The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

He paused, but Edwin could not speak.

“If you’ll listen, I’ll tell you all about it. I think you will approve of my choice. I’ll tell you—”

“For God’s sake, don’t. Not now—”

“Very well. As you wish.” Mr. Ingleby’s hands that held the architect’s papers trembled. He smiled, kindly, but with a sort of bewilderment. “As you wish,” he repeated.

And Edwin, feeling as if he would do something ridiculous and violent in the stress of the curiously mingled emotions that possessed him, went quickly to the door and ran upstairs to his room, where he flung himself on his bed in the dark.

In a little while he found himself, ridiculously, sobbing. He could not define the passionate mixture of resentment, jealousy, shame, and even hatred, that overwhelmed him. He could not understand himself. A psycho-analyst, no doubt would have found a name for his state of mind, describing it as an “Œdipus complex”; but Edwin had never heard of psycho-analysis, and only knew that his mind was ruthlessly torn by passions beyond the control of reason. He made a valiant attempt to think rationally. Primarily, he admitted, it wasn’t his business to decide whether his father should marry again or remain a widower. His father was a free agent with responsibilities towards Edwin that were rapidly vanishing and would soon be ended. He couldn’t even suggest that this new marriage would be the ruin of any vital comradeship between them, for the hopes of this ideal state that he had once cherished, had not been realised during the last few years. There was no reason why his father’s marriage should affect him personally, or even financially, for he had never reckoned on the least paternal support when once he should be qualified. There was not even the least suggestion that his father was physically unsuitable for the married state, for there was no reason why he should not live for many years to come. There were actually valid arguments, that Edwin could not dispute, in favour of the plan—such as Mr. Ingleby’s loneliness, soon to be increased, and the discomfort that he had suffered as an elderly widower at the hands of a series of inefficient house-keepers. From every point of view the world would be justified in concluding that he was doing the correct and obvious thing. Why, then, should Edwin lie on his bed in the dark wetting his pillow with tears, and sick with shame?

No reason could assuage his suffering. However calmly he tried to consider the matter, the thought of his mother rose up in his mind; a vision of her, beautiful and pathetic, and indefinitely wronged, came to reinforce his indignation. He lit a candle and gazed for a long time at her photograph, the one that he had always kept in his desk at St. Luke’s and scarcely noticed for the last three years; and though he knew that she was dead and presumably beyond the reach of any human passion, the sight of her features filled him more than ever with this unconscionable resentment so devastating in its intensity. The portrait took him back to the tenderness that he remembered at the time of her death, and particularly that strange moment when he and his father had knelt together in the little room across the landing. The smell of Sanitas. . . .

And then he remembered another incident in the gloom of that brown room at the Holloway on the windy crown of Mendip, whence he had seen all the kingdoms of the earth. Thinking of this, he seemed to hear the voice of a very old woman, who said, “The Inglebys are always very tender in marriage. I’ve seen many of them that have lost their wives, and they always marry again.” How could she have known? And then the thought of a strange woman in the house, treading in the places where his mother’s steps had once moved, swept him off his feet again.

“I could never stay here,” he thought. “I could never stay here. . . . I should do something desperate and cruel and unreasonable. I couldn’t help myself. I must go. It’s a pity . . . but I must go. I couldn’t stay here. I simply couldn’t.”

With this determination in his mind, but without the least idea of the way in which it might be realised, he arrived at a state of comparative serenity, in which he could contemplate his mother’s photograph without so much passionate resentment at the slur that was being laid on her memory. Now he saw everything in terms of his new resolution. He saw, pathetically, the little bed in which he had slept for so many years, the shelves on which his favourite books were ranged, the piano and the sheaves of his mother’s music that he had managed to install in his room: all the small details that went together to create its atmosphere of homeliness.