The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

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.

II

On a bright morning at the beginning of September Edwin found himself one of a crowd of ten or fifteen youths, waiting with a varying degree of assurance, outside the office of the Dean of the Medical Faculty in James Street, a sordid thoroughfare in which the pretentious buildings of the old College of Science hid its hinder quarters. The door was small, and only distinguished from its neighbours, a steam laundry and brassworker’s office, by a plate that bore the inscription, “University of North Bromwich. 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 mortar-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 himself a negligible unit, was waiting until his name should be called from the office, and, in the meantime, surveying his companions with suspicion and being surveyed with a more confident and collective 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 Exhibition 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, possessed his soul in silence. In the meantime he watched the others with a good deal of interest and speculation.

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 waistcoat 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 particularly to a paragon of elegance, whose waistcoat was the orange colour of a blackbird’s bill with light blue enamelled buttons, whose hair was mathematically 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 open 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 obviously a person of this degree of magnificence must frequently do. Did he change the buttons, or did he 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 entered the office.

Edwin, relieved from his scrutiny, turned his attention 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 this 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. Evidently 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 determination to go through with this adventure at all costs.

“Mr. Brown,” said the porter, and nearly blundering 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 championship of the world.