The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

While Edwin stood waiting and wondering if he dare risk an encounter, the door opposite opened and a bevy of bloused figures appeared. The sight of the first took him by surprise: it was the elder of the two anæmic young ladies in the drapery who travelled in the morning train with him from Halesby. She gave him a smile of recognition that revealed her defective teeth. This prospect was altogether too much for him. An acute shyness drove him back into the cloak room, and, as soon as he had taken off his pumps and put on his shoes again, he left the Queen’s Assembly Rooms and bolted down Sackville Row to his train.

II

The Willis’s dance, to which Edwin had looked forward with such mingled pleasure and anxiety, was destined to bring forth a violent emotional experience. Mr. Jones had not undergone the experience of cutting for the undulant figure of Sir Joseph Hingston for nothing. Apart from the fact that the sleeves were rather too long for his arms, Edwin’s dress coat was a success, and, as Aunt Laura benignantly pointed out, it was just as well that some allowance should be made for future growth. Mr. Jones had been extremely anxious that Edwin should be supplied with a magenta silk handkerchief, an ornament which, he was assured, all the best people wore stuffed in the corner of their waistcoats.

On this problem the Major had never delivered judgment, so Edwin mustered sufficient courage to approach Denis Martin for advice. Martin scornfully told him that the idea was preposterous. “It’s the kind of get-up that your friend Maskew would adopt,” he said. He also impressed upon Edwin the fact that the infallible index of a bounder in evening-dress was a ready-made tie. No doubt the advice was excellent; but it let Edwin in for an hour of agony on the evening of the dance, when the tie refused to answer to the Major’s printed instructions, and finished up by making him look as if he had gone to bed in his boots and slept on it.

He had never been to Mawne Hall before. That pretentious mansion with its castellated façade set on a steep bank above the valley of the Stour, in which the works that maintained it lay, was so brightly lit upon this evening that it glowed like a lantern through the bare boughs of the hanging wood beneath. In the gun-room at the side of the hall in which the hats and coats of the guests were being received by Bassett, the Willises’ coachman, he recognised a number of incredibly elegant creatures of his own sex with shining white waistcoats, pearl studs, and immaculate ties. He knew scarcely any of them, for they were mostly neighbouring ironmasters or professional people to whose society the Willises’ money had proved a sufficient introduction. Among them he recognised Sir Joseph Hingston, playing ducks and drakes with his aitches, and wearing, to Edwin’s encouragement, a flagrantly ready-made tie. In this particular, at any rate, he was one up on the baronet. He hoped that some one else would realise this fact. In the middle of these reflections he thought he heard a voice that he recognised, and turned to find himself rubbing shoulders with Griffin. Edwin said, “Good-evening.”

“Good Lord, Ingleby, are you here? I haven’t seen you since the pantomime night. What are you doing here? Do you know these people?”

It struck Edwin that he spoke rather contemptuously of his hosts.

“Yes. . . . I live near here, you know,” he replied. “I didn’t know the Willises were friends of yours.” As a matter of fact he knew nothing about the Willises’ friends; but it sounded rather well.

“No . . . I don’t know them,” said Griffin, “but the old man is a business friend of my uncle’s, and apparently they were rather hard up for men.” The sound of waltz music was heard, and Griffin left him hurriedly. “See you later,” he said.

Edwin, anxious not to be left behind, pulled on his gloves and split the thumb of one of them. He passed through the hall, where his name was announced, rather contemptuously, as he thought, by Hannah, the Willises’ tall and starchy servant, and was received in a manner that was reassuring and homely by Mrs. Willis. She spoke for a moment of his mother, and tears gathered in her rather watery eyes; then she introduced him to her small daughter Lilian, very self-conscious in a white party frock with a pale blue waistband, and another dark girl with beautiful grey eyes and a creamy rather than pale complexion, who was standing beside her. Miss Dorothy Powys, she said. Edwin, hedging for safety, booked a dance with Lilian, who took the matter as seriously as himself. Next, no doubt, he must have a shot at Miss Dorothy Powys, in spite of the disturbing beauty of her eyes; but when he came to ask her for a dance, he saw that Griffin was talking to her.