The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

He pointed to a corner in which a big fellow lay huddled up in a deep basket chair. He had shoulders that would have appeared massive by the side of any others but W.G.’s: a fair wide face marked with freckles, a sandy moustache and crisp, curly red hair. “That’s the kind of swine that ought to be working in the scrum.”

Edwin looked, and as he did so, instinctively went pale. A curious survival of the instinct of physical fear had shaken him. It was ridiculous. “I know that chap,” he said in an off-hand way. “He’s no good. I was at school with him. He’s got a weak heart. His name’s Griffin.”

CHAPTER III
CARNIVAL

I

Christmas came: an old-fashioned Christmas with hoar frost on the fields and hard roads gleaming with splintered light reflected from a frosty sky. In this raiment of frozen moisture even the black desert of Edwin’s morning pilgrimage appeared fantastically beautiful. The vacation did not suspend his work; for though no lectures were given, the dissecting room was still open; and here, on icy mornings, when the asphalt floor was as cold as the glass roof, he would freeze for an hour at a time watching Brown and Maskew at work, Martin having been whisked off to spend a baronial Christmas of scratch dances in Ireland.

A few months in North Bromwich had made a great change in Edwin. He had lost much of his old timidity, shaved twice a week, smoked the plug tobacco to which Brown had introduced him, and was no longer shy with any creature on earth of his own sex. With women it was different. . . . Ease and familiarity with this baffling sex would come, no doubt, in time; but for the present one or two desperate essays at conversation with the elegant Miss Wheeler in the absence of his friends had been failures. And Miss Wheeler was not the least approachable of her sex. There were several women medical students in his year; but in their case he had not felt the incentive to gallantry that the softer charms of Miss Wheeler suggested. Even if they had not insulated themselves with shapeless djibbehs of russet brown, and bunched back their hair in a manner ruthlessly unfeminine, the common study of a subject so grossly material as anatomy would have rubbed the bloom from any budding romance.

In the Biological laboratory, however, he found a figure that exercised a peculiar attraction on him. She was an American girl, a science student, who with the severity of the medical women’s dress contrived to combine an atmosphere of yielding femininity. She had a soft voice, for the tones of which Edwin would listen, big grey-blue eyes, soft dark hair, and very beautiful arms that her dark overalls displayed to perfection. Edwin would have found it difficult to define the way in which she attracted him: certainly he didn’t cherish any definite romantic ideas about her; but he did find her in some subtle way disturbing, so that he would be conscious of her presence when she came into the lab.; surprise himself listening for her voice when she spoke to the professor, and find that, without any definite volition, his eyes were watching her profile. And one day when she passed him and her overall brushed his sleeve, he found that he was blushing. Maskew, with his usual easy familiarity, was already on joking terms with her, and would sometimes sit on the table where she kept her microscope while they talked and laughed together; but though Edwin had every chance of sharing in this intimacy, he couldn’t bring himself to do so; and when, in the end, he was introduced to her formally, he wished that he were dead, and could not speak a word for awkwardness.

With men, on the other hand, he was now quite at his ease, even, strangely enough, with the once formidable Griffin. Since the day when he had discovered his old enemy in the Common Room they had often spoken to one another: they had even sat side by side in the deep basket chairs, one of which was now Griffin’s habitual abode, and talked of the old days at St. Luke’s, and sometimes, in the afternoon, they would share a pot of tea. There was no awkwardness in their conversation, as Edwin had feared there might be, for Griffin apparently took his expulsion as a matter of course, and, on the whole, as rather a good joke. Of course Griffin had changed. It was clear to Edwin from the first that in some way he had shrunk—not indeed physically, for he was fatter than ever; but the air of conscious and threatening physical superiority that Edwin had found so oppressive in his school days had vanished. Moreover, he was now prepared to accept Edwin as an equal, and make him the confidant of the amorous adventures that now absorbed his time, adventures to which the affair with the chambermaid at St. Luke’s had been the mildest possible prelude. Compared with Griffin’s positive achievements, the daring of Maskew’s relation with the young ladies of the Dousita seemed a trifle thin. Griffin’s father, with a shrewd appreciation of his son’s peculiar gifts, had entered him as a student at the school of brewing; and if once he could overcome his natural indolence, there was no reason why, in the future, he should not become a partner in the firm of his uncle, Sir Joseph Astill, and control the destinies of a number of barmaids beyond the dreams of concupiscence. On these prospects, Griffin, lounging in his basket chair, brooded with a heavy satisfaction.

“It’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” Edwin said one day, “that we should be the only St. Luke’s men in this place.”

“Oh, some are bound to turn up sooner or later,” said Griffin. “The other day, when I was up in town, I ran against Widdup—you remember Widdup—and he told me that his people thought of sending him here to take up engineering.”