The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

He still looked bewildered. Edwin took the paper from his trembling hands. As he had expected Maskew was first, but he saw that he himself was second on the list. Martin had ambled through respectively somewhere about the middle. W.G. and Harrop were last and last but one. He pinned the list on the notice-board. It was an exhilarating moment in which he was conscious of the herculean, sweaty handgrip of W.G. who was muttering: “Well, I’m damned if we don’t all deserve it.”

Talking and laughing together, they went out to lunch at Joey’s and caught the next train down to Evesham, where the coolness of the glassy Avon made the June heat more tolerable, and in the evening, blistered with rowing and sunshine, they came back to North Bromwich, dined together, and afterwards went to a music-hall. It was wonderful to Edwin to see the physical elation of W.G. The big man wanted to dance like a child, and it was with difficulty that Maskew restrained him from smashing a plate-glass window in Sackville Row. “You’re a cold-blooded swine, Maskew,” he said indignantly. “God, man, don’t you feel you want to do something? You must let off steam in some way, and it’s just as well to do it decently.”

Next morning the Dean sent a message to Edwin and Maskew, asking them to call at his office during the morning. They went together, and were received with his usual urbane politeness.

“Good-morning, Mr. Maskew . . . Mr. Ingleby. . . . You had better sit down. I am very pleased to see your names at the top of the list. Yes . . . very pleased. I’ve consulted Dr. Moon, and he approves your appointment as prosectors. It is an office that you will be very wise to undertake if you have any surgical ambitions, and I am very pleased to offer it to you. Perhaps you will let me know to-morrow? Thank you, gentlemen. . . . Good-morning.”

“Shall you take it?” said Edwin, as soon as they were outside.

“Of course I shall. I’m rather keen on Anatomy. It only means putting one back a year, and it’s worth it a hundred times over, if one gets the primary Fellowship. You’ll be a fool if you don’t do it. We should have a topping time together. No lectures . . . just a year of research work.”

“I shall have to think about it,” said Edwin.

It was the financial side of the question that had to be considered. To add another year to a course that was already expensive in pursuit of an elusive Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons: was it worth while? To begin with, he might easily fail. The primary examination was notoriously fluky, the results depending on the individual caprices and preferences of examiners. Edwin knew very well that better men than himself had failed in it. If, after draining his father’s pockets for another year, he should be ploughed, the situation would be altogether too pathetic.

Anything that affected his father’s purse seemed to Edwin, in those days, a matter for delicacy and shame. He hated to receive money from him. It was an acute embarrassment to see him write a cheque. He wrote slowly, with a regular, formal hand, and all the time Edwin, watching him, would think how many small, degrading sales of tooth paste and castor oil and pennyworths of camphor had gone to the making of that tenuous bank-account, and how easily and carelessly the painful accumulations would be spent. He hated asking his father for money, and for this reason had compelled himself to refrain from asking for the perfectly reasonable and necessary allowance that he had been wanting to settle for the last year.

And so he did not dare to tell his father that he had been offered the prosectorship and the opportunity of taking the Fellowship. If he had done so he was almost certain that Mr. Ingleby would have consented, and his father’s sacrifice would have thrown such a weight of obligation on him that life would not have been worth living. Indeed, if, in the end, he should have failed, his shame would have been intolerable. These reflections on the humility and penury of his father always plunged Edwin into a debauch of sentiment in which he would return with the zeal of a prodigal to the resolutions that he had made at the time of his mother’s death. They filled him with a kind of protective fervour that might easily have been mistaken for love, but was, in reality, an excuse for its absence. Still, even if the sentiment harrowed, it consoled, and Edwin was heroically elated by the performance of a sacrifice that he had not been brave enough to refuse.