 Confessions of Maria Monk and the family Bible; 
 but whenever Edwin came to go over his chest and 
 make the necessary report of progress fallacious 
 word upon his case sheets, he noticed that the boy 
 would hide a sheet of paper on which he had been 
 writing. His confidence was easily won, and with- 
 out the least shame he showed Edwin what he had 
 been doing. He had spent his time in writing verses 
 composed, for the most part, in the jingling meas- 
 ures of Moody and Sankey's hymns. They were 
 sprinkled with strange dialect words that filled
 
 4i6 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 them with splashes of sombre colour ; most of them 
 were frankly ungrammatical ; but there were things 
 in some of them that seemed to Edwin to bear the 
 same relation to poetry as the mountain tricklinga 
 of that far hill country bore to the full stream of 
 Severn. Their banalities, faintly imitated from 
 the banalities of the hymn book, were occasionally 
 relieved by phrases of pure beauty that caught the 
 breath with surprise. 
 
 "Why do you do this?" Edwin asked, and when 
 he had recovered from the shyness and diffidence 
 into which the question had cast him, the boy told 
 him that he wrote his verses because he couldn't 
 help it, because the words became an obsession to 
 him and would not let him sleep until they were 
 written down. The thin flame of creative aspiration 
 showed itself in other ways, in the patient's vivid 
 delight in colours and sounds, and in the strange 
 pictures, having no relation to nature, that he drew 
 with coloured chalks. 
 
 It seemed to Edwin that in this case the exhaus- 
 tion of chronic disease had revealed the existence, 
 as it sometimes will, of a faint fire of natural genius. 
 "There, but for the spite of heaven," he thought, 
 "goes John Keats," and, with the feelings of an 
 experimenter in explosives who mixes strange 
 reagents, he lent his patient a copy of the poet's 
 works. 
 
 The boy fell on them eagerly. He confessed that 
 he did not understand them; but he would read 
 them all day, mispronouncing the words as the 
 classical student perhaps mispronounces those of 
 the Greek poets, but extracting from their sono-
 
 THE CLERK 417 
 
 rous beauty a curious and vivid sensual satisfaction. 
 A single line would sometimes throw him into a 
 kind of trance, and he would lean back in his bed 
 with the book open on his chest and his slender 
 clubbed fingers clasped above it, repeating to him- 
 self his own version of the words without any con- 
 ception of their real meaning. Sometimes a line 
 would fill him with memories : 
 
 "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale 
 Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, 
 Far from the fiery moon, and eve's one star . . ." 
 
 "That is like our home," he would say. 
 
 The house-physician did not approve of these 
 experiments. On principle he would have disap- 
 proved of poetry, and in this case he considered the 
 reading of it unhealthy. As if there were any 
 element of health in this misfortune! ... A few 
 weeks later the patient had an attack of haemoptysis 
 and died. 
 
 It was only in such cases of chronic illness that 
 the question of the patient's intellectual state arose. 
 Such speculations might mitigate the fatigue of 
 slow siege warfare that had only one end in view, 
 but the acute medical wards, and particularly those 
 devoted to acute pneumonia, were the scene of 
 shorter and more desperate conflicts, grapplings 
 with death, in which the issue was doubtful and 
 medicine could at least give support, and some- 
 times turn the tide. 
 
 These were indeed terrible battles, in which de- 
 voted nursing counted for much. To Edwin it
 
 418 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 was a sight more awe-inspiring than the quiet of 
 death, to watch a strong man stretched upon his 
 back, breathing terribly through the night-long 
 struggles of pneumonia. In it he could see the 
 most tremendous expression of a man's will to live, 
 in the clenched hands, in the neck, knotted and 
 swollen with intolerable strain, in the working of 
 the muscles of the face and nose in their supreme 
 thirst for air. The sound of this breathing would 
 fill the room that was otherwise so silent that one 
 could hear the soft hiss of the oxygen escaping from 
 its cylinder. The train of students that followed 
 Sir Arthur round the wards would stand waiting 
 in the doorway, knowing that nothing was to be 
 seen, and the physician himself would step quietly 
 to the square of red screens and exchange a whisper 
 with the sister who stood at the patient's bedside, 
 her lips compressed as though their muscles were 
 contracting in sympathy with the other tortured 
 muscles that she watched. 
 
 "Well, how is he?" the physician would ask. 
 
 "I think he's holding his own. No sleep." 
 
 "That's a pity. Well, persevere with the brandy 
 and the warm oxygen." 
 
 "Yes, sir." Her tense lips scarcely moved. 
 
 And then Edwin's chief, so quietly that the pa- 
 tient did not know what he was doing, being indeed 
 no more than a mass of labouring muscles bent on 
 life, would feel the temporal pulse in front of the 
 ear with his firm white finger. 
 
 "Not so bad, sister . . . not so bad." 
 
 Then he would sweep away with the tails of his 
 frock-coat swinging.
 
 THE CLERK 419 
 
 "Ingleby, did you notice anything about the pa- 
 tient's hands?" 
 
 "His hands, sir?" 
 
 'Tea ... his hands." 
 
 "No, sir. Nothing, I'm afraid. I don't think he 
 was plucking the bedclothes . . . carphology, do 
 they call it?" 
 
 "You had better look the word up if you are not 
 sure. No ... it was a finer movement. He was 
 rolling his thumbs over the tips of his index fingers, 
 just like a man making pellets of bread at a dinner 
 party. There are men who do that. Remember 
 it. It's a bad sign in a case of lobar pneumonia. 
 Come along, gentlemen. The pneumococcus is a 
 sporting antagonist. Short and sweet. I'd as soon 
 die of pneumonia as anything and have a run for 
 my money. That case has put up a good fight." 
 
 That "case" ... On the face of it the use of the 
 word seemed to justify the accusation of gross 
 materialism that is so usually made against the 
 profession of medicine. The patient who lay there 
 fighting for his life was, in the physician's eyes, a 
 case, and not, as Edwin, who had taken notes of 
 his history in the earlier stages of the disease, knew 
 him to be a bricklayer's labourer fro>m Wolverbury 
 with a wife and six children, two of whom had died 
 in infancy. He was a case: a human body, the 
 soulless body that Edwin had learned in detail 
 through two years of labour in the dissecting room, 
 consisting of a heart hard-pressed, a nervous system 
 starved of oxygen and weakened by the virus of 
 pneumonia, and a pair of clogged lungs. This was 
 the whole truth as far as it concerned the physician.
 
 420 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 The calamity was a material calamity to be fought 
 with material weapons, and the state of his soul, or 
 his relations with his wife and the rest of the com- 
 munity in which he lived, only mattered in so far 
 as they affected his body and revealed him to have 
 been a clean-living and temperate man. For the 
 rest he was a case ; and it were well for the physi- 
 cian to leave the animula, vagula, blandula to the 
 poets. This was one of the hard lessons of medicine. 
 
 These were sombre things; but it must not be 
 imagined that they reflected the general tenor of 
 hospital life. The Infirmary, indeed, was so vast 
 as to be microcosmic, and its loves, its jealousies, 
 and its ambitions combined to produce a broad ef- 
 fect of human comedy, not without tears, but 
 leavened by the rich, and often unprintable humour 
 that flourished in the out-patient department. Hos- 
 pital politics, hospital scandals, hospital romances, 
 combined to make life a vivid and exciting experi- 
 ence. In the toils of the last, spring found W.G. 
 securely bound. Harrop, too, had launched into a 
 desperate affair with a probationer in the children's 
 wards whom the matron promptly transferred to 
 the infectious block and perpetual quarantine. Ed- 
 win and Boyce escaped this epidemic of tenderness 
 that swept through the fourth year like measles. 
 They were far too absorbed in their own interests 
 and discoveries to worry their hearts about any- 
 thing in a nurse's cap and apron. 
 
 Spring passed in a swift vision of plum-blossom 
 in the Boyce's Alvaston garden and two weeks of 
 musical debauchery, one Wagnerian and the other 
 of Gilbert and Sullivan. Most of the time they
 
 THE CLERK 421 
 
 were working at high pressure; but a week before 
 the beginning of the fourth examination, Boyce 
 proposed that they should cycle down together to 
 the country house that his father rented in Glouces- 
 tershire, and blow away the vapours of forced ven- 
 tilation with Cotswold air. 
 
 On the eve of an examination it seemed a daring 
 but enthralling plan. Edwin put the proposal be- 
 fore Mr. Ingleby, and was surprised to find that 
 he didn't object. Indeed, it had seemed to Edwin 
 for several months that his father was curiously 
 distrait and less interested than usual in his work. 
 This consent freed his conscience, and the two 
 friends set off together on a Saturday afternoon in 
 the spirit of abandoned holiday that is the highest 
 privilege of youth. They had decided to take no 
 medical books with them. As far as they were 
 concerned, the examination might go hang; for a 
 whole week they would live with no thought for the 
 morrow, taking long rides over the Cotswolds, 
 lunching at village inns on bread and cheese, re- 
 turning at night to feasts of beans and bacon and 
 libations of Overton cider. 
 
 They started from the infirmary at half -past two, 
 and had soon left the dust and tram-lines of North 
 Bromwich behind. The smooth, wide road that they 
 followed stretched in magnificent undulations over 
 the heights of the Midland plateau from which they 
 could see the shapes of Uffdown and Pen Beacon 
 fading into the west under a pale, black-country 
 sky. In front of them southward the sky was 
 blue.
 
 422 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "We're in for ripping weather," Boyce shouted as 
 he rode ahead. 
 
 The weather didn't really matter: they were in 
 for a great adventure. From the plateau they glided 
 swiftly to the vale of Kedditch, and when they had 
 left that sordid little town behind they climbed the 
 backbone of the Ridgway, where the road follows 
 the thin crest of a line of small hills and overlooks 
 on either side two dreaming plains. In a blue haze 
 of summer these green dominions lay asleep, so 
 richly scattered with dark woodlands that no hu- 
 man habitation could be seen. They were as lonely 
 as the sky. Westward of Severn the Glees and Mal- 
 verns towered over Wales; but Boyce appeared to 
 be more interested in certain lower wooded hills 
 upon the eastern side. He made Edwin the con- 
 fidant of his latest romance. 
 
 "She and I," he said, "used to bicycle out from 
 Alvaston in the cool of the evening . . . about an 
 ho.ur and a half's easy ride. It was early last sum- 
 mer. Those woods are full of nightingales. We 
 used to sit on a gate and listen to them and ride 
 home together in the dark. I can tell you it was 
 pretty wonderful." 
 
 Of course it was wonderful. Everything must be 
 wonderful in this enchanted country. Riding along 
 in the afternoon sunlight Edwin constructed for 
 himself just such another passionate adventure; 
 and the figure with which he shared these imaginary 
 ecstasies was, for want of a better, Dorothy Powys. 
 While the dream nightingales were singing their 
 hardest and he was on the point of renewing that 
 unforgettable kiss, they came to a cottage <half
 
 THE CLERK 423 
 
 timbered and lost in clematis and honeysuckle 
 where a steep road fell on either side at right anglea 
 to the ridge. 
 
 "Eight," shouted Boyce, "we'll take the road 
 down through the Lenches." 
 
 "What are the Lenches?" said Edwin, riding 
 abreast. 
 
 "Villages. Five of them, I think. There's Eous 
 Lench and King's Lench and Abbot's Lench, and 
 two others. They're a proper subject for a poem." 
 
 "Right-o . . . let's collaborate," said Edwin. 
 "How's this for a beginning?" 
 
 "As I was riding through the Lenches 
 I met three strapping country wenches." 
 
 And laughing together, they constructed a series 
 of frankly indecent couplets, recording the voy- 
 ager's adventures with all three. It was a matter 
 of the most complete collaboration, for the friends 
 supplied alternate lines, outdoing one another in 
 Eabelaisian extravagance. Edwin, however, pro- 
 vided the final couplet, which, he declared, gave the 
 composition literary form : 
 
 "Home to my vicarage I hasted 
 Feeling the day had not been wasted." 
 
 "A parson of the type of Herrick," said Boyce. 
 
 "Yea . . . but more serious." 
 
 "That kind of affair is awfully serious . . . at the 
 time." 
 
 The gables of Evesham and its one tall tower 
 swam in a golden dust. They drank cider in the
 
 424 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 inn courtyard, purchased a couple of Bath chaps 
 at a grocer's and crossed the Avon. Through an 
 orchard country they rode in that hour of evening 
 when bird-song is most wistful. The sun went 
 down in a blaze of splendour behind Bredon Hill. 
 The perfume of a beanfield swept across the road. 
 
 "Good God, isn't it good?" said Boyce. "We are 
 nearly there." 
 
 A village of Cotswold stone half hidden in blos- 
 soms of crimson rambler received them. The gar- 
 dens were full of sweet-williams, pale phloxes, and 
 tall hollyhocks. "Straight on," Boyce called. 
 
 A sign-post pointed up the hill to Overton. They 
 dismounted, and pushed their bicycles up a steep 
 lane in the twilight. Bats were flitting everywhere, 
 and a buff-coloured owl fluttered heavily between 
 the overarching elms. A faint tinkle of trickling 
 water came to their ears. 
 
 "That is the sound of Overton," said Boyce. 
 "Slow water trickling in the night." 
 
 They slept together in the low-beamed room, so 
 soundly that the sun was high before they wakened 
 next morning. 
 
 The week that now followed was the very crown 
 of youth. The Boyce's summer house stood upon 
 a patch of terraced ground, being the highest of 
 the three farms round which the hamlet of Overton 
 clustered, and overlooked the blossomy vale of 
 Evesham bounded by the Cotswold escarpment, 
 blue and dappled with the shadows of cloud. 
 "Parva domus: magna quies" read the motto that 
 Matthew's father, the poet, had placed above the 
 lintel of the door : "small house : great quietness" '
 
 THE CLERK 425 
 
 and indeed it seemed to Edwin that there could be 
 no quieter place on earth. 
 
 He and Matthew would smoke their morning 
 pipes together on a stone terrace that bleached in 
 the sun along the edge of a garden that the poet had 
 planted for perfume rather than for beauty of 
 bloom. Here they would sit, nursing books that 
 were unread, until the spirit tempted them to set 
 out towards the blue escarpment, and, after a hard 
 climb, lose themselves in the trough of some deep 
 billow of Cotswold and fall asleep on a bank of 
 waving grasses, or follow some runnel of the Leach 
 or Windrush until it joined the mother stream, 
 where they would strip and float over the shallows 
 with the sun in their eyes, emerging covered with 
 the tiny water leeches that gave one of the rivers 
 its name. 
 
 On the height of Cotswold they found an inn that 
 was half farm, possessing a barrel of cider that Ed- 
 win was almost ready to acknowledge as the equal 
 of that which he had drunk in Somerset ; and, for 
 further attraction a huge yellow cat beneath the 
 lazy stare of whose topaz eyes Matthew sat wor- 
 shipping. In the evening the air that moved over 
 the wolds grew cool and dry and more reviving than 
 any juice of yellow apples, and with their lungs 
 full of it they would spin down the winding hills 
 into the plain, past many sweet-smelling villages 
 and golden manor-houses, reaching Overton about 
 sunset, when the evening stocks, that Mr. Boyce 
 had planted along the approaches to his doorway, 
 recovered from their lank indolence and drenched
 
 426 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 the air with a scent that matched the songs of 
 nightingales. 
 
 There Mrs. Pratt, the wife of a neighbouring 
 labourer, would have their dinner ready: tender 
 young beans and boiled bacon and crisp lettuce 
 from the garden that Matthew dressed according 
 to the directions of his epicurean father; and with 
 their meal, and after, they would drink the dry 
 and bitter cider made at the middle farm from the 
 apples of orchards that now dreamed beneath them. 
 
 Then came music. The drawing-room piano 
 stood by the open window, and a soft movement 
 of air disturbed the flames of the candles in silver 
 candlesticks that lighted the music stand. No other 
 light was there; and in the gloom beyond, Edwin, 
 playing the tender songs of Grieg and Schumann, 
 and the prelude to Tristan, would see the long legs 
 of Matthew stretched dreaming on a sofa. The 
 nights were so silent that it seemed a pity to mar 
 them with music ; and for a long time Edwin would 
 sit in silence at the piano, while strong winged 
 moths fluttered in out of the darkness and circled 
 round the candle's flame. Last of all, before they 
 turned in, they would go for a slow walk over 
 meadows cool in the moonlight, listening to the 
 silence "Solemn midnight's tingling silentness," 
 Matthew quoted or to the gentle creaking of the 
 branches of elms, now heavy with foliage, that em- 
 bosomed their small house. 
 
 The last day of their holiday was wet; but that 
 made no great difference to them, for a succession 
 of showers drew from the drenched garden a per- 
 fume more intense. They spent the day in musical
 
 THE CLERK 427 
 
 exploration, and when the darkness came they sat 
 together talking far into the night. They talked of 
 North Bromwich, for the ponderable influence of 
 the morrow had already invaded their quietude, and 
 of their future work. 
 
 "In a year's time/ 7 said Edwin, "we shall be 
 qualified." 
 
 "What shall you do?" 
 
 "Oh, general practice, I suppose. That's the 
 easiest way to make a living. It's what .most men 
 do." 
 
 "I don't like the idea of it," said Matthew. "It's 
 sordid, unsatisfactory work. A hard living in 
 which science stands no chance. Selling bottles of 
 medicine quite harmless, of course, but unneces- 
 sary to people who don't really need them. You 
 have to do it to make a living. If you don't the 
 other people cut you out." 
 
 "I don't think it's as bad as that. There must 
 be something fundamentally good about medical 
 practice. You are actually helping the people who 
 are genuinely ill." 
 
 "That's the ideal side of it. But there's another. 
 I don't think I shall risk it. If the governor can't 
 let me have enough money to wait for consulting 
 practice, I shall have a shot at one of the services. 
 I think the Indian Medical Service is the thing. 
 Fairly good pay, a chance of seeing the world, and 
 a good sporting life." 
 
 "India ?" Edwin had never thought of it. 
 
 Sitting there in an English dusk the idea appealed 
 to him. Great rivers: burning plains under the 
 icy rampart of Himalaya : strange, dark religions.
 
 428 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 India. . . . Yes, it sounded good. His imagination 
 went a little farther ahead. A hill-station accord- 
 ing to 'Kipling, or perhaps a more solitary canton- 
 ment in the plains where the commandant was a 
 major in the Indian army and the wife of the com- 
 mandant, a girl whose name had once been Dorothy 
 Powys. And the major, of course, would succumb 
 to some pernicious tropical disease through which 
 Edwin would nurse him devotedly; and when he 
 was dead and buried his beautiful wife would come 
 to Edwin the only other Englishman in the sta- 
 tion, and say: "I never really loved him. I never 
 really loved any one but you." Altogether an ex- 
 tremely romantic prospect. . . . Yes, the Indian 
 Medical Service would do very well. . . . 
 
 The last night was more beautiful in its silence 
 than any other. It had been a wonderful week. 
 There would never be another like it. The crown 
 of youth. And, as it came to pass, the end of youth 
 as well. 
 
 m 
 
 It was late that night when Edwin reached home. 
 After the huge openness of the Cotswold expanses, 
 the air of Halesby, lying deep in its valley, seemed 
 to him confined and oppressive, and to add to this 
 impression there was a sense of thunder in it. 
 After supper his father went to his writing desk 
 and pulled out a sheaf of bluish, translucent papers 
 which he spread out on the table, and began to 
 study intently. Edwin, sprawling, tired and con- 
 tented, in the corner, watched him lazily. 
 
 "Whatever have you got there, father?" he said.
 
 THE CLERK 429 
 
 "Plans . . . architect's plans," Mr. Ingleby re- 
 plied nervously. 
 
 "Plans? What for? Surely you aren't thinking 
 of building a new house." 
 
 "Well, not exactly. No ... I am thinking of 
 adding to this one." 
 
 "But that would be an expensive job. Isn't it 
 big enough for us?" 
 
 "Yes. It's big enough at present ; but it may not 
 be shortly." 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 Edwin laughed uneasily, for he could not under- 
 stand this air of mystery. Mr. Ingleby rose from 
 his plans and cleared his throat. The little lamp- 
 lit room immediately became full of an atmosphere 
 of suppressed intensity, in which the tick of the 
 clock could be heard as if it were consciously call- 
 ing attention to the importance of the moment. 
 
 "I mean. ... As a matter of fact, I had intended 
 telling you this evening ; but I found it difficult to 
 do so, because . . . because I could not be quite 
 sure how you'd take it. It ... it may come as a 
 shock to you. I am thinking of enlarging the house 
 because I am proposing to be married again." 
 
 "Married? Good God!" 
 
 A feeling of inexplicable passion choked Edwin 
 so that his voice did not sound as if it were his 
 own. 
 
 "Yes, I knew it would come as a surprise to you. 
 Probably you'll find it difficult to understand my 
 feelings. You mustn't be hasty." 
 
 "Good God !" Edwin's amazement could find no 
 other words.
 
 430 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "You are the first person I have told, Edwin. 
 I've thought a good deal about it ... about you 
 particularly, and I've quite satisfied myself that I 
 am not doing you any injustice. In another year 
 I suppose you will be going out into the world and 
 leaving me. Don't decide what you think too 
 hastily." 
 
 He paused, but Edwin could not speak. 
 
 "If you'll listen, I'll tell you all about it. I 
 think you will approve of my choice. I'll tell 
 you " 
 
 "For God's sake, don't. Not now " 
 
 "Very well. As you wish." Mr. Ingleby's hands 
 that held the architect's papers trembled. He 
 smiled, kindly, but with a sort of bewilderment. 
 "As you wish," he repeated. 
 
 And Edwin, feeling as if he would do something 
 ridiculous and violent in the stress of the curiously 
 mingled emotions that possessed him, went quickly 
 to the door and ran upstairs to his room, where he 
 flung himself on his bed in the dark. 
 
 In a little while he found himself, ridiculously, 
 sobbing. He could not define the passionate mix- 
 ture of resentment, jealousy, shame, and even 
 hatred, that overwhelmed him. He could not under- 
 stand himself. A psycho-analyst, no doubt, would 
 have found a name for his state of mind, describing 
 it as an "(Edipus complex" ; but Edwin had never 
 heard of psycho-analysis, and only knew that his 
 mind was ruthlessly torn by passions beyond the 
 control of reason. He made a valiant attempt to 
 think rationally. Primarily, he admitted, it wasn't 
 Ms business to decide whether his father should
 
 THE CLERK 431 
 
 marry again or remain a widower. His father was 
 a free agent with responsibilities towards Edwin 
 that were rapidly vanishing and would soon be 
 ended. He couldn't even suggest that this new 
 marriage would be the ruin of any vital comrade- 
 ship between them, for the hopes of this ideal state 
 that he had once cherished, had not been realised 
 during the last few years. There was no reason 
 why his father's marriage should affect him per- 
 sonally, or even financially, for he had never 
 reckoned on the least paternal support when once 
 he should be qualified. There was not even the 
 least suggestion that his father was physically un- 
 suitable for the married state, for there was no rea- 
 son why he should not live for many years to come. 
 There were actually valid arguments, that Edwin 
 could not dispute, in favour of the plan such as 
 Mr. Ingleby's loneliness, soon to be increased, and 
 the discomfort that he had suffered as an elderly 
 widower at the hands of a series of inefficient house- 
 keepers. From every point of view the world would 
 be justified in concluding that he was doing the 
 correct and obvious thing. Why, then, should Ed- 
 win lie on his bed in the dark wetting his pillow 
 with tears, and sick with shame? 
 
 No reason could assuage his suffering. However 
 calmly he tried to consider the matter, the thought 
 of his mother rose up in his mind ; a vision of her, 
 beautiful and pathetic, and indefinitely wronged, 
 came to reinforce his indignation. He lit a candle 
 and gazed for a long time at her photograph, the 
 one that he had always kept in his desk at St. 
 Luke's and scarcely noticed for the last three years ;
 
 432 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 and though he knew that she was dead and pre- 
 sumably beyond the reach of any human passion, 
 the sight of her features filled him more than ever 
 with this unconscionable resentment so devastating 
 in its intensity. The portrait took him back to the 
 tenderness that he remembered at the time of her 
 death, and particularly that strange moment when 
 he and his father had knelt together in the little 
 room across the landing. The smell of Sanitas. . . . 
 
 And then he remembered another incident in the 
 gloom of that brown room at the Holloway on the 
 windy crown of Mendip, whence he had seen all the 
 kingdoms of the earth. Thinking of this, he 
 seemed to hear the voice of a very old woman, who 
 said, "The Inglebys are always very tender in 
 marriage. I've seen many of them that have lost 
 their wives, and they always marry again." How 
 could she have known? And then the thought of 
 a strange woman in the house, treading in the 
 places where his mother's steps had once moved, 
 swept him off his feet again. 
 
 "I could never stay here," he thought. "I could 
 never stay here. ... I should do something desper- 
 ate and cruel and unreasonable. I couldn't help 
 myself. I must go. It's a pity . . . but I must go. 
 I couldn't stay here. I simply couldn't." 
 
 With this determination in his mind, but with- 
 out the least idea of the way in which it might be 
 realised, he arrived at a state of comparative 
 serenity, in which he could contemplate his mother's 
 photograph without so much passionate resentment 
 at the slur that was being laid on her memory. Now 
 he saw everything in terms of his new resolution.
 
 THE CLERK 433 
 
 He saw, pathetically, the little bed in which he had 
 slept for so many years, the shelves on which his 
 favourite books were ranged, the piano and the 
 sheaves of his mother's music that he had managed 
 to install in his room: all the small details that 
 went together to create its atmosphere of homeli- 
 ness. 
 
 "How the devil shall I manage to leave them?" 
 he thought. He went to the window and saw, be- 
 yond the garden trees, the low line of those familiar 
 hills: the landscape that he had always delighted 
 in as his own, and that now was to be his no longer. 
 He sighed, for to leave them seemed to him im- 
 possible ; they were so familiar, so much a definite 
 part of his life. A curious impulse seized him to 
 creep downstairs and out of the house, and visit 
 the grave in the cemetery where his mother was 
 laid; but he restrained himself from this debauch 
 of sentiment, "It will do no good," he thought. 
 "It's all over." He even wondered if he might feel 
 happier if he went down to Aunt Laura's house 
 and confided in her : perhaps she would understand. 
 At least she was his mother's sister and might be 
 conscious of the indignity ; but when he had almost 
 determined to do this, he reflected that she and 
 his uncle were probably in bed, and a ludicrous 
 picture of her putting her head out of the window 
 to ask what was the matter, with her hair in curl- 
 ing pins, restrained him. Besides, it would be 
 rather ridiculous to fall back upon the sympathies 
 of a person whom he had neglected for several years. 
 
 "No. ... I must go on my own way," he thought. 
 "It's a sort of break in my life, just like the big
 
 434 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 break before. It's got to be faced, and it's no good 
 worrying about it." 
 
 He suddenly remembered that in twelve hours' 
 time he would be sitting for his fourth examination, 
 and that it would be wise for him to get some sleep ; 
 so he undressed and went to bed, wondering how 
 many more times he would undress in that little 
 room and caring less than he would have expected. 
 He fell asleep soon, for he was thoroughly tired out, 
 and slept so soundly that he did not see his father 
 enter the room a few hours later. He came in 
 softly, in his dressing-gown, carrying a candle, and 
 stooped above Edwin's sleeping figure with troubled 
 eyes.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 LOWER SPAEKDALB 
 
 NEXT day, in a fever of restlessness, Edwin 
 essayed and passed his fourth professional ex- 
 amination. He had expected to get a first-class in it, 
 but when he found himself near the bottom of the 
 list in the neighbourhood of W.G., he was not seri- 
 ously disturbed. The subjects of Forensic Medicine 
 and Toxicology were unimportant, and now that his 
 life had taken this sudden change of direction, it 
 did not much matter what sort of a degree he took. 
 His one concern was to get qualified and licensed 
 to earn his living on the bodies of his fellow-men 
 as quickly as possible. 
 
 Since his interview with his father, the deter- 
 mination to leave Halesby had not faltered, al- 
 though he had not then calculated the difficulties 
 that now faced him. To begin with, he had no 
 money beyond a few pounds that his mother had 
 placed to his credit in the Post Office Savings Bank 
 in his childhood. Luckily his college and hospital 
 fees had been paid in advance, and he was only 
 concerned with the actual cost of living and the 
 fees for the final examination. In some way or 
 other he would have to live for twelve months, and 
 he smiled to himself to think that he was in very 
 
 435
 
 436 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 much the same position as his father had occupied 
 thirty years before. 
 
 On the whole, he thought, his father must have 
 had less cause for anxiety, with Dr. Marshall's two 
 hundred pounds behind him and the humble stand- 
 ards of a village boy in place of Edwin's more elabo- 
 rate traditions of life. He felt that he needed the 
 advice of a sound man with some knowledge of the 
 world. In an emergency of this kind Matthew 
 Boyce could offer him very little but sympathy, and 
 so he turned naturally to the counsels of that bat- 
 tered warrior, W.G., feeling, at the same time, 
 rather shabby in making use of a friend whom he 
 had practically neglected in the last two years. 
 
 W.G. providentially didn't look at it in that light. 
 He had always regarded Edwin from a fatherly 
 standpoint, and the mere fact that this was a case 
 of rebellion against domestic authority of the kind 
 in which he had been engaged since his childhood 
 made- him sympathetic, though he didn't, as Edwin 
 saw to his despair, appreciate the delicacies of the 
 situation. 
 
 "I can quite see why you want to cut adrift," he 
 said. "It's a feeling that any one's who's dependent 
 gets, if he has any guts in him; but I'm damned 
 if I see any cause or just impediment why these 
 two persons shouldn't enter into holy matrimony." 
 
 "I suppose it's just rotten sentimentality. Still 
 ... I can't help it. There it is. It's the idea of 
 seeing another woman in my mother's place. I 
 simply couldn't stick it, W.G." 
 
 "Well, old chap, I'm quite prepared to believe 
 you know best. The thing is, what are you going
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 437 
 
 to do? You can't live on nothing in this hard world. 
 You can share my bed for a week or two if you 
 like. I'm sorry it won't be for longer ; but marriage 
 appears to be in the air. To tell you the truth, I'm 
 going to get married myself." 
 
 "You married? . . . Good Lord! What on earth 
 
 IP 
 
 are you doing that for?" 
 
 "I don't know. Force of circumstance, I sup- 
 pose. It's one of the things that happens when 
 you least expect it." 
 
 "Do I know her, W.G.?" 
 
 "Oh, yes . . . you know her. It's Sister Merrion 
 in Number Twelve." 
 
 There came to Edwin a vision of a tall, dark 
 girl, with wavy brown hair and Irish eyes, whom 
 he couldn't help remembering at the infirmary. 
 
 "I didn't even know that you were friendly." 
 
 "We weren't until about three weeks ago. I hap- 
 pened to notice that she was looking rather down 
 in the mouth, and took her out to tea ; and then the 
 poor girl broke down at the Dousita and told me 
 all about her home affairs. It's the devil and all 
 to see a pretty girl like that crying. She'd been 
 having a thin time of it at home with her father: 
 a pretty rotten sort of fellow, I gathered, and that 
 seemed the only way out of it. So we're going to 
 be married next month. A sort of fellow-feeling, 
 you know." 
 
 "But . . . Good Lord . . . are you in love with 
 her?" 
 
 "Ot course I am, you old ass. I shouldn't marry 
 her if I wasn't. It'll be a bit of a pinch till I'm 
 qualified, though."
 
 438 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "I say, I hope you'll be happy." 
 
 A sudden pang of something like envy over- 
 whelmed Edwin. The picture of settled peace, ro- 
 mantic love in a cottage, that W.G. was about to 
 share with the undeniably beautiful Sister Merrion 
 struck him as an ideal state. 
 
 "You're a lucky devil, W.G.," he said. 
 
 It seemed unreasonable that W.G. should devote 
 himself to the smaller problem of Edwin's ways and 
 means on the eve of such a momentous adventure. 
 It hardly seemed fair to bother him. 
 
 "We're going into rooms in Alvaston at first," 
 he said. "It'll be less expensive than furnishing, 
 and we don't intend to indulge in a family for the 
 present. Meanwhile, if I were you, I should go and 
 talk to the manager at Edmondson's. He may be 
 able to put you on to something. Yes . . . have 
 a shot at him first, and mention my name, he's a 
 very decent sort." 
 
 Edwin laughed to himself. It seemed to him that 
 he was in the grip of a curiously ironical fate, for 
 Edmondson's was the identical firm of wholesale 
 druggists with whom his father had been employed 
 on his first arrival at North Bromwich. History 
 was repeating itself in a way that was proper to 
 romance. 
 
 In the afternoon he went down to Edmondson's 
 and asked for the manager, a vigorous person with, 
 shrewd eyes that he screwed up habitually when- 
 ever he made a point in his conversation. He called 
 Edwin "Doctor" : a form of address that was flatter- 
 ing, until Edwin realised that it was no more than
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 439 
 
 a habit with him. "Ingleby," he said ; 'let me see, 
 I know the name." 
 
 "Probably you know my father. He's in business 
 at Halesby." 
 
 "Ah, yes, of course . . . your father. Come along 
 to my room, doctor, and have a cigar." 
 
 In this varnished chamber, decorated with a col- 
 lection of barbarous surgical instruments, survivals 
 of the Middle Ages, Edwin unbosomed himself. The 
 manager listened in silence, screwing up his eyes, 
 from time' to time* to show that he was taking in 
 Edwin's story. 
 
 "Well," he said at the end of it. "Do you want 
 me to tell you what I think of it, doctor? Candidly, 
 you know." 
 
 Edwin was only too anxious for another opinion. 
 "Well, I think you don't know when you're well 
 off. To tell you the truth, doctor, I think you're 
 a damned fool. That's straight. See?" 
 
 "I'm not surprised," said Edwin. "Still, I've 
 made up my mind. I'm not going to stay at home. 
 I can't do it, that's all. I'm only wondering if you 
 can put me in the way of a job of some kind." 
 
 "Well, doctor, that's easier said than done. When 
 you're qualified, it'll be a different matter alto- 
 gether. I think I can promise to keep you in <lo- 
 cums' at four or five guineas a week, as long as 
 you like to take them; but I can't honestly say 
 there's anything for you at present. It's not like 
 the old days when doctors were allowed to keep 
 unqualified assistants." 
 
 "I'm through my fourth exam., you know. I could 
 do dispensing."
 
 440 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Dispensing. . . . Yes, I hadn't thought of that. 
 Well, doctor, I'll see what I can do for you. You 
 know what I think of it, don't you? In the mean- 
 time you'd better leave your address. No good 
 writing to Halesby, I suppose?" 
 
 Edwin gave him the address of W.G.'s diggings, 
 and went off, hopelessly discouraged, to find his 
 friend. W.G., however, was at present far too en- 
 grossed in the charms of Sister Merrion to be avail- 
 able. So Edwin went on to the Boyce's house in 
 Alvaston, only to find that Matthew had cycled 
 down to Overton again with his father. It was 
 impossible for him to settle to any work; so he 
 took an afternoon train to Halesby, at a time when 
 he knew his father would be busy at the shop, and 
 collected the few belongings that he felt he must 
 take with him. 
 
 The atmosphere of the house was inexpressibly 
 poignant. Within its walls, he reflected, dwelt the 
 ghost of all his childhood, and memories of his 
 mother, that had lain submerged in his conscious- 
 ness for many years, rose to meet him wherever he 
 went. Well, he would never see the place again. 
 This exile, it pleased him to think, was his final 
 sacrifice to her memory. That was the best way 
 in which he could express it. At the worst, an- 
 other voice whispered, it was an excess of mawkish 
 .sentiment. 
 
 All through the afternoon, and particularly when 
 tie disinterred small pieces of the lumber that he 
 Jiad collected in his schooldays, this sense of a 
 ghostly childhood haunted him. It followed him 
 jdown the stairs into the hall, where the grandfather
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 441 
 
 clock ticked steadily as it had ticked ever since 
 he could remember, into the dead drawing-room, 
 soon to be made alive by the tastes of another femi- 
 nine personality ; on the lawn, where the limes were 
 shedding their sticky bloom; on the way to the 
 station, when he lugged his bag through the gnarled 
 shadows of Mrs. Barrow's ancient garden, and 
 caught a glimpse of the old lady's kindly nodding 
 bonnet as she smiled at him from her place in the 
 window, where she sat hermetically sealed in an 
 atmosphere of Victorian decay. 
 
 There were the reedy pools and Shenstone's hang- 
 ing woods, ghostly waters and woodlands, never 
 to be seen again. And there was the platform of 
 Halesby station, reeking of hot coal dust and ashes, 
 and, from the incoming train, a flux of shabby peo- 
 ple, including the bank-clerk in tennis flannels and 
 the mysterious commercial traveller with the brown 
 leather bag, reading the Pink } Un as he walked. 
 From this, through the black-country's familiar des- 
 ert, the train carried him into the bitter reality of 
 North Bromwich. With something approaching the 
 feelings of an intruder he installedhimself inW.G.'s 
 diggings, and made a supper, undeniably pleasant, 
 of bread and cheese with a large bottle of W.G.'s 
 beer. The latter, which happened to be Astill's 
 XXXX, induced a mood of tolerant sleepiness, and 
 luckily prepared him to receive, at midnight or 
 thereabouts, the confidences of his friend on the 
 subject of Sister Merrion's intellectual charms. 
 
 "You know, old chap, she's different from me 
 reads poetry by the hour when she's in the bunk on 
 night duty. Longfellow's her favourite. A long
 
 442 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 > i 
 
 way above my head and all that ; but it's a wonder- 
 ful thing, when you come to think of it, to be mar- 
 ried to an intellectual woman. ..." So the words 
 poured into Edwin's drowsy ears. He was far too 
 sleepy to smile, and, Longfellow apart, it did seem 
 to him a comfortable and even enviable thing to be 
 the adored centre of the universe in_the Irish eyes 
 of a tender creature with wavy brown hair and a 
 painful domestic tragedy. W.G. was still moralis- 
 ing on his past wickedness and the prospect of a 
 blameless future when Edwin fell asleep. 
 
 Next morning he was awakened by his friend, 
 boisterous and ruddy from a bath, performing a 
 strange ritual of prostrations and contortions in 
 front of an open window discreetly veiled with flut- 
 tering butter-muslin. Edwin lazily watched the 
 sinuous play of muscles under the shaggy limbs of 
 W.G. through half-closed eyelids. 
 
 "You'd make a topping subject for dissection, 
 W.G.," he said. 
 
 "Hallo!" W.G. answered from between his legs. 
 "You awake, you old slacker? There's a letter for 
 you that came up with the tea. Tea's cold, by the 
 way." 
 
 "Thanks," said Edwin, as W.G. skimmed the let- 
 ter over to him. "Good Lord, it's from Edmond- 
 son's." 
 
 It was a note hastily scribbled advising Edwin 
 to go at once and see Dr. Altrincham-Harris at 563 
 Lower Sparkdale, North Bromwich, between nine
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 443 
 
 and ten a.m., or six and nine p.m., and signed by 
 the manager who screwed his eyes up. 
 
 "Five hundred and sixty-three, Lower Spark- 
 dale," Edwin groaned. "I say, that sounds pretty 
 bad. Altrincham-Harris is rather hot stuff for 
 Lower Sparkdale, isn't it? Queer place for a double- 
 barreler." 
 
 "General practitioner," said W.G., rubbing him- 
 self down with a pair of flesh-gloves. "They all go 
 in for hyphens. It impresses the lower-middle 
 classes. When I go into practice, my son, I shall 
 be known as Dr. William George-Brown, if I 
 can afford the extra letters on a plate." 
 
 "Lower Sparkdale's a pretty awful slum, isn't 
 it?" 
 
 "Never been there. It's time you cleared off to 
 the bathroom. You'll feel better when you're 
 awake." 
 
 Edwin spent the morning in writing, and four 
 times rewriting, a letter to his father. It was a 
 difficult job, for he felt that the reasons for his 
 departure could not be explained in words, and he 
 was particularly anxious to make it clear that it 
 was purely a matter of temperament and that he 
 didn't wish it to imply any criticism of Mr. Ingle- 
 by's plans. When he had finished it he found that 
 it was far too late to visit the surgery of Dr. Al- 
 trincham-Harris. He therefore waited till the 
 evening, and then took a steam-tram through a 
 succession of sordid streets, past the public abat- 
 toirs and the newly-opened Kowton House, to the 
 level of 563 Lower Sparkdale. 
 
 The extreme end of that street was not as bad
 
 444 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 as he had imagined it might be, for at this point 
 the slum ended, resolving itself into the edge of a 
 growing suburb of red-brick. Number 563 was a 
 corner house secretively curtained with dirty mus- 
 lin on flat brass rods. A shining plate revealed the 
 qualifications, such as they were, of C. Altrincham- 
 Harris, Physician and Surgeon, and as the front 
 door seemed to have sunk into a state of disuse, 
 Edwin entered at another, marked "Surgery," 
 round which a number of poorly-clad women, some 
 of them carrying babies, were clustered. 
 
 Inside the door was a narrow waiting-room that 
 concentrated into an incredibly small number of 
 cubic feet the characteristic odour of an out-patient 
 department. Every seat was occupied, and Edwin, 
 deciding to wait for his turn, stood listening to a 
 varied recitation of medical history that every pa- 
 tient seemed compelled by the surroundings to re- 
 late to her neighbour. At the moment when he en- 
 tered a very stout woman, who had been drinking, 
 had the ear of the company, talking loudly over the 
 shoulder of a pasty child whose neck was covered 
 with the pin-points that fleas make on an insensi- 
 tive skin, and occasionally, in accessions of tender- 
 ness, hugging it to her bosom. 
 
 "So I says to the inspector . . . yes, inspector, 
 >e 'ad the nerve to call 'isself . . . says I, you can 
 take your summonses to 'ell, I says. I love my 
 children, I says. There's more love for the little 
 'armless things in my finger than there'll ever be 
 in your bloody body, I says. And I caught 'er up 
 and carried 'er straight along 'ere to the doctor. 
 Doctor 'Arris knows me, I says, and what's more
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 445 
 
 'e shall 'ave a look at Margaret's 'ead with 'is own 
 eyes. Shan't 'e, my pretty?" The child wriggled 
 as she was clasped in another beery embrace. 
 
 A bell tingled inside. "Now we shall see," said 
 the lady determinedly rising. "And 'ave a stifflcate 
 if it costs me two shillin's." 
 
 The room murmured low applause and sympathy, 
 and she entered the surgery, emerging, two minutes 
 later, with the testimonial in her mouth. 
 
 "What did I tell yo'?" she said. "The doctor 
 says there ain't one. Not one. It's time these in- 
 spectors was done away with. I only 'ope 'e will 
 summons me. Good-night, all." 
 
 She went out, hugging the child in both arms, 
 and a pale woman, respectably dressed, who had 
 sat through her tirades in silence, took her place in 
 the doctor's consulting room. Dr. Altrincham- 
 Harris didn't keep her long. She came out, like 
 the rest of them, after an interview that lasted per- 
 haps two minutes, carrying a bottle of medicine 
 wrapped up in one of the papers that are called 
 comic. Again the bell rang. 
 
 "Good God," Edwin thought, "and this is general 
 practice!" It was evident that he had entered a 
 world in which the academic methods of diagnosis 
 and prescription with which he had been educated 
 were not followed. On the surface it was quite 
 clear that the physician could not have given an 
 eighth part of the usual time or care to the con- 
 sideration of any single case. He remembered in- 
 stances of hospital patients who had affected to 
 despise the perfunctoriness of the methods of the 
 Prince's out-patient department, and had boasted
 
 446 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 that they would receive better attention from the 
 hands of a "private doctor." He hoped to goodness 
 that none of these unfortunate people would drift 
 into the hands of Dr. Altrincham-Harris. 
 
 His own turn came, and relieved to be rid of the 
 stink of the waiting-room, he entered the surgery. 
 Dr. Harris was sitting in an attitude of impatience 
 behind a desk littered with papers. He was a little 
 man, with grey, untidy hair and a drooping mous- 
 tache. He held a pencil in his hand, as if he were 
 itching to dash off another prescription, and an 
 open drawer in the desk at his right hand was full 
 of small silver. When he saw that Edwin was bet- 
 ter dressed than the majority of his patients, his 
 manner changed at once. "Please sit down," he 
 said. "Now, what can I do for you?" 
 
 Edwin hesitated, for he found it difficult to be- 
 gin. Dr. Harris encouraged him with a wink, and 
 a grip of his left arm. 
 
 "Now, my boy, you needn't be frightened of me. 
 You'll find the doctor's your best friend. Had a 
 bit of bad luck, eh? Well, you're not the first, and 
 you won't be the last." 
 
 The wink was the most disgusting part of this 
 performance, but Edwin, quickly recovering his 
 sense of humour, pulled out Edmondson's letter 
 and handed it to the doctor. 
 
 "Well, now, why didn't you say so at first," said 
 Dr. Harris, scratching a bristly grey chin. "Yes . . . 
 I did mention to their manager that I was in want 
 of some one to do a bit of rough dispensing and 
 keep this place tidy. You see I don't live here. It's 
 what we call a lock-up, and the work's so pressing
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 447 
 
 that I've really no time to do my own dispensing. 
 I suppose you hold the Apothecaries' Hall Diploma 
 passed your exams and that?" 
 
 "No . . . I'm a medical student. I took phar- 
 macology in my last exam. I'm in my final year." 
 
 "Hm ... I shouldn't have thought it. You look 
 very young. Final year . . ." Then his eyes bright- 
 ened. "Have you done your midwifery yet?" 
 
 "Xo, I shall do that later in the year." 
 
 "That's a pity ... a pity. You could have been 
 very useful to me in that way, keeping cases going, 
 you know, so that I could be in at the finish. I 
 could do twice the amount of midwifery that I do 
 now if I had some one to keep an eye on them. 
 Before the General Medical Council did away with 
 unqualified assistants, I used to keep three of them : 
 paid me well, too. Now I've got to do everything 
 myself. It's a dog's life, but there's money in it, 
 I don't mind telling you. Well, there's no time to 
 waste. What do you want?" 
 
 "I want a place to live in and my keep, and just 
 
 enough money to keep me going till I'm qualified. 
 
 That's all. You'll understand . . . I'm on my own, 
 
 and I've just about ten pounds to carry me over 
 
 ^a year. I hope you can give me a job." 
 
 "I suppose you could take a hand with dressings 
 :and things like that?" 
 
 Edwin saw that the little man was out for bar- 
 gaining, but as long as he could feel that, some- 
 thing was being settled he didn't really mind. 
 
 "Yes ... I can do anything you like to use me 
 for in your surgery hours. I can't promise more. 
 Tou see, I have to pass my final."
 
 448 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "You can learn a lot of useful things about gen* 
 eral practice here," said Dr. Harris. "It should 
 be extremely useful to you. You see, I've been at 
 this game for thirty years. It's a great chance for 
 you." He took up a handful of silver from the 
 open drawer and started to jingle it. "Look here, 
 you're wasting time." 
 
 Edwin agreed. 
 
 "Well, suppose I take you on, I might be able 
 to give you three . . . better say two pounds a 
 month. You can feed up at my place and sleep 
 here. If you sleep here, you'll be able to take night- 
 messages and telephone them up to me. There's a 
 bedroom fitted up. One of my assistants used to 
 sleep here. How will that suit you?" 
 
 With a feeling of intense relief Edwin accepted. 
 
 "Very well, then, there's no reason why you 
 shouldn't begin at once, just to get into the way 
 of things." He paused, and added as an after- 
 thought: "We'll count that you start from to- 
 morrow." 
 
 He led Edwin behind the green baize curtain at 
 the back of his desk, disclosing a set of shelves and 
 a counter stained with the rings of bottles and 
 measuring glasses. At the end of the counter was* 
 a sink into which a tap with a tapered nozzle 
 dripped dismally. One drawer held labels, another 
 corks, a third a selection of eight-ounce, four-ounce, 
 and two-ounce bottles. At the back of the counter 
 stood a row of Winchester Quarts, of indefinite con- 
 tents, labelled with the Roman numerals from one 
 to nine. Dr. Harris swabbed the swimming coun-
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 449 
 
 ter with a rag that was already saturated with 
 medicines. 
 
 "You can learn all you want in five minutes," he 
 said. "There's no time for refinements in this sort 
 of practice. These big bottles are all stock mix- 
 tures, and whatever they teach you in your uni- 
 versities, I can tell you that these nine mixtures 
 will carry you through life. There you are . . . 
 Number One : White Mixture. Number Two : Soda 
 and Rhubarb. Number Three : Bismuth. You have 
 to go easy with Number Three: Bismuth's expen- 
 sive. Number Four: Febrifuge . . . Liquor Am- 
 mond Acet : and that. Number Five: Iron and 
 Mag. : Sulph. And so on. . . . Number Nine : Mer- 
 cury and Pot : lod . . . you know what that's for," 
 with a laugh, "we use a lot of that here. Now 
 you've one ounce of each stock mixture to an eight- 
 ounce bottle, and a two-tablespoonful dose. I used 
 to put them up in six-ounce bottles ; but if you give 
 them eight ounces they think they're getting more 
 for the money: they don't realise they're getting 
 eight doses instead of twelve, and that's their look- 
 out, isn't it? Same proportions for children and 
 infants, only you use the four and two-ounce bot- 
 tles instead, with dessert-spoon and teaspoonful 
 doses. Simple, isn't it? But you want to simplify 
 if you're going to make money in these days. Now, 
 is that quite clear?" 
 
 "Quite clear." 
 
 "Well, then, when a patient comes in I have a 
 look at him with my experience you can tell in a 
 moment and I give you a slip of paper behind the 
 .curtain. Like this. 'Mrs. Jones. No. 5. T.D.S.'
 
 450 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Mrs. means an eight-ounce bottle. One ounce of 
 Number Five stock mixture. One tablespoonful 
 three times a day. Then, if I put '4tis horis' in- 
 stead of 'T.D.S.,' it means a tablespoonful every 
 four hours ; but I only do that when I see they can 
 afford to get through the bottle more quickly. 
 You'll find powders in that drawer. Antifebrin 
 it's cheaper than phenacetin and caffein. And calo- 
 mel for children. Then, as I w r as saying, while I 
 have a look at the patient and ask him one or two 
 questions you make up the medicine." 
 
 "Suppose, when you've had a talk to him, you 
 change your mind about the treatment." 
 
 "I never change my mind. There's no time for 
 that," said Dr. Harris. "And if I did we could 
 change the medicine next time. But you needn't 
 worry about the treatment: that's my part of the 
 business. Why" and the little man expanded 
 "I shouldn't w r onder if we got through as many as 
 a hundred patients in a couple of hours, the two 
 of us together. Now, are you ready?" 
 
 He left Edwin behind the curtain and rang his 
 bell. A patient entered, and as soon as the doctor 
 had said good-evening to her the prescription was 
 passed behind the curtain and Edwin proceeded to 
 fill a bottle from one of the Winchester Quarts. This 
 business went on monotonously for another hour. 
 Edwin dispensed mechanically in a kind of dream. 
 He never saw a single patient; but little scraps of 
 conversation showed him that most of them were 
 suffering from the evils of poor housing and a 
 sedentary life. It consoled him to think that most 
 of the mixtures that he dispensed were relatively
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 451 
 
 harmless. Sometimes, by an access of solicitude 
 and deference in the doctor's voice, he could gather 
 that the patient was of a higher social degree, and 
 he smiled to find, in these cases, that the mixture 
 was invariably prescribed in four-hourly doses. 
 
 All the men, it appeared, were judged to be in 
 need of White Mixture or Rhubarb : all the women 
 demanded Iron and Mag: Sulph: all the children 
 were treated with a treacly cough mixture or calo- 
 mel powders. In the space of an hour he must 
 have, dispensed at least forty bottles of medicine, 
 and towards the end of the evening he noticed that 
 Dr. Harris became even more perfunctory in his 
 examinations if such a word were ever justified 
 and that signs of irritation began to show them- 
 selves in his voice. At last the waiting-room bell 
 rang twice, and no patient appeared. 
 
 "That's the lot," said Dr. Harris, appearing from 
 behind the curtain. "I think I'll have a wash." It 
 was the first time that he had washed his hands 
 in the whole of the evening. "Well, you see what 
 it's like," he said, "I think I'll have a nip of 
 whisky." He produced a vitriolic bottle from a 
 cupboard and mixed some whisky with water in a 
 medicine-measure. 
 
 "A good average day," he said. "Three pounds 
 ten." He shovelled the silver from the drawer into 
 a leather bag that weighed down his coat pocket. 
 "That takes a lot of making at a shilling a time. 
 Well, how do you like it?" 
 
 "I think I shall be able to manage," said Edwin, 
 who was not anxious to commit himself. 
 
 "You'd better come and see your room."
 
 452 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 It was a bare bedroom on the first floor with iron 
 bedstead and a dejected washhand-stand, but it 
 seemed to Edwin that, at least, it would be quiet 
 and free from distractions. "I shall be able to read 
 here," he thought, "and after all, it's only for twelve 
 months." 
 
 "Not much to look at," said Dr. Harris apologeti- 
 cally. "I'll send you down some bedding to-night. 
 I'll expect you for breakfast at eight o'clock sharp. 
 You'd better come along and have some supper 
 now." 
 
 "I think I'd better go and collect some of my 
 things. I've been staying with a friend in his dig- 
 gings." 
 
 "All right. As you like," said Dr. Harris. "Nine 
 o'clock sharp to-morrow morning then? You have 
 to be punctual if you're to make money in this 
 business." 
 
 Edwin said good-night, keeping the key of the 
 surgery. When the doctor had gone he went back 
 into the curtained dispensary and tried to introduce 
 a little order into the waste. A strange life, he 
 thought ... a strange and degrading life. If this 
 were general practice, he wondered why he had 
 ever despised his father's trade, for surely there 
 was more dignity in selling tooth-brushes than in 
 dealing so casually with the diseases of human be- 
 ings. "I must talk it over with old W.G.," he 
 thought. "He's a sound man." But he knew at the 
 bottom of his heart that he couldn't afford to specu- 
 late on the ethics of the case. All that mattered 
 to him, for the present, was the necessity of find- 
 ing a roof any roof to shelter him and food to
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 453 
 
 keep him alive. He was a beggar, and could not 
 choose, and had every reason to be thankful for this 
 or any solution of his difficulties. 
 
 "It sounds bad," said W.G., when Edwin had ex- 
 panded on the refinements of Dr. Harris's medicine, 
 "but, in a way, you're lucky to have fallen on your 
 feet so quickly. As a matter of fact, you don't 
 deserve it. You're an old fool to have left home, 
 you know. Now, there's some chance of your ap- 
 preciating how comfortable you were." 
 
 Boyce was more sympathetic, entering with great 
 pains and seriousness into the cause of Edwin's 
 spiritual nausea. The results of it pleased him in 
 so far as they meant that in future Edwin would 
 be living in North Bromwich, and promised a per- 
 petuation of the delightful comradeship that they 
 had enjoyed in the summer. "I expect we shall 
 see a lot of you, old boy," he said, "ambrosial eve- 
 nings, you know." 
 
 Edwin laughed. "The evenings won't be exactly 
 ambrosial. I shall be earning my two pounds a 
 month filling eight-ounce bottles with rubbish at 
 a shilling each. I shall feel like compounding in 
 a felony. It's the devil . . ." 
 
 m 
 
 And it was pretty bad. No more concerts or 
 operas; no week-ends at Overton; no dinners at 
 Joey's; no possible diversion of any kind that im- 
 pinged upon the hours between six and nine. And 
 yet Edwin was happy. For the first time in his life, 
 and at a price, he was realising what independence 
 meant. Even the break at Halesby had passed off
 
 454 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 without any severe emotional disturbance. He had 
 written to his father again, telling him his new 
 address and what he was doing, and his father had 
 replied in his formal business hand, not, indeed, 
 with any offer of help, but with an implied approval 
 of what he had done, enclosing a number of bills 
 (opened) and a couple of second-hand book cata- 
 logues. 
 
 There was nothing unfriendly in the letter, no 
 heroics of outraged paternity. Eeading between 
 the lines, Edwin felt that by consulting no interests 
 but his own he had made an awkward situation 
 easy for his father. In that case, he reflected, Mr. 
 Ingleby might very well have made him an allow* 
 ance. It gave him a sense of grim satisfaction to 
 remember that he was still a minor and that even 
 if he were too proud to use it, he still held the 
 weapon of his father's legal responsibility rh re- 
 serve, but the next moment he was ashamed of this 
 reflection : when it came to a point the element of 
 pathos in his father's history and person always 
 disarmed him. 
 
 It was enough that he should be happy, princi- 
 pally for the reason that his days were so full and 
 any moments of relaxation came to him with a 
 more poignant pleasure than any he had known 
 before. He had very little time for reading out- 
 side the subjects of his final exam., that now over- 
 whelmed him with an increasing weight. For 
 pleasure he read little but lyrical poetry, finding 
 his chief enjoyment in the last hour before he fell 
 asleep in Dr. Harris's empty lock-up, with a copy 
 of Mackail's selections from the Greek Anthology
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 455 
 
 that he had salved from one of the second-hand 
 bookstalls in Cobden Street. 
 
 In spite of himself, he was beginning to like 
 Charles Altrincham-Harris. He didn't for one 
 moment alter his opinion of the degradation to 
 which the man had subjected the nobilities of his 
 calling, his meanness and his avarice. In his deal- 
 ings with the unfortunate people who came to the 
 shilling doctor for treatment, he still abhorred him ; 
 he knew him to be a person whose mind was a sink 
 of pseudo-professional prurience, and whose body 
 and habits were unkempt and unclean; but for all 
 this, he could not deny the fact that in his rela- 
 tions with his dispenser he displayed a curious vein 
 of natural kindness, and that his ideals, apart from 
 his loathsome business, were of a touching sim- 
 plicity. 
 
 Every morning they met at breakfast. The doc- 
 tor believed in good food as a basis for work, and 
 his housekeeper, a small, shrewish woman of fifty, 
 was an excellent cook. At the breakfast table he 
 would impart to Edwin the more salacious para- 
 graphs of the morning paper, which he always 
 opened at the page that contained the records of 
 the divorce-court. He took no notice of politics. 
 "They can do what they like as long as they don't 
 legislate about us" And though Edwin felt sin- 
 cerely that the sooner his kind were legislated for, 
 the better, he was thankful that his employer was 
 not a political bore or bigot. 
 
 After breakfast Dr. Harris always smoked a clay 
 pipe in his carpet slippers, a present from a patient 
 who, for some unimaginable reason, had been grate-
 
 456 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 ful. Then they would walk down to 563 Lower 
 Sparkdale together in the fresh morning air, and 
 the combination of gentle exercise with deeper 
 breathing would impel the little man to make 
 Edwin the confidant of his ambitions. 
 
 "Twelve thousand pounds," he would say, "that's 
 all I want. Twelve thousand pounds. Five hun- 
 dred a year. Then I shall find a quiet little place 
 in the country and have a rest. Keep bees and 
 poultry: that's what I shall do, and smoke a pipe 
 in the garden in the evening when the poor devil 
 that buys my practice is going down to the surgery 
 to rake in the shillings." 
 
 In these moments he would reflect on the begin- 
 ning of his career. "I took a good degree, you know. 
 You wouldn't think it to look at me now, would 
 you? No ... I had bad luck, and a bad wife, 
 which is the worst sort of luck. She lost me my 
 practice, and so I grew sick of medicine. I couldn't 
 be bothered with the social side of it. Money was 
 what I wanted : money and quiet. And so I took 
 a dose of medicine : fifteen years at a shilling a bot- 
 tle, with advice thrown in, and then a quiet life. 
 That was all I wanted. And I've very nearly got 
 it. Another year or two will make me secure. 
 Security . . . that's what I wanted. Well, here we 
 are. . . ." 
 
 So the morning's work began, and no morning, 
 as far as Edwin could see, was different from any 
 other. He was thankful when the clock struck ten, 
 and Dr. Harris ruthlessly locked his surgery door. 
 Then, fortunately, he was obliged to take the next 
 tram to the hospital ; for if he had lingered, as he
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 457 
 
 was sometimes forced to do on Sundays, Dr. Harris 
 would have lit his pipe and proceeded to regale him 
 with anecdotes of medical experiences that always 
 related to sex, on which he dwelt with a slow, de- 
 liberate satisfaction, like a dog that nuzzles a piece 
 of garbage. 
 
 The aspects of medical science that related to 
 sex were the only ones in which he was really in- 
 terested. He possessed an expensive and eclectic 
 library of books on these subjects, to which he was* 
 always adding others that he bought from the col- 
 porteurs of medical pornography who are continu- 
 ally pestering the members of his profession. These 
 he would pore over at night, when Edwin was provi- 
 dentially engaged in reading for his final. "Medi- 
 cine is an extremely interesting profession from 
 that point of view," he would say, and indeed the 
 dispenser soon discovered that this aspect of the 
 medical profession supplied Dr. Harris with a great 
 number of his patients. In the squalid underways. 
 of the city he had established a reputation for skill 
 and discretion in the treatment of contagious dis- 
 ease, and the unfortunate victims who came to 
 Lower Sparkdale from more reputable suburbs 
 were ready to pay through the nose for his advice. 
 
 One night, hearing behind his curtain the over- 
 tures of one of these cases that he knew so well, he 
 suddenly became aware of a tone that was familiar 
 in the patient's voice. Listening more closely he 
 could have sworn it was the voice of Griffin. 
 Evidently it was a person of some consequence, for 
 Dr. Harris devoted as much as five minutes to his 
 examination.
 
 458 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "I suppose you wouldn't like a prescription?" 
 
 "No, you'd better make it up for me," said the 
 voice that resembled that of Griffin. 
 
 "Certainly . . . delighted." 
 
 Dr. Harris breathed heavily, as he always did 
 when writing a prescription, and then passed the 
 slip of paper behind the curtain to Edwin. Edwin, 
 looking at once for the name at the head of the 
 prescription, was disappointed. The patient had 
 preferred to remain anonymous. He dispensed the 
 medicine, and when Dr. Harris had said good-bye 
 to the patient he could not resist the temptation of 
 looking from behind the curtain to verify his sus- 
 picions. He could only see the back of the depart- 
 ing patient, but the suspicion filled him with a 
 queer -sensation of awe. 
 
 It showed him a new aspect of medicine that had 
 never occurred to him in hospital life, but would, 
 no doubt, be present often enough in private prac- 
 tice. Griffin was a person well known to Edwin 
 and his friends, a person about whose adventures 
 and their consequences he would easily and nat- 
 urally have spoken. If he had retailed the incident 
 to Maskew and W.G. in the Dousita, it would have 
 been the occasion of a little pity and probably some 
 irreverent mirth. But he saw at once that he could 
 do nothing of the sort. He had become, for the 
 first time in his life, the keeper of a professional 
 secret. For the rest of the world, however inter- 
 ested, Griffin and Griffin's disease must not exist. 
 
 Edwin felt the weight of a new responsibility, 
 reflecting that in his future life he would in all 
 probability become possessed of many such secrets
 
 LOWER SPARKDALE 459 
 
 and that there might be occasions on whicn his 
 sense of duty would be divided between the tra- 
 ditional discretion of Hippocrates and the instincts 
 of humanity. He invented a hypothetical case for 
 his own confusion. Supposing he had a sister to 
 w r hom Griffin was engaged: supposing that they 
 were going to be married in a week after this un- 
 comfortable knowledge had come into his posses- 
 sion, endangering the whole of her future happiness 
 and perhaps her life: what, in that case, should: 
 be his attitude towards the question of professional 
 secrecy? What would he do? Would he be justi- 
 fied in telling her what he knew? Hippocrates said 
 "No"; but Hippocrates' refusal narrowed the field 
 of possibilities to confronting Griffin with his own 
 shame and threatening him with . . . what? Not 
 with exposure for that Hippocrates forbade. Obvi- 
 ously with death. And that would be murder. . . . 
 
 Balancing the relative heinousness of murder 
 and perjury, Edwin began to laugh at himself, and 
 while he did this a curious reminiscence came into 
 his mind : the picture of a small boy, who resembled 
 him in very little but had been himself, lying in the 
 hedge side of Murderer's Cross Road, on the downs 
 above St. Luke's, reflecting on the same problem of 
 the justification of homicide and saying to himself 
 as he brooded on his wrongs: "I can quite easily 
 understand a chap wanting to murder a chap." And 
 this picture tempting him further, he relapsed into 
 a dream of those strange, remote days tinged with 
 extremes of happiness and misery, and both of 
 them unreal. . . . 
 
 He thought no more of Griffin.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 EASY ROW 
 
 FOR a whole year Edwin inhabited the room 
 above the lock-up surgery in Lower Sparkdale. 
 It was a happy year, for into it was crowded a 
 great wealth of experience and elevating discovery 
 to which the mechanical drudgery of Dr. Harris's 
 dispensing room acted as ballast. In his medical 
 studies he began to feel for the first time the fruits 
 of his earlier labours: to realise that all medicine 
 was little more than an intelligent application to 
 life of the theoretical subjects that he had mastered 
 without reasoning. From the very first day of his 
 experience in the dissecting room there was nothing 
 in all that he had learnt that had not its direct 
 bearing on his present practice; and the reflection 
 that he possessed all this essential knowledge ready 
 for use was exhilarating in itself. Again, the fact 
 that he was now standing on his feet, actually earn- 
 ing his own living, gave him a greater happiness 
 than he had ever known in his days of dependence ; 
 it made him accept the routine of Lower Sparkdale 
 as a penance, cheering him with the thought that 
 so much sacrifice was really necessary before he 
 should be master of himself. 
 
 He was lonely; but this seemed inevitable, for 
 460
 
 EASY ROW 461 
 
 no person in his senses could be expected to grind 
 along in a steam-tram to Lower Sparkdale for the 
 sake of his company; and the final year was too 
 full of strenuous studies for all of them to allow 
 of much indulgence in the joys of friendship. Mat- 
 thew Boyce made a few heroic attempts. He even 
 spent several evenings in Harris's dispensary, find- 
 ing the shilling doctor's clinical and commercial 
 methods something of a joke. They were no joke 
 to Edwin: he had recognised long ago that they 
 were no more than Harris's solution of the problem 
 of living. The doctor saw nothing unworthy in 
 them. He did his best, within his limited knowl- 
 edge, for his patients. He was kind, and even, on 
 occasion, generous. If there were fault to be found 
 it must be with the State that allowed such igno- 
 rant men to deal with precious human bodies^ and 
 not with him. When the first humour of the ex- 
 perience was exhausted Boyce came to the surgery 
 no more. Little by little Edwin's insulation became 
 more complete, and in the end he relapsed into the 
 degree of loneliness that he had known in his early 
 days at St. Luke's. 
 
 Given the opportunity, he almost enjoyed it. 
 There was something remote and secret about this 
 little room in the corner house above the grinding 
 trams, and when the surgery emptied at night and 
 he went upstairs to work he would find himself 
 suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of thankful- 
 ness for the fact that it was so peculiarly his : that 
 his own books and pictures and clothes had made it 
 individual and different from any other room in 
 the whole of the city. And when the town slept^
 
 462 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 and he sat on reading into the early hours of the 
 morning, the lonely chamber was like a lighthouse 
 set in seas of night, and dreams of the misty lands 
 beyond Severn, of Mendip couched in darkness, or 
 of the sleeping wolds by Overton, would beat at 
 Ms lighted window like seabirds in the night. 
 
 At first the sacrifices that his poverty demanded 
 had seemed no more than part of a new and excit- 
 ing game. It was some months before he realised 
 that, literally, he could not afford the indulgence 
 of a single pleasure that cost money. If he were 
 to free himself from the bondage of Dr. Harris's 
 dispensary it was absolutely necessary that he 
 should save enough money to pay his examination 
 fees. He began to find a new delight in carefully 
 hoarded shillings, and this practice threw him into 
 a curious sympathy with his employer. Each of 
 them, on a different scale, was committed to a pres- 
 ent sacrifice for the sake of future freedom; and 
 this reflection reconciled him in some degree to the 
 inconveniences that Dr. Harris's miserly ways in- 
 flicted on him. 
 
 It was galling, none the less, to find that he could 
 not afford to buy a single new book, to hire a piano, 
 or to hear any music except the free recitals by 
 which the municipal organist convinced the citizens 
 of North Bromwich that they were getting some- 
 thing for their money, in debauches of sound that 
 reminded them how much the organ had cost. 
 Sometimes, to Edwin's joy, he played the fugues 
 of the Well-tempered Clavier, and on their wide 
 streams he would be carried from springs of moun- 
 tain sweetness, by weir and cataract to solemn tidal
 
 EASY ROW 463 
 
 waters and lose himself at last in seas of absolute 
 music. Time after time lie thanked God for Bach, 
 and walked home to his garret like a man who has 
 gazed upon the splendour of a full sea and carries 
 its tumult in his mind far inland. 
 
 Through all these experiences Edwin was so pos- 
 sessed by the one idea of holding on until his final 
 exam, was over that he scarcely missed the society 
 of his friends. He knew that his friendship with 
 Boyce was founded too deeply in common experi- 
 ence ever to be shaken by his own changed circum- 
 stances : it might lapse, but it could never be broken. 
 He always felt that the future held more for them 
 than the past had ever given ; but his other friends, 
 Maskew and Martin in particular, seemed to have 
 been translated to another place of existence. In 
 the wards and in the lecture theatres he would meet 
 them; but elsewhere they had nothing in common 
 with his way of existence. 
 
 Even W.G. seemed gradually to be slipping away 
 from him an unreasonable state, for Edwin, after 
 all, was now for the first time sharing something 
 of the big man's early experience. For several 
 months they had scarcely spoken, and then, one 
 day, nearly ran into each other's arms in Sackville 
 Row, and almost mechanically wandered off to the 
 Dousita together. In the shades of the smoking- 
 room nothing had changed. When they sank into 
 the cushions of their favourite corner Miss Wheeler 
 approached them with an exact replica of the smile 
 with which, four years before, she had engaged the 
 heart of Maskew; and when she took their order, 
 she stood on one leg in exactly the same position,
 
 464 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 leaning, with a hint of tiredness that was not sur- 
 prising in a young woman who habitually breathed 
 tobacco smoke in place of oxygen, with her hand 
 on the curtain at the side of their settee. 
 
 "I never see Mr. Maskew now," she said with a 
 sigh. "I can't think whatever 'as happened to all 
 you boys, I'm sure." 
 
 She brought them coffee, and W.G., who had 
 scarcely spoken, but whose knitted brows testified 
 to the pressure of some urgent problem, said : 
 
 "Well, how do you like it?" 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "Being on your own." 
 
 "Oh, it's all right," said Edwin. 
 
 "I never thought you'd stick it," W.G. confessed. 
 "I didn't think you had it in you. You see, in your 
 case there was never the least necessity for it." 
 
 "There was, you know " 
 
 "I could have understood it if you'd had a regular 
 bust-up. I should certainly have stayed at home 
 if the governor hadn't booted me out. You never 
 had anything of that kind." 
 
 "No . . . not exactly. But the position was the 
 same. I had a sort of ... of emotional cold-douche. 
 I was awfully sensitive about my mother. My fa- 
 ther and I were all wrong. We'd really nothing in 
 common. And it's turned out all right. That's the 
 main thing." 
 
 "You're a quixotic ass, my son. No . . . that's 
 not the word, but it's the same sort of thing. It 
 was really damned foolish of you." 
 
 "It's jolly sound to stand on your own feet. Yon 
 know where you are for the first time. It was only
 
 EASY ROW 465 
 
 uncomfortable because he was really awfully de- 
 cent. He is now: but he hasn't the faintest glim- 
 mering of my point of view." 
 
 "They rarely have," said W.G. gloomily. "Still, 
 you haven't made such an ass of yourself as I 
 have." 
 
 "Something new?" 
 
 "Yes . . . I'm married." 
 
 "Good God!" 
 
 "It isn't as bad as that," W.G. chuckled. "I 
 thought it would come as a bit of a shock to you." 
 
 "But why on earth ?" 
 
 "Well, you see she w r as awfully unhappy at home. 
 Brute of a father. And we simply got tired of 
 waiting. That's all. You must come and see us. 
 She always remembered your clerking in her ward. 
 We're living in furnished rooms in Alvaston. It's 
 an amazing experience, you know, marriage. Quite 
 different from anything else of the kind." In view 
 of W.G.'s experience in these matters Edwin was 
 ready to take this for granted. 
 
 "I should think it is a damned funny thing," he 
 said. 
 
 They parted. There was something almost pathet- 
 ic to Edwin in W.G.'s hot handclasp. He felt that 
 W.G. was up against something far bigger than 
 anything that had happened to him before: a 
 strange, momentous adventure, yet one that was 
 thrilling and, in a way, enviable. Once again he 
 found himself admiring the big man's desperate 
 daring. W.G. with a wife, and probably, in a few 
 years, children ! . . . Assuredly they were all grow- 
 ing old.
 
 466 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 n 
 
 In all that summer Edwin scarcely saw a patch 
 of living green except the leprous plane-trees that 
 sickened in the hospital square. The current of 
 his life flowed slowly through the culverts of grimy 
 brick that led from Lower Sparkdale to the Infir- 
 mary. He became part of the stream of dusty hu- 
 manity that set citywards and back again with the 
 regularity of a tide. In December he came to the 
 end of his penance. The final examination was 
 fixed for the beginning of January, and before he 
 could sit for it, he was compelled to take a course 
 of practical midwifery, twenty cases in all, which 
 compelled his residence for a couple of weeks in 
 the neighbourhood of the Prince's Hospital, the in- 
 stitution to which this department was attached. 
 Matthew Boyce and he had decided a year before 
 that they would do this work together, and though 
 the unusual strain of the fortnight in Easy Bow 
 would be a doubtful preliminary to the effort of 
 the final examination, the two friends had always 
 looked forward to the experience. 
 
 The authorities of the Prince's Hospital, lacking 
 obstetrical wards, had made this course the oppor- 
 tunity for establishing an Out-patient Department 
 that could deal with ten cases a week at the nominal 
 charge of five shillings each. The students worked 
 in pairs, and though they could never be sure of 
 attending their cases together, the resident staff of 
 the hospital, and, if necessary, a consultant phy- 
 sician, were always available in case of an emer- 
 gency. Edwin and Boyce were housed in one of
 
 EASY ROW 467 
 
 the faded Georgian buildings that faced the hos- 
 pital. Its lower stories, like those of all its neigh- 
 bours, were devoted to theatrical lodgings; but a 
 special night-bell, polished by the moist hands of 
 forty anxious husbands every month, communicated 
 with the upper room in which the resident students 
 attempted to sleep. The house was as well known. 
 to all the poorer people in the neighbouring war- 
 rens as were the faces pale with sleeplessness of 
 the students who issued from it, carrying the black 
 bags that were symbolical of their labours, a source 
 of mysterious speculation to the children of the 
 district, and of amusement to the "professionals" 
 who inhabited the front rooms. 
 
 On a Monday morning in December the landlady 
 received Edwin and Boyce and installed them in a 
 small room at the back of the ground-floor infested 
 with portraits of smiling young ladies in tights, 
 inscribed, with the most dashing signatures imagin- 
 able, to herself. Mrs. Meadows was evidently very 
 proud of these decorations and called attention to 
 the most blatant pair of legs by polishing the glass 
 of their frame with her apron. 
 
 "I hope you gentlemen will be comfortable," she 
 said. "Not that I doubt it. I don't have many 
 complaints." The statement was a challenge, and 
 implied that if there should be any complaints the 
 lodgers might look to themselves. 
 
 "It's a nice fresh room," she said, throwing open 
 a French window that disclosed a small patch of 
 black earth that had once been covered with grass 
 but was now untenanted by any living organisms 
 but cats and groundsel.
 
 468 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "I like them to keep the window open. It takes 
 away the smell of the gentlemen's disinfectant. Not 
 but what it's clean, I dare say." 
 
 Edwin and Boyce would have assented in any 
 case if it were only to release the-composite lodging- 
 house smell that penetrated the room from the ad- 
 joining "domestic offices," and Mrs. Meadows's 
 kitchen where, it would be imagined, turnip-tops 
 simmered day and night upon a gas-ring. 
 
 "Then there's a pianoforte," she said, hesitating 
 at the dusty portiere. "I find that professionals 
 like a pianoforte. It's cheery like." 
 
 In a little while it became apparent that the pro- 
 fessionals liked a pianoforte, in every one of the 
 thirty odd houses within earshot, even if they could 
 not play one. From the hour of midday, when they 
 rose, until six o'clock, when they betook themselves 
 to their various theatres, the pianos of Easy How 
 were never silent. 
 
 "It's no good trying to do any work in this place," 
 said Edwin. 
 
 "There won't be any time, anyway," said Boyce. 
 "You wait till the fun begins." 
 
 They lunched together on steak-and-kidney pud- 
 ding and turnip-tops with a brand of bottled beer 
 in which Mrs. Meadows showed an admirable taste, 
 and in the early afternoon the fun began. 
 
 From the beginning, Fate had decreed a compli- 
 cation by deciding that Mrs. Hadley, back of num- 
 ber four, court sixteen, Granby Street, and Mrs. 
 Higgins over number fifty-four Rea Barn Lane, 
 should conspire to increase the population of North 
 Bromwich at the same moment. Mr. Hadley and
 
 EASY ROW 469 
 
 Mr. Higgins achieved a dead heat, arriving on the 
 doorstep together in a dripping perspiration with 
 messages of an equal urgency. 
 
 "This is rather rotten," said Boyce. "Which of 
 these ladies will you take?" 
 
 "I'll have Mrs. Higgins," said Edwin. "I suppose 
 the bag's all right?" 
 
 The bag was right enough, though it contained 
 very little that could do any harm, and smelt abomi- 
 nably of Lysol. Mr. Higgins, still out of breath, 
 with beads of sweat sweeping an alluvium of metal 
 dust into the furrows of his cheeks, carried the 
 bag for Edwin. For all his exhaustion, Mr. Hig- 
 gins wanted to run, and Edwin, walking with long 
 strides beside him, was in danger of losing his dig- 
 nity by being swept into the same degree of panic. 
 The reflection that this would betray his inexperi- 
 ence held him back. , 
 
 "The nurse said very urgent, doctor," Mr. Hig- 
 gins panted. 
 
 "Yes . . . yes. You mustn't excite yourself . It'll 
 be all right." 
 
 "I suppose," said Mr. Higgins doubtfully, "you're 
 well up in these sort of cases, doctor? I expect 
 you've seen a lot of them?" 
 
 Edwin wished he had been able to grow a mous- 
 tache for the occasion. 
 
 "Hundreds," he said. 
 
 Mr. Higgins gave a sigh of relief. "That's a good 
 thing. That's a very good thing. You see, I'm 
 nairvous, doctor. I lost my fairst over it, and I 
 don't want to lose this one. Very young she is." 
 
 "Is this her first?"
 
 470 JHE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "Yes, doctor." 
 
 Another bit of bad luck ! 
 
 Through a maze of gritty streets they hurried, 
 reaching, at last, a house beside a corner "public" 
 which a cluster of women, gossiping in their aprons 
 on the doorstep, proclaimed as the site of this mo- 
 mentous birth. One of them snatched the black 
 bag from Mr. Higgins. "You get away, 'Iggins, and 
 'ave a pint of beer quiet like. This baint no place 
 for an 'usband. This way, doctor. Here she is, 
 poor lamb." 
 
 She pushed her way up the stairs, breathing 
 heavily. Her bunchy skirts filled the staircase, 
 which was no wider than a loft-ladder and very 
 dark. 
 
 " 'Ere 'e is," she cried triumphantly, as she 
 pushed open a matchboard door. " 'Ere 'e is. 'Ere's 
 the doctor. Now you won't be long, my lover. 'E'll 
 'elp you. You'll 'elp 'er, won't you, doctor?" 
 
 She deposited the talismanic bag triumphantly 
 on the foot of the bed ; then she winked at Edwin : 
 "I'll go and keep 'Iggins out of the way," she said. 
 
 "I'm that glad youVe come, doctor," said the 
 nurse. She was a little shrivelled woman, with a 
 nervous smile and her hair packed into a black net 
 with a wide mesh that made her whole head sombre 
 and forbidding. Her lips twitched when she 
 smiled, and Edwin, who had been counting on the 
 moral support of her experience, saw at once that 
 she was even more anxious than himself. He was 
 soon to know that the women who acted as profes- 
 sional midwives in the North Bromwich slums were 
 usually widows left without means, who adopted
 
 EASY ROW 471 
 
 this profession with no other qualification than a 
 certain wealth of subjective experience, on which 
 they were careful to insist. The claim : "I've had 
 eight of them myself, so / ought to know," did 
 not atone for the fact that they didn't actually know 
 anything at all. Mrs. Brown, the lady to whose 
 mercies the trustful Mr. Higgins had committed his 
 second, was a timid specimen of the class. Beneath 
 her protestations of experience her soul quaked 
 with terror, and a hazy conviction that if anything 
 went wrong, she, the unregistered, would probably 
 be committed for manslaughter, reduced her to a 
 state of dazed incompetence in which she heard 
 without hearing Edwin's none too confident direc- 
 tions. She went downstairs tremulously to bring 
 hot water, and Edwin was left alone with his pa- 
 tient. 
 
 "It won't be long, doctor, will it?" she said. 
 
 "Of course not ... of course not," said Edwin. 
 He felt very much of a fraud, for he hadn't the 
 least idea how long it would be. The whole picture 
 was moving: the patient, a girl of twenty-four or 
 five, her honey-coloured hair drawn back tightly 
 from a face that was blotched already with tears, 
 but not ill-looking: the humility of the little bed- 
 room with its hired furniture and certain humble 
 attempts at ornamentation : pink ribbon bows upon 
 the curtains, a ridiculous china ornament on the 
 mantelpiece, and brass knobs at the foot of the bed- 
 stead, so polished that they had already become 
 loose. No doubt Mrs. Higgins the second had been 
 in respectable suburban service, and these worthy 
 efforts were the signs of an attempt to introduce
 
 472 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 into Kea Barn Lane the amenities of Alvaston. She 
 lay quietly on the bed, gazing at nothing while 
 Edwin unpacked his bag. He did not look at her, 
 but became suddenly conscious that her body had 
 given a kind of jump and that her hands were des- 
 perately clutching a towel that Mrs. Brown had 
 knotted to the rail at the bottom of the bed. Then 
 he heard the joints of the bedstead creak. "It's all 
 right. Cheer up. ... It won't be long," he said. 
 
 Mrs. Brown emerged panting from the stairway 
 with hot water. "That's right, my lover, that's 
 right. . . . That's another one less. Now, let the 
 doctor have a look at you." . 
 
 A strange business. ... It was a moment that 
 might have been difficult; but Edwin soon realised 
 that the seriousness of the occasion, the fact that 
 this young creature's life was veritably in his hands, 
 made modesty seem a thing of no account. In the 
 eyes of this woman Edwin was not a young man 
 but an agency of relief from pain. In the body 
 that pain dominated there could be no room for 
 blushes. Edwin, trying to summon all his hardly 
 learned theory to his aid in practice, was suddenly 
 impressed with the obligations that this confidence 
 imposed on him. He remembered the terms of the 
 Hippocratic oath. Yea ... a goodly heritage! 
 
 "Is it all right, doctor?" said the anxious voice 
 of Mrs. Brown. 
 
 "Yes,, it's all right." 
 
 "Thank the Lord for that! You hear what the 
 doctor says, my lover " 
 
 "But it will be a long time yet." 
 
 "Oh, don't say that, doctor, don't say that," Mrs.
 
 EASY ROW 473 
 
 Higgins wailed. "You aren't going to leave me?" 
 
 "It's no good staying here now," he said, as gently 
 as he could. "It's really all right. It's only a 
 matter of time." 
 
 "Can't you help her a bit, doctor?" 
 
 Of course he couldn't. A business of that kind 
 would mean calling in the house-surgeon from the 
 Prince's. He was determined not to be driven into 
 a panic, though this would have been easy enough, 
 when he was convinced that the case was taking a 
 normal though inevitably lengthy course. 
 
 "I expect you'll want me again some time this 
 evening," he said. 
 
 Mrs. Brown showed him downstairs. "You're 
 sure it is all right, aren't you, doctor?" she said. 
 
 "Perfectly all right. You know what a first case 
 is." 
 
 "I'd ought to," said Mrs. Brown proudly. "I've 
 had eight myself." 
 
 He trudged back to Easy Row, where the pro- 
 fessionals' pianos, tuned in quarter-tones, were al- 
 ready combining to show their catholicity in musi- 
 cal taste. Boyce w T as drowsing in an easy-chair with 
 the Greek Anthology open in his lap. 
 
 "Well, how's your Mrs. Higgins?" he asked lazily. 
 
 "Oh, she's all right. A primip. Is Mrs. Hadley 
 through her little troubles?" 
 
 "B.B.A. Born before arrival. A soft job. Saves 
 a lot of trouble." 
 
 "My good lady will haul us out in the middle of 
 the night, damn her !" said Edwin. A conventional 
 mode of expression, for he didn't in the least feel 
 like damning Mrs. Higgins. In his mind he still
 
 474 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 carried the picture of her plain hair and blotched 
 face : he could hear the sound of that sudden shud- 
 der and the noise of the bedstead creaking. 
 
 The evening passed quietly. They tried to read, 
 but found the feeling of suspense made that im- 
 possible. No message came from Mrs. Higgins, and 
 as they were almost certain to be called out in the 
 night, they went to bed early. While they were un- 
 dressing, Boyce humming softly the Liebestod from 
 Tristan, the bell in their bedroom rang. 
 
 "Mrs. Higgins," said Edwin. "I'd better go and 
 see." 
 
 He groped -his way downstairs. In the front 
 room a party of music-hall artistes were making a 
 noisy supper. Before he could reach the door the 
 bell rang again, and when he opened it, a big man 
 whose breath smelt of liquor, lurched into the hall. 
 
 "Are you the doctor?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "You're to come at once to thirty-four Greville 
 Street. It's the missus. The nurse says it's urgent." 
 
 The nurse always said it was urgent. Boyce 
 came downstairs grumbling. 
 
 "We'd better go together." 
 
 "What about my friend, Mrs. Higgins?" 
 
 "Oh, damn Mrs. Higgins!" said Boyce. 
 
 It was a clear and frosty night, in which all 
 points of light, whether of starshine, or street- 
 lamps, or of blue sparks crackling from the tram- 
 way cables, shone brightly. The Greville Street 
 husband lurched along beside them, just sufficiently 
 awake to show them the way through a maze of 
 rectangular byways to a street that lay upon the
 
 EASY ROW 475 
 
 outer edge of the district that the hospital covered. 
 The chill clarity of the air dispelled sleep. It was 
 even pleasant to be walking there, for at this time 
 of the night the town was so empty that they might 
 almost have been walking over a country road. 
 
 "Here it is," said the husband thickly. 
 
 Boyce and Edwin entered together. The front 
 room of the house was crowded with people who 
 should have been in bed. They sat clustered about 
 a table on which stood a number of bottles from 
 one of which the messenger had evidently extracted 
 his peculiar perfume. In the corner chair, next to 
 the window, an old woman in a lace cap had fallen 
 asleep. Opposite her a very dirty old man toasted 
 his shins in front of the fire. A strapping girl with 
 dark, untidy hair, and aa almost aggressive phys- 
 ical beauty was holding forth shrilly to a group of 
 three women who had wandered in to drink and 
 gossip from a neighbouring court. 
 
 "Here they are," said the husband sullenly, "two 
 on 'em." 
 
 "My God! . . . Two of them? Is that all?" said 
 the dark girl, examining and, as it seemed, approv- 
 ing. 
 
 Upstairs they found a midwife of another but 
 equally characteristic type: a fat woman whose 
 attention was divided between the patient in bed 
 and the cheerful company in the front room. On 
 the surface she was a little patronising, an attitude 
 that the two students' inexperience made it difficult 
 for them to resent. "I know what you doctors 
 want," she said, standing with her sleeves rolled 
 up over her red forearms. "Plenty of hot water,
 
 476 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 that's what you want. I've got some disinfectant 
 too. I've often been with the 'ospital doctors. Now 
 we shan't be long." 
 
 She bustled downstairs, looking into the front 
 room for a drink on her way to the kitchen. Boyce, 
 confident in the completion of his first case, took 
 the lead in questioning the patient, a slightly older 
 version of the dark sanguine girl they had seen 
 below. Her whole attitude towards the business, 
 though less pathetic than that of the unforgotten 
 Mrs. Higgins, was equally moving. It implied such 
 a cheerful and courageous acceptance of life and 
 this most uncomfortable of its experiences. Her 
 amazing vitality pervaded the room. It could be 
 seen in her masterful smile, in the grip of her red 
 fingers on the knotted towel, in the deep suffusion 
 of her face. A jolly woman, built in the mould of 
 a fighter, who would neither take quarter nor give 
 it. When Boyce had examined her she smiled, dis- 
 closing a fine set of teeth, and solemnly winked. 
 
 "Well, doctor, what about it?" 
 
 "Listen to 'er," said the midwife, chuckling. 
 "That's the way to take it!" 
 
 "Well, it's all right, you know, but it won't be 
 just yet awhile." 
 
 "My God ... I didn't pay the 'ospital five bob 
 for you to tell me that. Look 'ere, doctor, my elder 
 sister 'ad a horrible time with her first. 'Ad to 
 'ave it took off 'er. Be a sport, doctor, and give us 
 a smell of chloroform. Come on, now ! There's two 
 on you. . . . 'Ard-'earted devils all you doctors are. 
 Bain't they, Mrs. Perkins?" She smiled at the mid- 
 wife, and then, suddenly, her face changed and
 
 EASY ROW 477 
 
 she clutched at the knotted towel. "Oh, my!" she 
 said, and Edwin saw the veins in her neck swell, 
 and heard her clench her teeth. 
 
 "That's the way, dearie. That's the way," said 
 Mrs. Perkins, gritting her own teeth in sympathy 
 and smoothing back the hair from the patient's 
 brow. 
 
 Edwin and Boyce were debating as to whether it 
 were worth while staying when a messenger from 
 the hospital arrived from below to say that Mrs. 
 Hadley, Boyce's patient of the afternoon, was "took 
 worse," and so Edwin was left alone once more in 
 the squalor of the patient's room. He sat waiting 
 in a chair that was supposed to be easy, listening 
 to the conversation of the woman and her nurse. 
 Most of it was family history of a scandalous kind, 
 and the manner of its expression was extremely 
 frank. In the course of his hospital work he had 
 never before realised the extraordinary contradic- 
 tions of the code by which the talk of the working- 
 class is governed. In its mixture of delicacies and 
 blatancies it amazed him. Both the women were 
 flunt gossips, and the conversation never ceased, 
 except in those moments of acute and sudden ten- 
 sion when the patient's hands clutched at her towel 
 and the midwife mopped her brow. Then, when 
 the upstairs room was silent, a murmur of laughter 
 and loud voices would come up the stairs from 
 below. In this family, at any rate, the occasion of 
 a birth did not lack celebration. Even the patient 
 was curious about what was happening downstairs. 
 "What's our Susan doing?" she said from time to 
 time.
 
 478 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 An interminable business. As the night wore on 
 it grew very chilly, and Edwin shivered in his chair. 
 The case hung fire unaccountably, and in this, the 
 first of many such cold vigils, he fell into a strange 
 mood, often to be repeated, in which the sublime 
 influences of night and solitude combined to purge 
 his reflections of pettiness and showed him what 
 an unimaginable mystery his own life was. The 
 patient fell into an uneasy doze. The midwife 
 nodded in her chair, snatching up her head with a 
 conscious jerk whenever it lolled over her fat bosom. 
 The smelly oil-lamp on the mantelpiece gave an 
 occasional sputter when a drop of water was sucked 
 up into the wick. In the room below the excited 
 talk bad petered out and only a sound of soft snor- 
 ing was heard, like the breathing of cows in a byre. 
 
 Edwin thought of many things. It seemed to 
 him that his mind burned clear as frosty starlight 
 lighting forgotten memories of his childhood. He 
 thought of his own mother. He wondered if she 
 had lain like the woman on the bed on the night 
 when he was born. He wondered if it had been in 
 the least like this, and whether another doctor, 
 whose name he did not even know, had sat by the 
 fireplace in the little room at Halesby waiting and 
 peeing his own life stretched out before him in this 
 light of perilous clarity. He thought of St. Luke's 
 of a thousand small things that had lain sub- 
 merged for years and now appeared unbidden. The 
 strangeness of his own experience, the elements of 
 linked circumstance that had combined to twist his 
 life into its present state and make him what he 
 was. He thought of his father, with an unusual
 
 EASY ROW 479 
 
 degree of charity, realising that this man too was 
 no more than a slave of the same blind influences 
 driven hither and thither in spite of his innate 
 goodwill. Edwin was ashamed to think that he had 
 been angry with him. In his present mood it seemed 
 to him an unreasonable thing that one should be 
 angry with any human creature. Pity . . . yes, and 
 love but never anger. So, like a devotee in a 
 Tibetan lamassary, he saw his fellow creatures, his 
 father, himself, the midwife, and the woman on the 
 bed, bound helpless to the revolving wheel which 
 is the earth. And the earth seemed very small be- 
 neath the stars. . . . 
 
 At two o'clock in the morning the handsome girl 
 from downstairs, who was the patient's sister, came 
 softly into the room and asked the midwife if she 
 would like a cup of tea. The patient blinked at 
 her with red eyes. 
 
 "How is it going, Sally?" said the sister. 
 
 "Oh, it's all right. I suppose it's got to be worse 
 before it's better," she said, with a laugh. "Ask 
 the doctor if he'll have some tea too." 
 
 Edwin accepted gratefully. It was harsh stuff 
 that had been standing on the hob downstairs for 
 some hours already. Mrs. Perkins was easily per- 
 suaded into doctoring hers with a tablespoonful of 
 brandy from the bottle that is a regular constitu- 
 ent of the working class layette. The sister sat at 
 the foot of the bed and stared lazily at Edwin. 
 
 "You look tired, doctor," she said. 
 
 Edwin admitted that he had had a biggish day. 
 
 "You ought to get a bit of sleep," said the dark
 
 480 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 girl. "Sorry there bain't no spare beds in the house ; 
 but you can turn in with me if you like." 
 
 She looked so daringly provocative that Edwin 
 had a horrible suspicion that she meant it; but it 
 was evidently the sort of joke that Greville Street 
 understood, for the patient on the bed cried, "Ethel, 
 you are a cough-drop, you'll make the doctor blush," 
 and Mrs. Perkins rocked with laughter until she 
 spilt her tea. 
 
 "Well, why should you have all the fun, Sally? 
 It isn't every day we get a nice young man in the 
 house." 
 
 "Fun . . .," said the patient wryly. "You'll know 
 all about this sort of fun some day." 
 
 "Not just yet, thank you," said Ethel. "I can 
 look after myself better than that." 
 
 She went downstairs again. Edwin was beginning 
 to feel a little unhappy about the case. To his in- 
 experience the long delay seemed abnormal, and his 
 imagination presented to him a series of textbook 
 disasters. While he stood doubting whether he 
 should give himself away by sending to the hos- 
 pital for the house-surgeon, he was startled by a 
 sudden cry. Now, at any rate, there was no doubt 
 about it. At this rate, he thought, it could not be 
 long. But it took three hours: three hours of des- 
 perate struggle in which he could give no help, 
 though the thing was so fierce that he found his 
 sympathies snatched up into it : so that he held his 
 breath and clenched his hands and felt his own 
 temples bursting with effort. There had been no 
 experience like it. As he sat at the bedside with 
 the patient's fingers clasped about his wrist, he
 
 EASY ROW 481 
 
 had the feeling that this woman, who had joked 
 with him half an hour before with the dry, coura- 
 geous cynicism that colours the philosophy of her 
 class, was not an individual human soul any longer ; 
 not a woman at all, but a mass of straining, tor- 
 tured muscle animated by the first force of life. 
 So it had been since the first woman cried out in 
 the night under the tangles of Caucasus: so it 
 would always be : the most sublime and terrible of 
 all physical experiences, a state of sheer physical 
 possession, more powerful than any spiritual 
 ecstasy imaginable. 
 
 At five o'clock the baby was born a boy, and 
 Mrs. Perkins, standing by with a skein of twisted 
 thread in her hand, danced with nervousness. Ed- 
 win's hands also trembled ; but his heart was light- 
 ened with a sudden relief, as though the labour 
 had been his and his also the accomplishment. A 
 palpably ridiculous state of mind . . . but it took 
 him like that. 
 
 The dark girl put her head in at the door. She 
 was very pale now. Had the whole household 
 shared in these physical throes? 
 
 "Is it all right?" she said. 
 
 "Yes . . . it's a boy. A beautiful boy." 
 
 "Hallo, Eth," said a quiet voice from the bed. 
 "Go and tell Jim." 
 
 It was the first word the patient had spoken. 
 
 A moment later she opened her eyes and stared 
 in a dazed way at Edwin. She smiled. She was a 
 woman again an extraof dinarily chastened woman 
 and somehow strangely beautiful. "Thank you,
 
 482 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 doctor/' she said. "You 'elped me ever so. Did 
 I be'ave very bad, Mrs. Perkins?" 
 
 "Bad? You be'aved fine," said Mrs. Perkins, 
 wrapping the baby in a blanket and putting it in 
 the fender. 
 
 The patient gave a deep sigh and seemed to 
 relapse into her thoughts. From time to time she 
 would say a couple of words in a weak-contented 
 voice. 
 
 " 'As Eth told Jim?" she asked several times, and 
 then : "What'll mother think?" 
 
 "You be quiet, my lover," said the midwife. 
 "Don't you disturb yourself with talking." 
 
 At last she said suddenly : "I'm better now," and 
 asked if she might see the baby. Mrs. Perkins un- 
 wrapped the blanket from a red and frowning fore- 
 head and showed it to her. She touched its cheek 
 with her finger and smiled miraculously. The ac- 
 tion seemed to bring her submerged personality to 
 the surface again. 
 
 "Ugly little b ," she said, with a happy laugh. 
 
 "Looks as if 'e'd been on the booze." 
 
 "I shan't forget the way you 'elped me, doctor," 
 she said again, when Edwin left the house. Al- 
 though it was still dark, the workmen's trams had 
 begun to run, and lights appeared in the lower win- 
 dows of public houses where hot soup was on sale. 
 When he entered the bedroom of their lodging, Ed- 
 win found, and envied, Boyce sleeping stertorously 
 with the blankets pulled over his head and an over- 
 coat on his feet. Three hours later, when the land- 
 lady came to call them, he woke, and explained to 
 Edwin the excitements of his own night: how, in
 
 EASY ROW 483 
 
 the middle of it, Edwin's own Mrs. Higgins had 
 called him out ("decent little woman," said Boyce), 
 and how, from sixteen Granby Street, he had been 
 called to a case at the other end of the district in 
 a common lodging-house kept by a Pole. 
 
 "No hot water ... no soap . . . nothing but a 
 bucket that they'd used for scrubbing the floors. 
 Not even a bed! Just a straw mattress with a 
 couple of grey blankets on it. Two other children 
 and a man in the room. And crawling! I've 
 stripped and had a rub down with a towel, but I 
 feel as if they were all over me now. You couldn't 
 see them on the grey blankets, you know," 
 
 "Sounds dismal. Had they a capable woman? 
 My Mrs. Perkins wasn't up to much." 
 
 "Midwife? My dear chap, they didn't run to 
 luxuries like that. It is a bit thick, isn't it? when 
 a modern surgeon-accoucheur is reduced to wash- 
 ing the baby with his own soap. As a matter of 
 fact, it was an extraordinarily interesting perform- 
 ance. The thing felt as if it would break. But seri- 
 ously, you know, this sort of thing teaches you a bit 
 about twentieth century housing." 
 
 "Yes, it's pretty bad," said Edwin. "There's one 
 thing about it: working all night like this gives 
 you a terrific appetite." 
 
 m 
 
 For a few days the extreme novelty of their ad- 
 venture sustained them, but after five nights of 
 broken or obliterated sleep, the presence of the 
 night-bell at their bedside stood for a symbol of 
 perpetual unrest. Their days were spent in visit-
 
 484 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 ing patients whom they had attended. All examina- 
 tion work was made impossible by the fatigue that 
 follows want of sleep, and the fact that they were 
 committed to a kind of enforced idleness made their 
 sojourn in Easy Kow almost as much a holiday as 
 the great summer days at Overton. 
 
 Both of them found that they could not even read 
 for pleasure; and so the undisturbed hours of the 
 day were passed in talk and in music. Mrs. 
 Meadows's piano had suffered under the fingers and 
 thumbs of countless guests; but Edwin and Boyce 
 shared the cost of a tuner and worked together 
 through the Wagner scores and the subtler treas- 
 ures that lay hidden in the songs of Hugo Wolf. 
 They had few visitors, for this community of taste 
 had already begun to isolate them from their stu- 
 dent friends; but Boyce's father, the poet, often 
 came to have tea with them and to share their 
 music, a man as versatile and sanguine as Mere- 
 dith's Roy Richmond, and yet so versed in every 
 variety of knowledge and so reverent of beauty that 
 Edwin felt there was no such company in the world : 
 one who took all beauty and knowledge for his 
 province. 
 
 One afternoon a message came to the house in 
 Easy Row from the hospital, and as Mrs. Meadows 
 was engaged in some obscure adjustment of her 
 toilet, Edwin went to the door to receive it. He 
 took the message, and was returning when another 
 figure appeared on the path. It was that of a young 
 girl of his own age, or, perhaps, a little older, and 
 she hurried forward when she saw that he was clos- 
 ing the door. He waited.
 
 EASY ROW 485 
 
 "You weren't going to shut me out, were you?" 
 she said. She smiled, and Edwin saw that her eyes 
 were of a warm hazel such as sunshine reveals in 
 peaty river water. Before them Edwin found him- 
 self blushing. 
 
 "No, indeed," he said. "Do you want Mrs. 
 Meadows? I'll go and tell her." 
 
 "Mrs. Meadows? This is thirty-seven, isn't it?" 
 
 "Yes . . . thirty-seven." 
 
 "I've come to see my friend, Miss Latham. She's 
 lodging here." 
 
 "I'm so sorry. Of course. I expect she's in the 
 front room." 
 
 "Thank you." She spoke very demurely. He 
 stood aside to let her pass and with her a faint 
 fragrance of white rose. 
 
 By this time Miss Latham herself had emerged, 
 a blowsy woman who was taking a small part in 
 the Christmas pantomime at the theatre, and had 
 introduced herself to the friends through Mrs. 
 Meadows a few days before. 
 
 "Why, Rosie, my dear, isn't this just sweet of 
 you? Fancy finding you on the step flirting with 
 Doctor . . . Dr. Ingleby! That's right, isn't 
 it?" 
 
 "Oh, what a shame, Hetty! We weren't, were 
 we?" Ingenuously she turned her eyes on Edwin 
 again. Were they hazel? Perhaps they were al- 
 most amber. A matter of light . . . 
 
 "No . . . I'm afraid we weren't. She didn't 
 give us time." 
 
 "Two doctors in the house ! Think of that !" said 
 Miss Hetty Latham, whose conversation habitually
 
 486 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 ran from one note of exclamation to another. 
 "Imagine how safe we feel, Kosie !" 
 
 And Rosie surveyed Edwin seriously. 
 
 "Aren't you awfully young?" 
 
 "I suppose I am rather. I'm not qualified yet. 
 But I expect to be next week." 
 
 "Then you must be awfully clever too " 
 
 "What on earth are we all doing talking here in 
 the passage? Come along in and have a cup of 
 tea," said Miss Latham boisterously. 
 
 "As you two are such great friends already, I 
 suppose it's waste of time introducing you." 
 
 "Really " Edwin protested. 
 
 "Very will, then. Dr. Ingleby: Miss Rosie 
 Beaucaire. I never get the order right. You can 
 take it or leave it. May he come to tea with us, 
 Rosie?" 
 
 "Of course he may." 
 
 "Come along then, both of you . . ."
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 WHITE ROSES 
 
 IT was the first of many amazing adventures, to 
 which Matthew Boyce supplied a calculated and 
 cynical commentary, watching Edwin as though 
 he were the subject of a physiological experiment 
 as indeed he was. But lack of sympathy in one 
 quarter was scarcely likely to worry Edwin when 
 he had found it so overwhelmingly in another. In 
 a few days Miss Latham, the most tactful of 
 duennas, had withdrawn from the scene. On the 
 first night of their acquaintance Edwin had taken 
 the hazel-eyed Miss Beaucaire back to her lodg- 
 ings in Prince Albert's Place at the back of the 
 theatre, where the pantomime was in rehearsal. All 
 the way through the squalid, lamp-lit streets they 
 had talked of things that were entrancing, simply 
 because they had to do with her. Edwin thought 
 that no companionship in all his life had been so 
 natural and so easy; and this was not surprising, 
 for the young woman, in addition to physical 
 charms that were armoury enough in themselves, 
 had developed the faculty commonly acquired by 
 ladies of her profession, of devoting herself entirely 
 to the companion of the moment and giving the 
 
 487
 
 488 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 impression that she had never known, and would 
 never want to know, any other person in the world. 
 Bosie was only twenty-four, but had given at least 
 the last third of her life to studying male of the 
 species of which Edwin was a peculiarly ingenuous 
 example. At the door of her lodgings she had con- 
 jured an atmosphere of mysterious intimacy. Speak- 
 ing in a voice that was low and of a thrilling ten- 
 derness, she had said : 
 
 "I mustn't ask you to come in to-day. It's a 
 dreadful shame; but mother has one of her head- 
 aches, and the noise might disturb her. You under- 
 stand, don't you?" 
 
 Edwin, with a vision of an elderly and delicate 
 version of Rosie herself lying on a sofa with a 
 handkerchief dipped in eau-de-cologne over her eyes, 
 assented. He thought it a very beautiful considera- 
 tion on Kosie's part. A small black and tan terrier 
 came dancing into the hall with a friendly yelp. 
 
 "Be quiet, Imp ... oh, do be quiet ! Isn't he a 
 duck?" she said. "Now, I must really go." She 
 held out her hand. A moment before she had taken 
 off her glove, and Edwin, who had scarcely ever 
 touched the hand of a woman before, thought that 
 her fingers were the softest and most delicate things 
 on earth. 
 
 "You'll come and have tea with us, won't you? 
 I should like you to meet mother." 
 
 "Of course, I'd like to. When?" 
 
 "Oh . . . quite soon. Any day this week. 
 Promise me you won't forget . . ." As if he could 
 ever forget! Her exquisite humility quite bowled 
 him over. When she had closed the door behind
 
 WHITE ROSES 489 
 
 her he walked away dazed with an unfamiliar 
 emotion that made the mean street, with its uni- 
 form row of mid- Victorian houses on one side, and 
 on the other the blank wall of the theatre and huge, 
 sooty warehouses, seem a holy place. The Halesby 
 Eoad, with its streaming traffic, shared the same 
 transfiguration. The speed and strength of the 
 horses enthralled him ; the faces of men and women 
 walking homeward from their work in the city 
 seemed triumphantly happy; the smooth wood- 
 pavement, polished by the rolling of innumerable 
 wheels, shone like a street in heaven. It seemed to 
 Edwin as if the whole world had somehow been 
 uplifted by a secret knowledge of his own experi- 
 ence. A night of wonder. . . . 
 
 "Well, what is the young woman's name?" asked 
 Boyce, when he returned to Easy Row. 
 
 "Beaucaire. She's principal girl Jin the 
 pantomime at the Queen's." 
 
 "H'm. . . . Attractive little piece. But she 
 can't be up to much if she's a pal of the Latham 
 woman's. I've seen her there several times." 
 
 "Oh, that means nothing," Edwin explained. "I 
 don't think she's at all keen on her. They acted to- 
 gether somewhere years ago. You can't drop peo- 
 ple when they've been kind to you. I don't think 
 she's at all keen on her. She's quite all right. Lives 
 with her mother in Prince Albert's Place." 
 
 "Pretty rotten sort of street. Got a bad name, 
 you know. I believe, as a matter of fact, it's con- 
 sidered rather the thing to lug an official mother 
 about with you."
 
 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "You don't mean " Edwin began, going very 
 
 white. 
 
 "Of course I don't. I don't know anything about 
 her. Only, for God's sake, take care of yourself. 
 A young woman of that kind generally has a fair 
 share of experience, and you . . . well, you haven't 
 exactly. Besides, it's just as well to remember that 
 the final's coming off in ten days." 
 
 The less said about the final the better. 
 
 "She isn't a chorus girl, you know. If you'd met 
 her I think you'd admit that she's a lady. She told 
 me that her mother " 
 
 Boyce chuckled. 
 
 "As a matter of fact," said Edwin, clinching the 
 argument, "her father was a country parson in 
 low circumstances." 
 
 "I understand they usually are," said Boyce with 
 a yawn. 
 
 Their night was complicated by two new cases. 
 Next morning they appeared at breakfast with 
 slightly ruffled tempers. They sat at opposite ends 
 of the table, Edwin reading, without understand- 
 ing, one of Oldham's caustic critiques on a sym- 
 phony concert the night before, his friend glued to 
 his beloved anthology. 
 
 "What did you say her name was?" said Boyce, 
 apropos of nothing. "Rosie, wasn't it?" 
 
 Edwin grunted. 
 
 "Have you ever sampled the Sortes Virgilianae? 
 I sometimes try that trick with the anthology. 
 There are plenty of generalisations, so it often 
 comes off rather well. How's this for last night?" 
 
 H'm "
 
 WHITE ROSES t 491 
 
 "Are you listening?" 
 "Yes, fire away." 
 Boyce quoted : 
 
 *H TO. poda, podoevaav ex X&p'W) &XM rl 
 ) TO. poda, r]l <rvvan<f>OTpa.', 
 
 "Rather neat, isn't it? While I was hanging 
 about that case in Craven Street, I made a transla- 
 tion for you. Tell me what you think of it. 
 
 *You of the roses, rosy-fair, 
 Sweet maiden, tell me whether 
 You or the roses are your ware, 
 Or both of them together.' " 
 
 "Damned rotten, anyway," said Edwin. "Maiden's 
 the wrong word . . ." 
 
 It comforted him, none the less, to find that 
 Rosie did not revisit Miss Latham, though this 
 lady pointedly rallied him on the doorstep, sug- 
 gesting that his intimacy with Miss Beaucaire had 
 reached a stage to which he had not yet attained 
 but aspired devoutly. The work at Easy Row, that 
 had slackened for a few days, came on with a rush ; 
 and though the image of this delicate creature now 
 filled his nightly vigils, being even more precious 
 for the squalid surroundings in which it came to 
 him, he found it impossible to visit the lodgings in 
 Prince Albert's Place, to which his thoughts with 
 tantalising regularity returned. 
 
 The flood of work held until their fortnight was 
 out, leaving them both washed-out and irritable. 
 To speak frankly, the last few days of their com- 
 radeship had not been a success. Although Edwin
 
 492 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 made it clear that he didn't wish to discuss the 
 affair of Kosie with Boyce, the incident of the Greek 
 epigram rankled. He found it impossible to take 
 the matter lightly, feeling that it was necessary to 
 convince himself at all costs that he wasn't making 
 a fool of himself, and finding it difficult to do so. 
 
 On the Monday next before the final examination 
 he found himself a free man. It was a questionable 
 liberty, for its enjoyment really depended on the 
 result of this ordeal. He had definitely severed 
 his connection with Dr. Harris, intending to devote 
 all his spare time at Easy How and the week after 
 to preparations for the exam. A big gamble. . . . 
 Ten pounds and a few shillings was all he possessed 
 in the world, except a problematical degree in 
 medicine which, in another seven days, might make 
 him certain of four guineas a week as long as he 
 chose to work. The margin seemed so small and the 
 chance so desperate that he burned the last of his 
 boats, selling his microscope to a pawnbroker for 
 twelve pounds. Twenty-three pounds. . . . One 
 could do a lot with twenty-three pounds . . . sup- 
 posing nothing went wrong. 
 
 He found a cheap bed-sitting-room in a quiet 
 street at the back of the University buildings. Here, 
 and in the museums, he would be able to put in a 
 week of intensive cramming. He found that he 
 couldn't do it. He had reckoned without the un- 
 reasonable quantity of Kosie. The first night on 
 which he settled down to read in his new lodging 
 the thought of her would not let him rest. It was 
 ridiculous. What he wanted was a hard walk. He 
 would go up to Alvaston and rout Boyce out of his
 
 WHITE ROSES 493 
 
 study for a tramp in the moonlight towards South- 
 field Beeches. He would apologise to Boyce for his 
 bearishness during the last few days. Hadn't they 
 assured each other on one of their ambrosial eve- 
 nings at Overton more than a year ago, that the 
 friendship of two men was a more precious and 
 lasting experience than anything that the love of a 
 woman could give? The whole thing was just the 
 result of physical staleness: a symptom of the 
 monotonous fatigue of the last year. He was going 
 to get rid of it at all costs. He turned out the gas 
 and went downstairs. 
 
 It was a discouraging night. A soft winter drizzle 
 had set in from the We&t, and in the jaded Halesby 
 Road nebulous street lamps were reflected in a layer 
 of black slime that covered the wood-pavement. The 
 shop windows were misted with rain, and the few 
 people who had ventured out into the street trod 
 carefully as though they were afraid of slipping. 
 A brutal night if ever there was one. Plodding up 
 the street with the rain in his face he found that 
 he was passing the end of Prince Albert's Place. 
 He passed it by twenty paces, and then, almost 
 against his will, turned round again. It was no 
 good. There she was, for certain, within forty 
 yards of him. If he were to walk along the road 
 on the opposite side under the blank walls of the 
 warehouses, he would be able to see the very room 
 that held her exquisiteness. He did so. There was 
 a light in the front room of the lower story, but the 
 blinds were down, and he could not see any one 
 inside. He crossed the road boldly and stood for 
 a moment on the doorstep. It gave him a peculiar
 
 494 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 stab of happiness to feel so near her. He railed 
 against the combination of shyness and convention 
 that held him ; for if he were to do the thing that 
 was reasonable and downright, he would have 
 walked straight into the house and told her the 
 thousand things that choked his heart he would 
 have kissed her soft hands and gazed into her shy, 
 adorable eyes. Yes, he would have kissed her eyes 
 too. No doubt it would rather have taken the 
 mother's breath away. Probably Rosie had never 
 given him another thought since he left her on the 
 doorstep. That was the funny part of it. He 
 laughed at himself, and the sound of his laugh must 
 somehow have penetrated the hall, for the black and 
 tan terrier barked shrilly. "Really, I'm off my 
 head, you know," he said to himself, and wandered 
 off again into the wet streets, walking, until the 
 small hours, those unimaginable slums in which his 
 labours of the last fortnight had lain. "God . . . 
 it's ridiculous!" he thought, "but a man can't help 
 falling in love." It seemed to him that the phantom 
 of Dorothy Powys regarded him seriously. 
 
 n 
 
 Next afternoon he presented himself at Prince 
 Albert's Place. A landlady who might well have 
 been Mrs. Meadows's sister took in his card, and 
 after a little buzz of conversation that might have 
 been explained in a dozen sinister ways, he was ad- 
 mitted to the little room, whose lighted windows he 
 had surveyed the night before. Rosie came forward 
 to meet him. Once again, trembling, he took her
 
 WHITE ROSES 495 
 
 hand. He even fancied divine flattery ! that she 
 blushed. 
 
 "This is my friend Dr. Ingleby, mother," she 
 said. 
 
 "Very pleased to meet you, I'm sure," said Mrs. 
 Beaucaire. "Won't you come and sit over here?" 
 
 In the shadow of Mrs. Beaucaire Edwin took his 
 Beat. She was a large woman with a husky voice 
 and a big, dissipated face that had once been hand- 
 some. If she had any place in the scheme of things 
 it was surely as a foil to the fragile grace of her 
 daughter. Rosie, with an occasional sideways 
 glance, was busy talking to a little man with a blue 
 shaven chin and an immense mobile mouth, who 
 looked like a bookie. 
 
 "I suppose you know Mr. Flood?" said Mrs. 
 Beaucaire. 
 
 Edwin confessed that he did not 
 
 "The Mr. Flood, you know. Bertie, this is Mr. 
 Ingleby. ... I beg your pardon, Dr. Ingleby," and 
 the great comedian shook hands with Edwin and 
 hoped he was well. 
 
 The atmosphere of the lodgings was very easy 
 and familiar. Bertie Flood, the Mirth-maker of 
 Three Continents, as the newspapers described him, 
 devoted himself in an easy paternal manner to 
 Rosie. It became apparent to Edwin, over- 
 shadowed by the bulk and impressiveness of Mrs. 
 Beaucaire, that whenever Mr. Flood could make 
 an opportunity of handling Rosie, he did so, and 
 also that Rosie did not in any way resent the 
 process. It even seemed to him that she invited 
 Mr. Flood's attentions.
 
 496 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 "We're very unconventional people, you know, 
 Dr. Ingleby quite Bohemian," said Mrs. Beaucaire 
 in a thick voice. 
 
 Edwin agreed that the relation was delightful. 
 It was only by an effort of concentration that he 
 could hear what the mother was saying. All the 
 time his eyes were on Eosie, so divinely fragile 
 in her white muslin blouse. He shuddered when 
 Bertie Flood touched her. Nothing but the delight- 
 ful innocence of the girl could have induced her to 
 suffer the presence of this satyr. And yet it seemed 
 to him that she was doing all that she could to 
 please him. . . . 
 
 "Yes, my poor husband : the vicar I always call 
 him habit, you know had a small parish in the 
 North of England. I have a son in the church too. 
 Both he and Rosie really take after the father." 
 
 "Yes. . . . Exactly," said Edwin. In that mo- 
 ment Eosie had smiled at him, and the smile was 
 enough. God, what a woman ! 
 
 "The vicar came from a very old family. In the 
 North it is recognised, but in a place like North 
 Bromwich it is very difficult for us to meet the right 
 sort of people. I have to be very careful for Eosie's 
 sake. The child is so trusting. I was so glad, you 
 know, when she told me that she had met you at 
 Miss Latham's. One feels so safe with a doctor. 
 You'll be able to look after her a bit ... see that 
 she don't get too tired. Pantomime is very tiring, 
 you know. I myself suffer agonies from indiges- 
 tion. What with that and my headaches, I'm 
 afraid I'm a poor companion for her. As I say,
 
 WHITE ROSES 497 
 
 both the children take after the dear vicar. Kosie 
 isn't a bit like me." 
 
 "No," said Edwin, still dazed by the memory of 
 her smile; but, as he spoke, his eyes met those of 
 Mrs. Beaucaire, and he saw to his amazement that 
 they were really the eyes of Rosie, that her dis- 
 coloured nose had once been of the same shape as 
 her daughter's, that the sagging, sensual mouth was 
 in fact a degraded version of Rosie's too. It was a 
 revelation, blasphemous but prophetic. He would 
 not consider it. He dared not look at her. 
 
 A moment later Bertie Flood left them. Tea 
 wasn't much in his line, he said, and his complexion 
 confirmed the assertion. Mrs. Beaucaire saw him 
 to the door. Edwin and Rosie were alone. 
 
 It was a wonderful minute. He felt that she 
 could never seem more beautiful, more delicate, 
 more exquisite than at this moment standing in 
 her pale loveliness against the grimy lodging-house 
 wallpaper, with her hands clasped before her. 
 
 "I had to come," he said. 
 
 "I had been expecting you. I'm awfully glad you 
 found time." 
 
 Found time! ... He wanted to tell her of his 
 strange adventure of the night before : how he had 
 stood in the dripping rain beneath her window, 
 hungry for the sight of her, unsatisfied. She stood 
 as though she would be glad to listen; but there 
 Was no time. Mrs. Beaucaire, after a noisy and 
 pointed demonstration in the hall, re-entered. It 
 seemed that there was nothing left for him but to 
 take his departure. 
 
 "Surely you're not going so soon?" she said.
 
 498 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 And he stayed. It was all delightfully intimate 
 and domestic. These people seemed to possess the 
 rare faculty of putting a visitor as shy as Edwin 
 at his ease. Mrs. Beaucaire did most of the talking, 
 enlarging on Kosie's devotion to the parson brother, 
 regretting that circumstance, and possibly the un- 
 reasonable prejudice of country people against 
 theatrical connections, had deprived him of the 
 family living : and Rosie listened quietly, more com- 
 pelling in her demure silences than Mrs. Beaucaire 
 at her most impressive. 
 
 Once or twice in the afternoon that lady tactfully 
 left them, returning, each time with a renewed 
 vigour and a scent that suggested the combination 
 of eau-de-cologne and brandy. These solitary mo- 
 ments were very precious to Edwin. Neither of 
 them spoke more than a few words, but the air be- 
 tween them seemed charged with emotion. It was 
 six o'clock when he left Prince Albert's Place. 
 
 "You won't forget us, will you?" said Mrs. Beau- 
 caire with enthusiasm. "It will be so nice for Rosie 
 to have some one to take her to rehearsal. I don't 
 like her mixing with the boys in the company. It 
 isn't the thing. And we don't happen to have any 
 really nice friends in the Midlands. In the North 
 it would have been quite different." 
 
 A delirious week slipped by. In spite of every 
 resolution Edwin had found it impossible to work. 
 His new lodging was not inspiring; but this was 
 only one of the excuses that he invented to salve 
 his conscience. He knew the real reason for this 
 divine, unreasonable restlessness. Even if it were 
 to wreck his chances in the final examination it
 
 WHITE ROSES 499 
 
 could not be avoided, and there was no reason 
 why it should be excused. He knew that he was in 
 love, and before this unquestionable miracle he 
 abased himself. 
 
 Mrs. Beaucaire, now satisfied that she could in- 
 dulge a "headache" and take to her bed as often as 
 she chose, did not question his presence at Prince 
 Albert's Place : she was even ready on occasion to 
 treat it with a mild facetiousness. Rosie, who 
 lapped up adoration as naturally as a kitten takes 
 to milk, treated it as a matter of course. Edwin 
 rather wished that she wouldn't take as a matter 
 of course the most wonderful thing in the world. 
 There was a passivity in her acquiescence that 
 filled him with a fear that she was used to this sort 
 of thing or even a little bored by it. She mopped 
 up his devotions with an ease that would have been 
 disconcerting if he had not always been bemused 
 by her beauty. Surely it was enough that she 
 should be beautiful ! 
 
 In the morning Mrs. Beaucaire always had a 
 headache of another kind next day Edwin would 
 escort Rosie to her rehearsal at the theatre. He 
 became familiar with the frowsty box in which the 
 lame stage-doorkeeper sat like an obscene spider 
 guarding the baize-covered board on which the com- 
 pany's letters were kept. The man came to know 
 him and would pass him in through the swinging 
 doors with a peculiarly evil leer. Sometimes, at 
 the stage door they would become involved in a 
 mass of patchouli-scented chorus, and Edwin would 
 thrill at the dignity and refinement with which
 
 $oo THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 Rosie, in her white fox furs, would slip through 
 this vulgar tumult. 
 
 So to the stage with its vast cobwebbed walls, its 
 huge echoes and the mysterious darkness of the 
 flies, where looped ropes and grimy festoons of for- 
 gotten scenery hung still as seaweed in a deep sea. 
 There, in the sour and characteristic odour of an 
 empty stage, Edwin would wait for her in a little 
 alcove of the whitewashed wall in which iron cleats 
 were piled, and the unmeaning murmur of the re- 
 hearsal would come to him mingled with the shrill 
 voice of the producer, who ended every sentence 
 with the words "my dear," or "old boy," and the 
 noise of the carpenter hammering wood in the flies. 
 His original acquaintance, Miss Latham, discreet- 
 ly avoided him, but the comedian, Bertie Flood, 
 seemed inclined to be familiar. One morning he 
 dragged Edwin off to his dressing room for a smoke. 
 He sat with his legs on either side of a chair, his 
 fawn-coloured bowler on the back of his head, look- 
 ing more than ever like a bookie. 
 
 "Well, old boy," he said, "how goes it? How's 
 the little Beaucaire?" 
 
 "She's all right, as far as I know," said Edwin, 
 who was inclined to resent the description. 
 
 "Ma had any headaches lately? I know what 
 ma's headaches will end in. Cirrhosis of the liver. 
 You're a doctor, aren't you? Well, I know all about 
 that. Had it myself. Just realised in time that it 
 didn't pay. Now I never touch anything but gin. 
 Do you want a word of advice?" 
 
 Edwin thanked him.
 
 WHITE ROSES 501 
 
 "May seem funny from a chap that gets two hun- 
 dred a week for making a damn fool of himself." 
 
 "Not at all," said Edwin politely. 
 
 "Well, if you'll take my advice, you'll go easy in 
 that direction. Treat it as a business proposition. 
 Ma's a bad old woman . . . only don't tell her I 
 said so. You see I'm a friend of the family. Dear 
 little girl, Rosie, too. Verbus Satienti I always 
 let 'em think I was at Oxford Good for business." 
 
 It was rather disturbing; for though it was no 
 news to Edwin that Mrs. Beaucaire's headaches 
 were euphemistic, the fact had done no more than 
 contribute to the ideal qualities with which he had 
 invested her daughter. There was something ro- 
 mantic as well as pitiful in the idea of Rosje's con- 
 trasting innocence: the rose that has its roots in 
 foulness is not less a rose. It had even seemed to 
 him that the complete collapse of Mrs. Beaucaire 
 might throw Rosie into his arms: a situation that 
 would be full of romantic and tender possibilities; 
 and the girl's inimitably virginal air was enough 
 to convince him that Bertie Flood's other sugges- 
 tions were no more than the natural products of 
 a mind degraded by the atmosphere of the music- 
 hall. He was convinced too that he had no cause 
 for jealousy. Ever since he had first visited her, 
 Rosie had never spent more than a few hours of 
 daylight out of his sight. 
 
 On the last day of the week before the examina- 
 tion his confidence suffered something of a shock. 
 It was a raw winter morning, but he had set his 
 heart on taking her into his own hill-country, and 
 she, with her usual sweet submission, but without
 
 502 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 a hint of enthusiasm, had consented. He had 
 planned to avoid the Halesby side of the range and 
 to approach it from the southern escarpment. Early 
 in the morning he paid a visit to Parkinson's, the 
 florist's, in the Arcade, where he bought a bunch 
 of pale, exotic roses : white roses, that should match 
 her own sweetness and fragility. Once she had 
 expressed a general liking for flowers, and since 
 then it had been his delight to give them to her. 
 She mopped up his flowers and his passion with the 
 same dreamy passivity. 
 
 From the corner of the Place he saw a weedy, 
 black-coated figure in front of Number Ten; and 
 as he approached, the figure entered and the door 
 closed behind him. Edwin wondered vaguely if it 
 might be the parson brother. The landlady opened 
 the door in a flurry. It almost seemed as if she 
 wanted to conceal something. 
 
 "I don't think Miss Beaucaire can see you for a 
 bit," she said. "Won't you call later in the morn- 
 ing?" 
 
 He told her that he would wait, as they had an 
 appointment, and a train to catch. 
 
 "Then will you kindly wait in my room. You 
 mustn't take any notice of the state it's in," she 
 said, still on the defensive. 
 
 The state of the landlady's room was not inspirit- 
 ing. On a dirty table cloth lay the remains of last 
 night's supper. On the window sill stood a chevaux 
 de frise of empty brandy bottles that Edwin 
 couldn't help associating with Mrs. Beaucaire. The 
 arm-chairs, covered with dirty chintz overalls that 
 suggested a layer of more ancient dirt beneath,
 
 WHITE ROSES 503 
 
 were not inviting. He preferred to stand. The 
 house was as quiet and secretive as usual; but 
 from the next room he heard an irritating rumour 
 of voices. One of the voices, he could have sworn, 
 was Rosie's. A little later he heard a laugh, and 
 the suspicion became a disquieting certainty, for 
 the laugh was one that he knew well with a dif- 
 ference. It was as if Mrs. Beaucaire had laughed 
 with Rosie's voice. He found it difficult to restrain 
 himself from bursting into the room and settling 
 the matter once and for all. Again the laugh 
 and then a long silence. He heard steps in the 
 passage, a whispered conversation with the land- 
 lady, and then Rosie came in to him, flushed, and 
 with her fair hair disordered. He could not speak. 
 He only gave her the roses. 
 
 "Thank you, Eddie," she said, scarcely noticing 
 them. Her lips were parted and her eyes shone 
 with excitement. She had never seemed to him 
 more beautiful, but there was something frighten- 
 ing in her beauty. 
 
 'Whatever is the matter with you?" she said. 
 "Why do you look so serious?" 
 
 "Who was your visitor?" 
 
 "Oh, that's it, is it? You silly boy! You surely 
 don't mean to say you're jealous?" 
 
 "Please tell me " 
 
 "It was only a priest. I had to make my con- 
 fession." 
 
 "A priest? I thought your people belonged to 
 the Church of England." 
 
 "That doesn't prevent me from being a Catholic. 
 It's much better for professional girls to be Cath-
 
 504 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 olics. They look after you when you're on the 
 road." 
 
 He could not say any more about it. It seemed 
 to him that her eyes were anxious as though she 
 were not quite sure how much he had heard. 
 
 "You believe me, don't you?" She spoke in a 
 frightened whisper. 
 
 "Of course I do. We've just time for our train. 
 You are coming, aren't you?" 
 
 She said: "Of course I am," and ran upstairs 
 singing to put her hat on. 
 
 The roses lay neglected on the sideboard where 
 she had placed them. In five minutes she returned, 
 thoroughly dressed for her new role of country girl 
 with brogued shoes and a short skirt of Harris 
 tweed. 
 
 "I'm ready," she said gaily. 
 
 It was a wonderful day. They walked together 
 under dull skies that made the berries in the hedge- 
 rows and the waning fires of autumn glow more 
 brightly, and even ministered to the girl's own 
 beauty. The cool air and the walking made her 
 cheeks glow with a colour that was natural and 
 therefore unusual. Edwin was so entranced with 
 her companionship that he forgot his anxiousness 
 of the morning; so lost in the amazing beauty of 
 her hazel eyes and her cheek's soft contour that he 
 did not notice that she was limping. Halfway to 
 the summit of the hills she stopped, gave a little 
 sigh, and sat down on the bank of a hedge. 
 
 "I'm awfully sorry, Eddie. My foot hurts. I 
 think this shoe's too tight." 
 
 "They look simply splendid."
 
 WHITE ROSES 505 
 
 "I know. I only bought them yesterday just 
 specially for to-day." 
 
 "But it's ridiculous to go for a long walk in new 
 shoes !" 
 
 "Do you mind if I take them off for a minute?" 
 
 "Of course not. Let me undo the laces." 
 
 He knelt at her feet. It was a wonderful and 
 thrilling experience to loosen the laces, to feel her 
 small feet in their smooth silk stockings. His 
 hands trembled. 
 
 "I wish you wouldn't touch my feet. I'm awfully 
 sorry : it's one of the things I can't bear. You don't 
 mind, do you?" 
 
 "You mustn't blame me. They're so beautiful." 
 
 She smiled. Her modesty delighted him. 
 
 Sitting there together, so miraculously alone, 
 he began to talk about his future. "I shan't see 
 you for a whole week. It will be unbearable. But 
 when the exam, is over and I'm qualified it will be 
 such a relief. I shall feel able to say the things that 
 I want to say to you." 
 
 For a long time she was silent. Then she said: 
 "What are you expecting to do?" 
 
 "I think I shall go in for one of the services. 
 What do you think of the Indian Medical? It 
 would be wonderful to see India. I've always 
 thought that I should like to know something of 
 the world. I think it's a good life. Women gen- 
 erally love it. What do you think about it?" 
 
 "I should think it would be rather nice. But 
 wouldn't it be awfully hot? I've known one or 
 two boys in the Indian Army. There's lots of danc- 
 ing and that sort of thing, isn't there?"
 
 506 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 He laughed. Dancing wasn't his strong point, 
 as Professor Beagle could have told her, and in 
 any case India didn't mean dancing to him. She 
 did not seem at all anxious to pursue the subject. 
 
 "I think we could walk back to the hotel now," 
 she said. "I'm simply starving." They walked 
 down the hill together, almost in silence. When 
 they reached the hotel, she disappeared in the com- 
 pany of the barmaid, leaving Edwin to wait for her 
 in the coffee-room. He almost resented her ab- 
 sence. He felt that he couldn't spare her for a 
 moment. Waiting at the table he picked up a week- 
 old copy of the North Bromwich Courier. Gazing 
 idly at the front page, he caught sight of his own 
 name. It was the announcement of a wedding. 
 
 INGLBBY: FELLOWS. On the tenth of December, 
 at the Parish Church, Halesby, John Ingleby to 
 Julia, elder daughter of the late Joseph Fellows, 
 of Mawne, Staffs. 
 
 He was overwhelmed with a sudden indescribable 
 emotion that was neither jealousy, anger, nor 
 shame, but curiously near to all three. He sat be- 
 wildered, with the paper in front of him. Eosie 
 returned to find him blankly staring. 
 
 "Why, what's the matter with you? You look 
 as if you'd seen a ghost." 
 
 "Yes. ... I think I have. It's nothing, really. 
 Nothing at all." 
 
 He drank more than he need have done of a 
 villainous wine that was labelled Chateau Margaux, 
 but had probably been pressed on the hot hill-sides 
 of Oran. In the train, on the way home, he felt
 
 WHITE ROSES 507 
 
 flushed and sleepy, but, all the time, divinely con- 
 scious of the warmth and softness of Kosie sitting 
 beside him. They were alone in the first-class car- 
 riage. "I'm sleepy too," she said. He drew her 
 gently to his side, and she rested, content, with her 
 head on his shoulder. In the wonder of this he 
 forgot the newspaper and its staggering contents. 
 As they neared North Bromwich she stood up in 
 front of the mirror to arrange her hair, and Edwin, 
 pulling himself together, saw that his blue coat was 
 floured with a fine bloom of powder. 
 
 She still found it difficult to walk, and so they 
 drove in a hansom to Prince Albert's Place, very 
 grimy and sinister in the dusk. 
 
 "You needn't ring," she said, taking out a latch- 
 key and showing him into the narrow hall. "Let's 
 be very quiet, so as not to disturb mother." 
 
 "I don't think I'll come in," he said. He knew 
 that he must make an end somewhere. 
 
 "Not even to be thanked? I've enjoyed myself 
 most awfully." 
 
 She stood before him in the gloom of the hall as 
 though she were waiting for something. It felt as 
 if the dark space between them must break into 
 flame. Their lips met. 
 
 "Good God! . . . how wonderful you are!" he 
 said. 
 
 "Next week," she whispered. 
 
 m 
 
 Edwin had arranged to spend the following day 
 with the Boyces at their house in Alvaston. He 
 found it difficult to contain himself, for the delicious
 
 508 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 memory of their parting the night before swamped 
 his efforts at conversation with the persistency of 
 waves that follow one another in a rising tide. It 
 seemed to him impossible that his state should not 
 be evident to the whole household, and particularly 
 to Matthew, who knew him so well. 
 
 In the afternoon, when they sat smoking together 
 in Boyce's study at the top of the house, he felt 
 that he was on the brink of a confession. The only 
 thing that restrained him from it was the memory 
 of the epigram and of his friend's translation. He 
 felt in his bones that Boyce would not be sym- 
 pathetic and though his infatuation suggested that 
 he wouldn't much care whether Boyce were sym- 
 pathetic, or suspicious, an intuitive dread of sus- 
 picion and its possible effects on his own reason 
 made him hold his tongue. It was in the nature of 
 Boyce, who didn't happen, for the moment, to be 
 in love, to be critical, to sweep away Kosie's per- 
 fections in a generalisation: and the appeal of a 
 generalisation to the mind of youth is so strong that 
 Edwin was afraid to hear it. Somewhere in his sub- 
 merged reason he admitted that Boyce's judgment 
 on the matter would probably be sound, and reason 
 was the last tribunal in the world before which he 
 wished this exceptional case to be presented. An 
 unsatisfactory day. For the first time in their 
 lives, the relations of the two friends were in- 
 definitely strained. 
 
 He left Alvaston early in the evening. On his 
 way to his lodging he passed the gloomy entrance 
 to Prince Albert's Place. It would have been easy, 
 so easy, to call at Number Ten, but he had deter-
 
 WHITE ROSES 509 
 
 mined, once and for all, that the examination week 
 should be free from distractions, and pride in his 
 own strength of mind held him to his course, though 
 he realised, almost gladly, that even if he were 
 master of his feet he could not control his thoughts. 
 He wondered if he would dream of her . . . 
 
 Next day the rigours of the final examination 
 overtook him. This was the supreme ordeal in 
 which every moment of his professional life from 
 the day when he first entered the dissecting room 
 to the night of the last midwifery case, would stand 
 the test of scrutiny. He was not exactly afraid of 
 it. He knew that his knowledge and technical skill 
 were at least above the average of his year, and 
 felt that with ordinary luck he would be among the 
 first four of a field of twelve. The year was not one 
 of exceptional brilliance, and comparisons were 
 therefore in his favour. 
 
 On the first day, in the viva-voce examination on 
 surgery, he did, for one moment, lose his head, but 
 when once he had pulled himself together and ac- 
 customed himself to the conditions of the test, he 
 settled down into a state of fatalistic equanimity, 
 taking the rough with the smooth and deciding that, 
 on the whole, he was not likely to make a hopeless 
 fool of himself. 
 
 On the first night he went to bed early, but on 
 the second, feeling that his mind would be clearer 
 for some diversion, he went to a music-hall with 
 W.G. and his wife. Drinking beer in the bar with 
 his friend, he suddenly heard his name called, and 
 felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to find him- 
 self in front of a face that was curiously familiar,
 
 510 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 and in a moment found that he was shaking hands 
 with Widdup, a small and rather chastened Wid- 
 dup, who spoke to him with the slow, precise voice 
 that he had known at St. Luke's. 
 
 "I thought it was you, Ingleby," he said. "I 
 wondered if I should run across you." 
 
 Avoiding a hair-raising display on the slack wire, 
 they stood talking. Widdup, it appeared, had been 
 destined for an engineering career in North Brom- 
 wich, when his mathematical genius had won him 
 a scholarship at Cambridge. 
 
 "A pity, in & way, for I should have seen more 
 of you. I suppose that sort of thing always hap- 
 pens to school friendships." At present he was 
 visiting a firm of iron-founders on business. They 
 talked together of old times : of the day when Ed- 
 win, greatly daring, had seen the Birches run : of 
 the languid Selby, now head-master of a small pub- 
 lic-school in Norfolk, and of old fat Leeming. Be- 
 tween the conscious effort of remembering St. 
 Luke's and the unbidden image of Kosie, Edwin's 
 head was in a whirl. 
 
 "And old Griffin," said Widdup. "That's another 
 funny thing. I ran slap into him in the lounge of 
 the Grand Midland to-night. Up to the same old 
 games, you know. Yes ... he had a girl with 
 him. Bather an attractive little piece: something 
 to do with the pantomime, he told me. What was 
 her name? The old brute introduced me, too ! Yes 
 ... I think I've got it. Beaucaire. . . . Rosie 
 Beaucaire. Rather a rosy prospect for old Griff, 
 I should imagine. Why, what the devil's the mat- 
 ter with you?"
 
 WHITE ROSES 511 
 
 "I'm all right, thanks," said Edwin. "It's this 
 exam., you know. Let's have another drink." He 
 called for whisky and soda. 
 
 "Chin-chin," said Widdup. 
 
 Edwin polished off a couple of drinks and then 
 told Widdup that he must rejoin his friend, leaving 
 him staggered at his abrupt departure. He didn't 
 rejoin W.G. He walked straight out of the theatre 
 and off up the Halesby Koad. He had determined 
 to go straight to Rosie's lodgings and thrash the 
 matter out; but by the time he reached Prince 
 Albert's Place he had thought better of it. 
 
 It was the most natural thing in the world, he 
 reflected, that Griffin should know the Beaucaires, 
 for Griffin was constantly in touch with theatrical 
 people. It was even natural that Griffin, knowing 
 her, should take Rosie to the Grand Midland. It 
 was the obvious thing to do if you had money to 
 spend, as Griffin had. It would be just like the 
 irony of fate, he reflected, if Griffin should afflict 
 him with unhappiness in this case as he had done in 
 so many others. He remembered the bitter suffer- 
 ings of those early days at St. Luke's that Widdup 
 had so clearly recalled. He remembered Dorothy 
 Powys and the dance at Mawne : his suspicions, his 
 agonised resentment. Even more darkly there came 
 to him the memory of a voice in Dr. Harris's sur- 
 gery, a conviction, never yet established, that Griffin 
 had no right to know any woman. This reflection, 
 he knew, implied a doubt of Rosie's innocence: an 
 imputation that he could not possibly admit. And 
 yet . . . and yet . . . He remembered the warning 
 that Bertie Flood had given him in his dressing
 
 512 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 room. He remembered the visitor in the black coat 
 four days before. His mind was in hell. 
 
 In this purgatory of doubt and horror, he lived 
 for the rest of the week. In the daytime the prog- 
 ress of the examination engrossed him, but at 
 night he always found himself hanging about the 
 darkness of Prince Albert's Place, hoping against 
 hope, that his suspicions were unfounded, not dar- 
 ing to put them to the test, lest they should be con- 
 firmed. 
 
 On Friday night, when the last of his medical 
 ordeals was over, he went straight to Number Ten. 
 It was a wonderful moment. Now, with a clear 
 conscience hie might see her again ; now, once more, 
 he could know the ecstasy of her kisses and forget 
 the ungenerous nightmare in which he had lived 
 through the later stages of the exam. He ap- 
 proached the dirty doorway with his heart beating 
 wildly. At first his ring was unanswered, but a 
 little later the landlady came to the door with a 
 red, suspicious face, opening it jealously, as though 
 she feared to let him in. 
 
 He inquired for Miss Beaucaire. Miss Beaucaire 
 was out. Did the woman know when she was ex- 
 pected to return? She hadn't the least idea. Was 
 Mrs. Beaucaire in, then? Mrs. Beaucaire was in, 
 but invisible. Mrs. Beaucaire had one of her head- 
 aches. Edwin suggested that he should wait in 
 their room. Impossible. Mrs. Beaucaire was lying 
 down there. He hung upon the doorstep as if he 
 were waiting at the gates of paradise. At last the 
 landlady took it upon herself to close the door.
 
 WHITE ROSES 513 
 
 She must have thought he was mad. Perhaps he 
 was mad. . . . 
 
 For an hour or more he waited in the rain. It 
 occurred to him that at least the woman was speak- 
 ing the truth, for there was no light in either of the 
 front rooms. The Grand Midland. ... It was 
 there that Widdup had seen them. He walked to 
 Sackville Row at a great pace and straight into the 
 hotel, where waiters and elderly commercial gentle- 
 men stared at his wet clothes and his haggard face. 
 He went into each of the dining-rooms and down 
 the stairs to the Turkish lounge. Nowhere was 
 Eosie or Griffin to be seen. A search of this kind 
 was ridiculous, but every moment that the agony 
 was extended made him more desperately anxious. 
 
 He walked back in the drizzle to Prince Albert's 
 Place and paced the pavement under the black 
 walls of the warehouses. The road was deserted. 
 There was no sound in it at all but the dripping of 
 water from some neglected spout. He walked up 
 and down in the shadow, and as he walked he 
 became conscious of something like a personality 
 in the faces of the long row of lodging-houses, 
 something sinister, as though their shuttered 
 windows concealed a wealth of obscene experience 
 like the eyes of ancient street-walkers. The souls 
 of those squat Victorian houses were languidly in- 
 terested in him. Another victim. . . . That was 
 what he must seem to them. And still the windows 
 of Number Ten were unlighted. 
 
 He heard the clock in the Art Gallery chime 
 eleven: a leisurely, placid chime muffled by gusty 
 rain. Perhaps the woman had lied to him. Per-
 
 514 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 haps, at that very moment Rosie was sleeping peace- 
 fully in the unlighted upper story. He was over- 
 wrought with the strain of the examination on the 
 top of this devastating passion. He had better go 
 home. 
 
 He turned to go, and at that very moment he 
 saw two figures approaching from the Halesby 
 Eoad. The street lamp, at the corner, threw their 
 shadows on the shining pavement. One of them 
 was Eosie he would have known her anywhere 
 and the other, beyond doubt, was Griffin. He was 
 seized with the same blind passion that had swept 
 over him in the big schoolroom at St. Luke's ten 
 years before, an impulse to murder that he could 
 only control by digging his finger nails into his 
 hands. 
 
 He stood there trembling in the shadow of the 
 blank wall, huddling close to it for support and 
 for protection. They passed him, and he heard 
 Kosie's quiet laugh. Her laugh was one of the 
 things about her that he had loved most. They 
 stopped at the door, and Eosie took out her latch- 
 key. It was almost a repetition of the scene in 
 which he had shared a week before. Now, perhaps, 
 she would kiss him. He felt that if he saw her kiss- 
 ing Griffin he could have killed them both. Murder- 
 er's Cross Eoad. ... A hundred thoughts came 
 swirling through his brain. They entered, and 
 closed the door behind them. Griffin: the old 
 Griffin: the human beast of St. Luke's. The new 
 Griffin : the gross North Bromwich womaniser : the 
 Griffin of Dr. Harris's surgery. . . . Edwin saw 
 himself upon the edge of a ghastly, unthinkabl
 
 WHITE ROSES 515 
 
 tragedy. He must prevent it. At all costs. At the 
 cost of life if needs be. 
 
 He crept quickly across the road. The houses 
 watched him. The window of the lower room 
 bloomed suddenly with a yellow light. He stood 
 with his hands clutching the window-sill, listening. 
 Once again he heard Rosie's laugh, and a rumour 
 of deeper speech that he knew to be the voice of 
 Griffin. The shadow of Griffin's shoulders swept 
 the window, swelling gigantically as it passed. The 
 light was turned down, but not extinguished. 
 Rosie's laugh again. He could have killed her for 
 that laugh, for it mocked him. The faint shadow 
 of the man's shoulders retreated. He guessed that 
 they were standing at the door. The door of the 
 room closed softly. Now there was no sound except 
 the heavy breathing that one hears in the neigh- 
 bourhood of a pigsty at night. Was Griffin still 
 there? 
 
 Another beam of light fell on the shining street. 
 Some one had lighted the gas in the room upstairs. 
 Was Griffin still below? Panic seized him. He 
 must know. At all costs he must know. Dr. Harris's 
 surgery. ... If he had to break in the front door 
 he must know. As he reached it he tripped over an 
 iron boot-scraper. The step barked his shin. Of 
 course the door was locked, but wonder of won- 
 ders Rosie had left the latchkey outside. He 
 opened the door softly and went on tip-toe into the 
 hall. In the room on the right he still heard the 
 grunting noise. Thank God, Griffin was still there ! 
 At least he could tell him that he knew! 
 
 He opened the door. In the half-light he could
 
 516 JHE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 see that the room was empty except for Mrs. Beau- 
 caire, who lay stretched on the sofa, snoring heavily 
 with her vile mouth open. On the table stood an 
 empty brandy bottle. The place stank of brandy. 
 
 Now he knew the worst. He stumbled upstairs 
 in the dark and knocked frantically at the door 
 of the front bedroom. Kosie answered: "Who is 
 it?" 
 
 "It's I. For God's sake, let me in." 
 
 "Who the devil is it?" said the voice of Dr. 
 Harris's consulting-room. 
 
 Kosie answered him in excited whispers. 
 
 "You can't come in, Eddie," she said. "How on 
 earth did you get into the house? Please go away. 
 I can't see you. I can't, really." 
 
 "I'm coming in, I tell you. If you don't open 
 the door, I'll smash it. I mean what I say." 
 
 "Ingleby ?" the voice muttered. "What the 
 
 devil has Ingleby to do with you? All right. I'll 
 go. I'll chuck the fellow downstairs." 
 
 "Oh, don't . . . please don't. . . . Let him go 
 quietly." 
 
 Griffin unlocked the door. He stood facing Ed- 
 win in his shirt-sleeves. Bosie, still dressed, 
 clutched at the mantelpiece. The vein in the middle 
 of Griffin's forehead bulged with anger. His short 
 neck was flushed. 
 
 "What the hell " he began and then they 
 
 closed. Edwin's heel ripped up the corner of the 
 carpet as they swayed together. Suddenly Griffin's 
 grip slackened. His face blanched, and in a mo- 
 ment Edwin was letting down a sheer weight upon 
 the bed.
 
 WHITE ROSES 517 
 
 "What's the matter?" Rosie screamed, and flung 
 herself beside him. "What's the matter?" 
 
 "Good God ! . . . He's gone." 
 
 "No . . . No " she cried. 
 
 Edwin tore open Griffin's shirt, listening for an 
 impulse that was not there. 
 
 "He's gone," he said, panting. "He's dead. . . . 
 Heart. ... He always had a rocky heart. He's 
 dead." 
 
 The awful word seemed to pull Rosie together. 
 They stared at each other blankly with wide eyes. 
 
 "Are you sure?" she whispered. 
 
 "Yes. ... Of course " 
 
 She rose to her feet, speaking in a voice that was 
 quite new to him. 
 
 "Eddie . . . for God's sake, go ... now! . . . 
 quickly !" 
 
 "I can't go." 
 
 "Go quickly, I tell you. Don't be a damned little 
 fool. You don't want to be mixed up in this. 
 Eddie, for God's sake. . . . It's 'natural causes,' 
 Eddie." 
 
 He blundered down the dark stairs and out into 
 the street. He could not walk. He cowered under 
 the warehouse wall opposite, gazing, as though 
 fascinated, at the yellow square of window. The 
 discreet Victorian houses surveyed him as if the 
 horror that the yellow blind concealed were an 
 ordinary occurrence in their dingy lives. They 
 were used to death. And death did not change 
 them. A rubber-tyred hansom rolled smoothly up 
 the Halesby Road, past the mouth of the Place. At 
 the corner, under the gas-lamp, Edwin saw the
 
 Si8 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 figure of a policeman with rain shining on his cape. 
 The sight recalled him to a sense of awful possi- 
 bilities. For the moment he dared not move. He 
 flattened himself against the warehouse walls and 
 did not realise that he was standing directly under 
 the dripping waterspout. In the western sky rose 
 the baleful glare of an uncowled furnace. The 
 policeman strolled away, and Edwin, cautiously 
 emerging, set off through the rain up the Halesby 
 Koad towards the hills. He felt that he needed 
 their solitude and darkness. 
 
 IV 
 
 Next day, a haggard and desolate figure, he ap- 
 peared in the cloak-room of the University where 
 the examination results were displayed. In a dream 
 he realised that he was now a Bachelor of Medicine, 
 but in the realisation there was none of the joy that 
 he had anticipated. He stood before the board be- 
 wildered, until W.G. came up behind him and 
 wrung his hand. 
 
 "You look as if you'd been making a night of it, 
 my boy," he said. "Come and have some coffee at 
 the Dousita." 
 
 W.G. was on the top of himself. "It was a pretty 
 near thing. The external examiner in Medicine 
 gave me hell ; but it's all right. God ! . . . it's diffi- 
 cult to believe, isn't it? What are you going to 
 do?" 
 
 "I don't know. A voyage, I should think." 
 
 He hadn't thought of it before. 
 
 "That's not a bad idea. Bit of a rest cure, eh? 
 That's the only disadvantage, I don't mind telling
 
 WHITE ROSES 519 
 
 you, of being married. I couldn't leave the missus." 
 
 W.G. babbled on happily. "Did you see the eve- 
 ning paper?" he said. "I see that fellow Griffin's 
 done for. I always said he'd come to a nasty, sticky 
 end. Some woman or other. ... I remember your 
 saying that he couldn't play footer because of his 
 heart. Ah, well . . . that's ong fewine the less, poor 
 devil!" 
 
 When W.G. left him, Edwin called for a time- 
 table and looked out the trains to Liverpool. There 
 was one that started in half an hour. He caught 
 it, and next morning presented himself at a ship- 
 ping office in Water Street. 
 
 The medical superintendent received him. 
 
 <r You want a ship? Well, you know, you look 
 very young. When were you qualified?" 
 
 "Yesterday," Edwin confessed. 
 
 "Very young. Still, you won't be stale. You 
 don't drink, by any chance?" 
 
 "I'm practically a total abstainer." The man 
 scrutinised Edwin's haggard eyes. 
 
 "H'm. . . . Well, as it happens, one of our men 
 has failed us. I'll give you a ship, the Macao, if 
 you can sail to-morrow. Bather short notice, eh?" 
 
 "I think I can do it. What about equipment?" 
 
 "Oh, we don't go in for brass-bound uniforms on 
 our ships. Ten pounds a month and bonus. What?" 
 
 "Where is she going to?" 
 
 "China. You may call at Japan for coal with 
 luck. See the world, you know. That's what most 
 of you fellows are after. You'll have to go aboard 
 to-night, Birkenhead Docks." 
 
 "I'll be there."
 
 520 THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 
 
 And with trembling hands he signed his contract. 
 
 In a wintry evening he crossed the Mersey ferry. 
 A salt wind from the west boomed up the channel. 
 Edwin, in the bows, felt his face drenched with 
 spray. "It's clean," he thought. "It will make me 
 cleaner. That's what I need. I don't believe I shall 
 ever feel anything again, until I'm washed clean. 
 I'm old . . . old and- numb. I've lost my sense of 
 enjoyment. I wonder if it will ever come back \o 
 me!" 
 
 As he stood there in the salt breeze, some words 
 of Traherne, his mother's countryman, came into 
 his mind: 
 
 << You shall never enjoy this world aright till the 
 sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed 
 with the heavens and crowned with the stars." 
 
 Perhaps they were true. He wondered.
 
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