The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

Nothing aroused in him an acute remembrance of those ancient happy days more easily than music. He wished, above all things, that he might some day be able to taste these joys for himself; and so he persuaded his aunt to teach him the notes on the piano, and having an inherited aptitude, he soon found that he could pick his way through simple compositions, preferably in the open key, that he found among his mother’s music at home. Mr. Ingleby, who had no ear, appeared to be unmoved by these painful experiments; and to Edwin, the long winter evenings were made magical by their indulgence. He would sit at the piano in the drawing-room for hours at a time, and here, in a strange way, he found himself curiously in touch with the vanishing memory of his mother. At times this feeling was so acute that he could almost have imagined that she was there in the room beside him, and sometimes he would sit still at the piano in long intervals of silence, just drinking in this peculiar and soothing atmosphere. Eventually these diversions made Mr. Ingleby uneasy.

“You spend a good deal of time at the piano, Edwin,” he said. “I do hope you are not letting it interfere with your work.”

Edwin said nothing; but from that time onward it seemed to him that even this, the most harmless of his amusements, had become a matter for grudging and suspicion. At first he only felt indignation and anger; but later he realised that this, along with his father’s other anxieties, probably had its origin in financial considerations. The cost of his education in North Bromwich was a big thing for a country chemist to face. If once he failed, the whole of his early effort might be wasted. But then, he was not going to fail.

II

The terminal examinations at Christmas had made him sure of this. They showed him that in his own year he and Maskew were in a class by themselves; and though Maskew beat him easily in all the subjects of the examination, it satisfied him a little to think that Maskew had probably put in a good deal more work than he had, particularly in anatomy, where he had the advantage of working in partnership with W.G., for whom the subject of medical education was of the most deadly seriousness.

Early in the Lent term Edwin found himself introduced to a new stratum of North Bromwich society, through the accident of his acquaintance with Griffin. The new university had inherited from the old college of science and the still older medical school, the tradition of a pantomime night, a visit en masse to one of the North Bromwich theatres, where this elevating art-form flourished for three months out of the twelve. The evening was one of fancy dress, rowdiness, and general licence, in which the stage suffered as much as the auditorium, and the unfortunate players were propitiated for the ruin of their performance by a series of presentations.

Arrangements for this function were always made with a high seriousness. The committee was composed of representatives from each year in the school of medicine and from each of the other faculties. In this affair, as in all matters of sport or communal life, the older foundation of the medical school took the most prominent part; but the prestige of Griffin as the nephew of the Vice-Chancellor and an acknowledged expert on all matters theatrical, had induced the brewers to run him for the secretaryship; and since the secretary was the official on whom the bulk of the work fell, and no one was particularly anxious to take on the job, Griffin, in his first year, had been elected to the post.

There was no denying the fact that it suited him. To begin with, he was already on intimate terms with every theatre manager and stage-doorkeeper in North Bromwich, and was used to dealing with the susceptibilities of theatrical people. Again, he had plenty of money, a circumstance that would help him in the preliminaries, which were expensively conducted in the local Bodega and other bars and restaurants. Also, it gave Griffin something to do; for the life of the student in brewing was of the leisurely and somnolent character that one would naturally associate with malt liquors, and most of his time had previously been spent sprawling in a deep basket chair in the Common Room, playing an occasional languid game of poker, or jingling sovereigns in his pocket while he waited for the results of racing in the evening papers.

At the annual meeting, which Edwin had not been sufficiently interested to attend, there had been the usual difficulty in selecting a member from the unknown quantities of the first year, and Griffin, full of resource, had suggested Edwin, who was straightway elected, and summoned to attend the deliberations that followed. His election caused a good deal of amusement to his friends, and particularly Martin, who preserved an aristocratic contempt for this vulgar theatrical business, and W.G., who prophesied Edwin’s conversion into a thorough-going blood; but it introduced him to a new and bewildering society in which he met a number of men of his own faculty who had already become impressive at a distance.

Such were the brothers Wade, the elder unapproachable in his final year, the younger of an elegance surpassing that of Harrop. Such was Freddie St. Aubyn, a slight and immaculate figure with fair hair and moustache, and the most carefully cultivated reputation for elegant dissipation in North Bromwich. This Byronic person had already suffered the pangs of a long intrigue with the première danseuse in a musical comedy company, on whom he was reputed to have spent money and passion lavishly but without the least suggestion of grossness.