The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“Sober?” repeated Mr. Ingleby. “Well, I suppose you will have to go; but I do hope—”

He didn’t say what he hoped; but Edwin knew, and was content to leave it at that.

III

The great day came, and Edwin found, as some compensation for the scoffing of W.G. and the superciliousness of Martin and Maskew, that his position was really one of some importance. All the first-year men, even the immaculate Harrop, had decided to go to the theatre, and up to the last minute Edwin was busy selling tickets. He had asked W.G. to put him up, and W.G., as a matter of form, had consented. “I don’t suppose I shall see you after midnight, my son,” he said. With his usual thoroughness in everything that he attempted, W.G. had determined to make a night of it. “It will do me good to make a damned fool of myself for once in a way,” he said, “if it’s only for the sake of realising it afterwards . . .”

They put in a hard afternoon’s work together first, and then he and Edwin and Maskew went together to W.G.’s rooms to change. They were all rather excited, and W.G. carried a bottle of whisky in each of his coat pockets, the first of which was broached as an aperitif while they were changing. In less than an hour they emerged, W.G. attired as nearly as convention would allow him, in the manner of his woaded ancestry: a splendid caveman with lowering black brows and hairy arms like those of a gorilla, a disguise that only called for a little accentuation of his natural characteristics to be made effective; Maskew, again in character, as a Restoration cavalier; and Edwin in the modest guise of Pierrot. In the foyer of the theatre they met Martin, who had driven down in a hansom from Alvaston clothed in six feet of baby linen, with a feeding bottle round his neck. The stalls were already full of a carnival crowd of students, and the rest of the house was crowded with spectators who had come to enjoy the rag, and other unfortunate people who had entered in ignorance of the festival and the fact that their form of entertainment was to be changed for one night only.

There, among the crowd, Edwin found Griffin, a fleshy and unsubtle Mephistopheles, the Mephistopheles of Gounod, not of Goethe, and Freddie St. Aubyn, romantically pale in a wig of black curls that he had procured for his presentation of Byron. Freddie, in the interests of verisimilitude, had even shaved his moustache.

Only the earlier part of the performance remained in Edwin’s memory. The rest of it was no more to him than a brilliant haze, from which single moments of wild picturesqueness detached themselves: as when he had a vision of a prehistoric man armed with a waving whisky bottle for a club and feebly restrained by a flushed cavalier, flown with insolence and wine, storming his way through the surging crowd in front of the stalls bar and planting his feet upon the counter; or of the same barbarian, gently armed by a tactful manager in evening dress, putting his weapon to the usages of peace and friendliness by uncorking it and offering its contents to a firm but good-humoured policeman.

“What a splendid fellow W.G. is,” Edwin thought to himself. “Splendid . . . splendid . . . magnificent.” And while he was thinking this, a sombre poet with shining eyes drew him aside and confessed to him, almost with tears, that all this brilliance and colour and life meant nothing to him compared with the memory of the Beardsley lady, whose ankles were so thin that they might be spanned with his little finger. “As light as a feather,” said the poet, “gossamer . . . swansdown . . . all soul. Of course, old fellow, I know that you can understand. I shouldn’t talk like this to any other person in the world.”

And Edwin understood, and realised the justice of the poet’s choice of a confidant so sympathetically that he was spurred to confidences on his own part. “You see, I happen to be a poet myself,” he said, and to prove it he felt bound to recite a sonnet that he had composed a year or two before at St. Luke’s. A magnificent sonnet it seemed to him, perhaps more magnificent for the accompaniment of a song in waltz rhythm by the theatre orchestra. It was flattering to find that Byron agreed with him as to its excellence; but while the poet was pressing his hand in congratulatory brotherhood, and Edwin was just deciding to recite it all over again, the sinister figure of Mephistopheles appeared and parted them, telling him that Miss Marie Loraine was now singing the last verse of her song and that in two minutes it would be his duty to present her with a bouquet and a pair of silver hair-brushes. Still reciting the most telling lines of his sonnet, he was conducted by Mephistopheles through the manager’s office, where a young lady who, in her inviting softness, resembled Miss Wheeler, was counting the counter-foils of tickets, and through a subterranean passage with the welcome chill of a catacomb, to the wings of the theatre, where a florid bouquet was thrust into his hands.

It struck Edwin that the scent of the flowers was of a suffocating heaviness, until he realised that the overpowering perfume of which he was aware proceeded not from the bouquet but from the scents and powders of a bevy of creatures of unnatural loveliness who stood waiting in the wings. They were the ladies of the chorus, and the nature of their costume would have given them an excuse for shivering; but they did not appear to be conscious of the heat that throbbed in Edwin’s brain. The scent and the proximity of such a huge expanse of naked flesh excited him. At this moment all his awkwardness seemed to have vanished. He could not believe that he was the same person who had blushed at the mere contact of the American girl’s overall, or sat speechless in the presence of Miss Wheeler at the Dousita. His old modesty seemed to him to have been a ridiculous and inexcusable folly; for, at the moment, he would have welcomed the prospect of making the most shameless advances to any one of these houris in competition with any man of his acquaintance. With the air of a Sultan he surveyed them, deciding to which of those blossoms the handkerchief should be thrown.