The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

The week that now followed was the very crown of youth. The Boyce’s summer house stood upon a patch of terraced ground, being the highest of the three farms round which the hamlet of Overton clustered, and overlooked the blossomy vale of Evesham bounded by the Cotswold escarpment, blue and dappled with the shadows of cloud. “Parva domus: magna quies,” read the motto that Matthew’s father, the poet, had placed above the lintel of the door: “small house: great quietness”—and indeed it seemed to Edwin that there could be no quieter place on earth.

He and Matthew would smoke their morning pipes together on a stone terrace that bleached in the sun along the edge of a garden that the poet had planted for perfume rather than for beauty of bloom. Here they would sit, nursing books that were unread, until the spirit tempted them to set out towards the blue escarpment, and, after a hard climb, lose themselves in the trough of some deep billow of Cotswold and fall asleep on a bank of waving grasses, or follow some runnel of the Leach or Windrush until it joined the mother stream, where they would strip and float over the shallows with the sun in their eyes, emerging covered with the tiny water leeches that gave one of the rivers its name.

On the height of Cotswold they found an inn that was half farm, possessing a barrel of cider that Edwin was almost ready to acknowledge as the equal of that which he had drunk in Somerset; and, for further attraction a huge yellow cat beneath the lazy stare of whose topaz eyes Matthew sat worshipping. In the evening the air that moved over the wolds grew cool and dry and more reviving than any juice of yellow apples, and with their lungs full of it they would spin down the winding hills into the plain, past many sweet-smelling villages and golden manor-houses, reaching Overton about sunset, when the evening stocks, that Mr. Boyce had planted along the approaches to his doorway, recovered from their lank indolence and drenched the air with a scent that matched the songs of nightingales.

There Mrs. Pratt, the wife of a neighbouring labourer, would have their dinner ready: tender young beans and boiled bacon and crisp lettuce from the garden that Matthew dressed according to the directions of his epicurean father; and with their meal, and after, they would drink the dry and bitter cider made at the middle farm from the apples of orchards that now dreamed beneath them.

Then came music. The drawing-room piano stood by the open window, and a soft movement of air disturbed the flames of the candles in silver candlesticks that lighted the music stand. No other light was there; and in the gloom beyond, Edwin, playing the tender songs of Grieg and Schumann, and the prelude to Tristan, would see the long legs of Matthew stretched dreaming on a sofa. The nights were so silent that it seemed a pity to mar them with music; and for a long time Edwin would sit in silence at the piano, while strong winged moths fluttered in out of the darkness and circled round the candle’s flame. Last of all, before they turned in, they would go for a slow walk over meadows cool in the moonlight, listening to the silence—“Solemn midnight’s tingling silentness,” Matthew quoted—or to the gentle creaking of the branches of elms, now heavy with foliage, that embosomed their small house.

The last day of their holiday was wet; but that made no great difference to them, for a succession of showers drew from the drenched garden a perfume more intense. They spent the day in musical exploration, and when the darkness came they sat together talking far into the night. They talked of North Bromwich, for the ponderable influence of the morrow had already invaded their quietude, and of their future work.

“In a year’s time,” said Edwin, “we shall be qualified.”

“What shall you do?”

“Oh, general practice, I suppose. That’s the easiest way to make a living. It’s what most men do.”

“I don’t like the idea of it,” said Matthew. “It’s sordid, unsatisfactory work. A hard living in which science stands no chance. Selling bottles of medicine—quite harmless, of course, but unnecessary—to people who don’t really need them. You have to do it to make a living. If you don’t the other people cut you out.”