The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“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 in common than himself with the strange dark people 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 went 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 romantic past that had bred him: with that magnificent 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 achievements, of his loneliness, of his difficulty of expressing—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 devotion. 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.

III

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 Wringford 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 deserted and overgrown with ragwort and scabious, and the Roman amphitheatre, to the great limestone 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 Redcliffe’s dreamy spire; and now in a few hours they would be back in Halesby: in another world.

As they travelled northwards Edwin was thinking 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 leading 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 westward 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 speaking 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.”