The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

The only feature of the dissecting room that now seemed objectionable was the smell of the powerful antiseptic that was used for preserving the subjects. For a week or two Edwin was conscious of its pervading 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, indeed, was still a little remote. After the spaciousness 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 concentration 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 resplendent 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 that was very nearly an affection. With his impressive 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 sweating 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 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 doctoring’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 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 Calvinistic 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 windup 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 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 allowed six. Six into twelve goes twice. Two hundred a year for fees and living and clothes—outsize—and recreation. You see, it’s pretty tight. Come along and have some lunch at Joey’s.”

III

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 Bromwich, 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 and 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 customer at this place; for Martin’s delicate fancy for 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 beginning to see less of each other—not from any ill-will on the part of either, but simply because Martin’s position in the house of the old lady in Alvaston, whose house was full of animals, had introduced 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 encouraging matrons and innumerable eligible daughters were becoming so pressing that his acquaintance 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 partner Maskew.