The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“Surely you’re not going so soon?” she said.

And he stayed. It was all delightfully intimate and domestic. These people seemed to possess the rare faculty of putting a visitor as shy as Edwin at his ease. Mrs. Beaucaire did most of the talking, enlarging on Rosie’s devotion to the parson brother, regretting that circumstance, and possibly the unreasonable prejudice of country people against theatrical connections, had deprived him of the family living: and Rosie listened quietly, more compelling in her demure silences than Mrs. Beaucaire at her most impressive.

Once or twice in the afternoon that lady tactfully left them, returning, each time with a renewed vigour and a scent that suggested the combination of eau-de-cologne and brandy. These solitary moments were very precious to Edwin. Neither of them spoke more than a few words, but the air between them seemed charged with emotion. It was six o’clock when he left Prince Albert’s Place.

“You won’t forget us, will you?” said Mrs. Beaucaire with enthusiasm. “It will be so nice for Rosie to have some one to take her to rehearsal. I don’t like her mixing with the boys in the company. It isn’t the thing. And we don’t happen to have any really nice friends in the Midlands. In the North it would have been quite different.”

A delirious week slipped by. In spite of every resolution Edwin had found it impossible to work. His new lodging was not inspiring; but this was only one of the excuses that he invented to salve his conscience. He knew the real reason for this divine, unreasonable restlessness. Even if it were to wreck his chances in the final examination it could not be avoided, and there was no reason why it should be excused. He knew that he was in love, and before this unquestionable miracle he abased himself.

Mrs. Beaucaire, now satisfied that she could indulge a “headache” and take to her bed as often as she chose, did not question his presence at Prince Albert’s Place: she was even ready on occasion to treat it with a mild facetiousness. Rosie, who lapped up adoration as naturally as a kitten takes to milk, treated it as a matter of course. Edwin rather wished that she wouldn’t take as a matter of course the most wonderful thing in the world. There was a passivity in her acquiescence that filled him with a fear that she was used to this sort of thing or even a little bored by it. She mopped up his devotions with an ease that would have been disconcerting if he had not always been bemused by her beauty. Surely it was enough that she should be beautiful!

In the morning—Mrs. Beaucaire always had a headache of another kind next day—Edwin would escort Rosie to her rehearsal at the theatre. He became familiar with the frowsty box in which the lame stage-doorkeeper sat like an obscene spider guarding the baize-covered board on which the company’s letters were kept. The man came to know him and would pass him in through the swinging doors with a peculiarly evil leer. Sometimes, at the stage door they would become involved in a mass of patchouli-scented chorus, and Edwin would thrill at the dignity and refinement with which Rosie, in her white fox furs, would slip through this vulgar tumult.

So to the stage with its vast cobwebbed walls, its huge echoes and the mysterious darkness of the flies, where looped ropes and grimy festoons of forgotten scenery hung still as seaweed in a deep sea. There, in the sour and characteristic odour of an empty stage, Edwin would wait for her in a little alcove of the whitewashed wall in which iron cleats were piled, and the unmeaning murmur of the rehearsal would come to him mingled with the shrill voice of the producer, who ended every sentence with the words “my dear,” or “old boy,” and the noise of the carpenter hammering wood in the flies. His original acquaintance, Miss Latham, discreetly avoided him, but the comedian, Bertie Flood, seemed inclined to be familiar. One morning he dragged Edwin off to his dressing room for a smoke. He sat with his legs on either side of a chair, his fawn-coloured bowler on the back of his head, looking more than ever like a bookie.

“Well, old boy,” he said, “how goes it? How’s the little Beaucaire?”

“She’s all right, as far as I know,” said Edwin, who was inclined to resent the description.