The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“You look ’ot, young man.”

It was hot, Edwin panted.

“Bloody ’ot,” said the man in the wagonette. As an afterthought he took a bottle of beer, about a quarter full, from his pocket. The cork came out with a pop. “Gas,” said the fat man, and chuckled. “Gas . . . eh?” He took a swig, and with the froth fringing his moustache, offered the bottle to Edwin. Edwin shook his head.

“You won’t?” said the fat man. “You’re workin’ ’arder than I am. Oh, well, if ’e won’t,” he continued dreamily, and finished the bottle. Then he pitched it over the hedge.

The dust was terrible. On either side of the track the hedges and banks were as white as the road. The horses pulled well, and even hanging on the step Edwin found it difficult to keep up with them. At the crest of the hill the driver whipped them into a trot. Edwin let go the step and was cursed fluently by the coster for standing in the way of his donkey-cart. His friend waved him good-bye. He found himself caught up in a stream of other walkers, hurrying in a bee-line for the grand stand, now distantly visible with the royal standard drooping above it. Behind him and in front the black snake of that procession stretched, sliding, literally, over the shiny convolutions of the Down that the feet of the foremost had polished, and moving in a sort of vapour of its own, compact of beer and strong tobacco and intolerable human odours. From the crown of the Downs Edwin looked back at the playing-fields, the tiny white figures at the nets and in the fives-court that sometimes stopped in their play to watch the black serpent in whose belly he now moved. They seemed very near—far too near to be comfortable; and even though he knew that nobody down there could possibly see him, he felt happier when a billow of the Down hid the plain from sight.

It was only when he reached the grand stand, losing himself in the thick of the crowd that clustered about it, that he began to feel safe. He looked at his watch and found that he had a quarter of an hour to spare. A little old man in seedy black clothes grabbed his elbow fiercely. “Young sir, young sir,” he said, “take my advice . . . gratis; free; for nothing.” He laughed, and Edwin saw gray bristles stretched on his underlip. “Take my advice. Never expose your watch at a race-meeting. Myself . . . I’ve learnt it from long experience, my own and my friends’. . . . Never even take a watch when I go racing. No, I leave it at home. A beautiful half-hunter by Benson of Ludgate Hill, with enamelled face. Yes. . . . You take my advice. A thing to always remember. Yes. . . .”

Edwin seriously thanked him. A roar went up from the crowd. “The Prince. The Prince has entered the Royal Box,” said the old man. “God bless him.” He raised a dusty top-hat. An extraordinary gesture for this wrinkled, gnomish creature. “Yes,” he mumbled; “a handsome time-piece. . . . Benson of Ludgate Hill. A very prominent firm. We shall see nothing here. You follow me.”

Edwin followed. More beer, more tobacco, more of the curious composite smell, more positively vegetable than human, that he had begun to associate with trampled pieces of paper, probably the debris of bags that had once held fruit of some kind. The little man pushed his way deftly through the crowd. He was so small and inoffensive that nobody seemed to notice him; and indeed the leading characteristics of this crowd’s vast consciousness seemed to be good humour. The bookies in their white hats, the many-buttoned costers, the sweating men in black coats, the very waiters in the refreshment tents, staggering under leaning towers of beef plates, seemed determined to enjoy themselves in spite of the heat and the smell of their neighbours under the white-hot sky.

Edwin, too, forgot his anxieties. The vastness of the crowd subtly shielded him. He felt newly secure, and his spirit was caught up into its excitement and good humour. He even turned down his collar. And all the time his mind exulted in a queer sense of clarity, an intoxication due, perhaps, to his successful daring. In this state he found all his surroundings vivid and amusing; all colours and sounds came to him with a heightened brilliancy. He smiled, and suddenly found that a young gipsy woman with her head in a bright handkerchief was smiling back at him. He thought it was jolly that people should smile like that. He thought what jolly good luck it was meeting his guide, the shiny shoulders of whose frock coat he saw in front of him. His quick mind had placed the little man already: a solicitor’s clerk in some ancient worm-eaten Inn of Court, a relic of the dark, lamp-litten London of Dickens: a city of yellow fog and cobbled pavements shining in the rain: of dusty, cobwebbed law-stationers’ windows and cosy parlours behind them where kettles were singing on the hob of a toasting fire, and punch was mixed at night.

It seemed to him that he could have met no more suitable person than his friend; for really all this racing crowd were making a sort of Cockney holiday of the kind that the greatest Victorian loved most dearly. He began to find words for it all. He must find words for it, for it would be such fun writing to his mother about it. If he dared. . . . It would be time enough to write a letter about it when the business was finished without disaster. There was always the possibility that he would be found out and expelled. Even if that should happen, he thought, he would like to tell his mother. . . .