The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

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 bitterness. 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 strangeness 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 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.

II

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 indulged 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 master 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 Edwin, 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 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 following 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 Silbury 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 Belgæ 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, became more clear, and with this the sounds of the country grew more distinct: indefinite noises, such as the creaking of cart-wheels in a hidden lane, the squeak of a pump-handle at the 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.