The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

In the duties of the wards Edwin became far more familiar with his cases than in the casualty department. The work was less hurried, and the patients themselves were less fully armed with the conventional social gestures by which men and women protect and hide themselves. They lay in bed helpless, dependent on the hospital staff for every necessity and amusement; and the stress of physical pain, or the catastrophe of a major operation had generally shaken from them the little superficialities that they had gathered to themselves in the course of everyday life. Edwin noticed that, even at their worst, the women were hardly ever too ill to be a little concerned for their personal appearance, and, as they grew better, the patients of both sexes would make an heroic attempt to appear as they wished themselves to seem rather than as they were; but he realised, none the less, that the doctor gets nearer to the bed-rock of human personality than any other man who ministers to humanity. With him, the person into whose hands their suffering bodies were committed in an almost pitiful confidence, they were concerned to hide themselves far less than with any other; and in this triumphant discovery Edwin flattered himself that he was becoming richly learned in human nature. He did not realise how little he had learned.

One thing, however, that these days taught him, he never lost in after life: an intense appreciation of the inherent patience and nobility of human beings, the precious ore that the fire of suffering revealed. Even the worst of his patients—in North Bromwich as elsewhere disease is an impartial enemy, falling on the virtuous and abandoned alike—revealed such amazing possibilities of good. In these hospital wards the fundamental gregarious instinct of mankind, with the unselfishness and sympathy that go along with it, asserted itself. The common life of the ward was happy, extraordinarily happy. Removed from the ordinary responsibilities of wage-earning and competition, fed and housed and tended without question, the patients lived together as happily as a community of African savages, supported by the female labour of the nursing staff, obedient to the unquestioned authority of the sister in charge.

And in Edwin’s eyes these, too, were wonderful people. At first he had taken them more or less for granted; but gradually he realised the tremendous sacrifices that their life implied: the long hours: the unceasing strain of keeping their temper: the clean, efficient materialism for which they must have sacrificed so much of the obvious beauty of life, committing themselves—for most of them were middle-aged—to an abnegation of the privileges of marriage and motherhood in a cloistral seclusion as complete as that imposed on the useless devotee of some mystical religion. He took it for granted that the life of a nun was useless to any one except herself. . . . Well, this was a religion worth some sacrifice: the religion of humanity. They themselves would only have called it a profession. At first it had seemed to him that their interests were narrow and their lives, of necessity, mean. He had been astonished at the small things that gave them pleasure: a bunch of primroses from a grateful patient; a ride on the top of a bus; a word of commendation from one of the consulting staff; a house-surgeon’s or even a student’s compliment; and, above all, the passionate attachments and enmities that made up the life of the nunnery in which they lived: but in the end he began to sympathise with them in the humility of their pleasures, to feel that anything might be forgiven to creatures who had made so great a sacrifice. In a mild way he idealised them; and for this reason they decided that he was “quite a nice boy.”

III

In the winter of his third year Edwin’s newly formulated enthusiasm for humanity in the bulk suffered something of a check. The hospital absorbed him so completely that in those days he saw very little of the city, going to and from his lectures and his work in the Pathological Laboratory at the University without taking any real share in the life of North Bromwich, or being aware of the passions and interests that swayed the city’s heart. Coming down from the hospital, one evening in December, he suddenly became conscious of a constriction in the traffic which grew more acute as it reached the narrows that debouch upon the open space in front of the town hall; and while he was wondering what could be the cause of this, a huge rumour of voices, not unlike that which proceeds from a Midland football crowd when it disapproves of a referee, but deeper and more malignant, reached his ears.

He wondered what was the matter, and since it looked as if the traffic were now completely blocked on the main road, he cut down the quiet street that faces the university buildings and overlooks the paved court in which the statue of Sir Joseph Astill inappropriately dispenses water to a big stone basin. Almost immediately he found himself upon the fringes of an immense crowd over which the waves of threatening sound that he had heard at a distance were moving like catspaws on a sullen sea. The windows of the town-hall itself blazed with light, making the outlines of the Corinthian pillars that surrounded it almost beautiful. He edged his way into the black crowd. It was composed for the most part of workers in iron and brass, and exhaled an odour of stale oil. In a moment of relative silence he asked the man who stood in front of him, a little mechanic who had not troubled to change the oily dungarees in which he worked, what was the matter.

“It’s Lloyd George . . . the b—,” he said, and spat fiercely. Edwin was not sure where he had heard the name before. He seemed to remember it as that of a Welsh member of Parliament who had come into notoriety during the debates on the South African War. He inquired what Lloyd George was doing.

“Come to speak agen’ Joe,” said the mechanic savagely; and, as a wave of sound that had started somewhere in the middle of the crowd came sweeping towards them, he suddenly began to squeal hoarsely like a carnivorous beast in a cage: a ridiculous noise, that seemed, nevertheless, to express the feelings of the multitude. From scraps of conversation that he heard beneath the crowd’s rumour, Edwin began to understand that this beggarly Welshman, who had spent the last few years in vilifying the workmen of North Bromwich generally, and their political idol in particular, had actually dared to bring his dirty accusations to the political heart of the city: the town-hall in which their favourite had delivered his most important speeches; that, at this very moment, the meeting which popular feeling had proscribed, was beginning behind the Corinthian pillars, and that the just indignation of North Bromwich had determined that he should not escape with his life.

It struck Edwin that whatever else the Welshman might be, he was certainly not lacking in courage; but, for all that, he found it difficult to prevent his own feelings in the matter from being swamped and absorbed and swept away by the crowd’s vast, angry consciousness. Almost in spite of himself, his heart palpitated with vehement malice against the intruder. He felt that he would have experienced a brutal satisfaction in seeing him torn limb from limb.

A yell of extraordinary savagery, in which he found it difficult not to join, rose from the square.