The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

In comparison with them, Biology was something of an oasis. Here, at any rate, he had to deal with life, a mystery more obvious and less academic. The contemplation of its lower forms, such as the Amoeba, a tiny speck of dreamy protoplasm stretching out its languid tentacles, living its remote and curiously detached life with no aims beyond that of bare mysterious existence, filled him with a strange awe. The laboratory in which these researches were conducted, was high and airy and not associated with any unpleasant smells except at the season when the class were engaged upon the dissection of the hideous dog-fish. It had even its aspects of beauty in the person of the fair American in her dark overall; and for this reason, if for no other, Edwin found himself becoming most proficient in his knowledge of the subject.

In the middle of the summer the examination came. Maskew was an easy first, and carried off the Queen’s scholarship for the year; Edwin came second with a first-class, which, even if it didn’t satisfy himself, was enough to make his father enthusiastic; Martin ambled through with an ease that challenged Edwin’s respect, and W.G., horribly intense and determined through all the week of the exam., scraped through by virtue of sheer bulldog tenacity. The result of the examination did Edwin good if only by convincing him that Maskew, for all his suburban flashiness and his inferior general education, had a better head than his own. Like the excellent man of business that he was, Maskew did not rest upon his oars: the week after the examination, and the first of the long vacation, found him and W.G. back in the dissecting room, plugging into anatomy, the next year’s principal subject, and Edwin saw at once that if he were to keep pace with his rival he would have to forgo the months of summery leisure to which he had looked forward in the vacation. Martin was playing tennis in Ireland, and so he found himself thrown once more into the society of these two.

It was a pleasant time, for their leisure was their own and there were no lectures to tie them to their work. They did a great deal of their reading in W.G.’s rooms, full of easy-chairs, and wreathed in tobacco smoke that escaped through a French window into a tiny garden plot green and pleasant under the white Midland sky, and this room became a haven of escape from the burning brick pavements in which Edwin and his friends would work together without strain, talking of the future and of W.G.’s romantic past, and stabilising their own ideas on the uncertainties of sex: a problem that so far had meant very little to Edwin, but which W.G. was not in a position to ignore.

“You know, it’s damned funny,” he said, “but when you get to know more about things, when you’ve done some anatomy and that, you begin to think of sex in a different light. It knocks all the mystery out of it, and I’m sure that’s a jolly sound thing. Good Lord, when I think of the ignorance with which I started on this sort of thing! Finding out everything by experiment, you know. . . . Why, if I’d had a short course of anatomy before I left school I should have been saved a lot of rotten experiments that didn’t do me or any one else any good. I’d have been a damned sight cleaner-minded than I ever was. A medical training’s a jolly good thing in that way: shows you exactly where you are instead of letting you go fumbling about in the dark.”

“Knocks all the poetry out of it though,” said Maskew.

“Poetry be damned,” said W.G. seriously, “there’s a good deal too much of your poetry about it. Poetry and mystery and a lot of bunkum like that . . . Male and female created He them. I don’t particularly admire the method. I think He made rather a better job of the amoeba. Think how much simpler it would be to split open a chunk of protoplasm instead of having to make a ridiculous fool of yourself if you want to propagate your species. Still, there it is, and the sooner you realise exactly what it means and what it’s all about, the less you worry your head about it.”

“Well, of course, if you’re going to treat it in that light you’re going to knock all the pleasure out of life—” Maskew protested.

“Oh, you’re a sensualist,” said W.G. “The main thing that I have against it is that it wastes valuable time.” He became scornful. “Think of all these rotten fellows who spend their days writing books on sexual problems, analysing their rotten little sensations in detail and gloating over mysteries of sex. It’s only their ignorance that makes them like that. What they want is a thorough course of anatomy and a whack of practical experience to cure them; and if every one else had the same sort of education there’d be no sale for their books.”

Edwin, listening to their sparring, remembered the library at St. Luke’s and a certain shelf of anatomical works that was always kept locked with a special key that Mr. Leeming carried mysteriously on his watch-chain. On the whole, he agreed with W.G. and his preferences for the methods of the Amoeba’s parthenogenesis. He wondered, however, if the kind of education that W.G. advocated would have scotched the production of such works as Romeo and Juliet or the love poems of Shelley.

“It would be rather rotten if you did away with love, W.G.,” he said.