The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

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 reason 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 inanimate 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 began 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, 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 spectacle 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 quality 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 satisfied in an accumulation of the periodical publications that have taken the place of Mr. Samuel Smiles in these days: weeklies devoted to all kinds of useful hobbies—electricity, wood-carving, plumbing—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 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 detachment 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 instance 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 distressed 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 instead 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 Highberrow 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 its great exemplar by the way in which the protagonists of one episode became mere incidentals to another. Edwin knew them all by name, and recognised them as if he had met them in the flesh whenever he 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 remembered 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 outsider and could pay its way. And during those prosperous times its liberties seemed secure from danger. But when the decay of the grouvier’s industry 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 forefathers had built. If they refused to pay the rent, he said, they would be evicted, not in order that other people might be introduced who would pay, but merely to satisfy the landlord’s convictions of the rightness 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 individualist 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 married daughter.