The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“But I want to talk about you.”

He wanted to talk about nothing else. His head was full of words that he wanted to throw before her like jewels, but he did not know how much he dared to say. He knew it was impossible for him to express a hundredth part of his delight in her. It would be nearly as bad as kissing her neck in the manner of Griffin, to say that the curve of it sent him delirious with joy. It would be indecency rather than candour to say that the faint scent of her intoxicated him. He was silent with tremulous emotion. He wondered if she could be conscious of it; and he could not guess, for she, too, did not speak. From the ballroom they heard the music of another dance begin. Two shadowy couples emerged from the passage beneath them. A curtain of Indian beading made a sound like dead leaves driven over a dry pavement by the wind. The intruders’ voices died away.

“I suppose we must go too,” she said with a sigh.

“Why must you go? Are you dancing?” Edwin asked, with a catch in his throat.

“No, I don’t think I shall dance any more. I was rather upset. It was silly of me. But I think we’d better go.”

Edwin offered her his arm in the best manner of Professor Beagle.

“Thank you,” she said in a low voice. For a moment she hesitated. She was smiling, and her eyes were wonderful in the gloom. Their faces were level with each other. And, suddenly, amazingly, she kissed him.

“I’m going,” she said. Edwin tried to take her hand as she moved away from him. For a second it lay in his, soft and small and warm. Then, before his arms had time to follow the impulse of his flaming brain, she had slipped away from him and passed into the shadow of the passage. He stood there at the foot of the stairs alone, his heart thudding like a steam-hammer in a bewildered, intoxicating elation. Why had she left him? Why? . . . unless it were only a part of her adorable modesty. That must be the reason: and yet it was hardly consistent with an exalted ideal of modesty to kiss a young man, whom she had only known for fifteen minutes, on the lips. A new aspect of the miracle presented itself to him. Was it possible, after all, that Griffin had been right, that she was really exactly what he had insinuated, a fast little baggage who had determined, in a sudden caprice, to throw Griffin over and try a new experiment?

He could not believe it. Everything that he had noticed and adored in her, her grey eyes, the delicious quality of her speech, her fragrance, the indescribable fineness—there was no other word for it—of her, denied the possibility. He found it difficult to realise that she had gone in the moment of such an astounding revelation. Such was the way of a Naiad, melting away out of her sweet mortality in the moment of possession. Standing alone at the foot of the gloomy staircase, listening in a dream to the luscious music of the Choristers’ waltz, he tried to recreate his dream out of memory. Nothing of her was left but her delicate perfume. On the stairs he saw a small crumpled muslin handkerchief from which the perfume came. He picked it up with the reverence of a pilgrim touching a relic, eagerly triumphant that he had managed to rescue a fragment of his dream. It did not strike him that this tiny square of scented muslin was presumably the instrument with which divinity blew its nose: and indeed its dimensions scarcely fitted it for this material function. He placed it in the satin-lined pocket of Mr. Jones’s creation. It pleased him to think that it lay near his heart.

This, of course, was only the beginning of a romance. No doubt, in the course of the evening, he would see her again. Somehow he must persuade her to see him alone, and then he would be able to do all the magnificently passionate things of which her flight had cheated him. He would kiss her; he would hold her exquisiteness in his arms; he would tell her all the glorious things that he had been fool enough to withhold.