The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

Together they passed the level of the grand stand. This huge erection of white-painted wood provided the only constant landmark, for Edwin was not tall enough to see above the shoulders of the adult crowd in which he was moving. Now they had left the grand stand behind it seemed that they must surely be crossing the course. And then a bell clanged and the crowd parted like a great wave of the Red Sea in pictures of the Exodus. Edwin found himself clinging to the coat-tails of his friend, and the little man, in turn, hanging on, as if for his life, to a whitewashed post from which the next wave would have sucked him back. The crowd swayed gently, settling down and leaving them stranded upon the very edge of the course. “That’s a trick worth knowing,” said Edwin’s friend.

Opposite them the stands, well known to him on Sunday walks as a vast skeletal erection, stood clothed in flesh and blood: tier upon tier of human faces packed one above the other looked down on him. Edwin had never before realised how pale the faces of men and women were. From the midst of them there rose a ceaseless murmur of human speech, shrilling occasionally like the voices of starlings when they whirl above an autumn reed bed, and then, as suddenly, still. For one extraordinary moment they were nearly silent. “They’re off!” said the little man. . . .

Again the murmur of the stands arose. A bookie just behind them was doing his best to get in a last few bets, entreating, proclaiming passionately the virtues of “the old firm.” His red face lifted above the crowd, and while he shouted saliva dribbled from his mouth. A curious roaring sound came from the other side of the horse-shoe course a mile or more away. He stopped with his mouth open in the middle of a sentence. Something had happened over there. Everybody, even those who couldn’t see anything, turned in the direction from which the sound came. Edwin turned with them. He couldn’t imagine why. And when he turned his eyes gazed straight into those of Miss Denning, the matron of the College Sanatorium, marvellously dressed for the occasion and leaning upon the innocent arm of Mr. Heal. Thank God, Mr. Heal was short-sighted! Edwin felt himself blushing. He knew for certain that she had seen and recognised him; for his sick headaches had often taken him to the Sanatorium and he had always been rather a favourite of hers. She stared straight at him and her eyes never wavered. Obviously the game was up. He fancied that her lips smiled faintly. Never was a smile more sinister.

Edwin had an impulse to bolt . . . simply to turn tail and run at his hardest straight back to the college. He couldn’t do that. Between him and escape, an impassable river, lay the parabola of yellow grass over which the Birches was even now being run. Feeling almost physically sick, he slipped round to the other side of his companion. He wished that gnomish creature had been bigger. “They’re at the corner . . . if you lean out you can see . . . look, they’re coming into the straight . . . Airs and Graces leading. Down they come. The finest sight in the civilised world.”

Edwin didn’t see them. He saw nothing but the phantom of Miss Denning’s eyes, her faint and curiously sinister smile. He wished to goodness the race were over. Now everybody was shouting. The stands rose with a growl like great beasts heaving in the air. Something incredibly swift and strepitant passed him in a whirl of wind and dust. The crowd about him and the heaving stands broke into an inhuman roar. The little old man beside him was jumping up and down, throwing his top-hat into the air and catching it again. The whole world had gone shouting and laughing mad. Edwin heard on a hundred lips the name of Airs and Graces. It meant nothing to him. Now he could only think of escape; and as the crowd bulged and burst once more over the course he made a dash for the other side.

Mounted police were pressing back the tide; but Edwin was small, and quick enough to get over. He pushed and wriggled his way through masses to which there seemed to be no end. Only in the rear of the stands the density of the crowd thinned. Then he broke into a run and though he was soaked with sweat and his head was aching fiercely, he did not stop running until a billow of the Down had hidden the stands from sight.

In a little hollow littered with tins and other debris, and choked with nettles and some other hot-smelling herb, he lay, recovering his breath, and, for the first time, thinking, beside a diminished dew-pond of dirty water. He was miserable. Fate now brooded over him as heavily as the white-hot sky, and he couldn’t, for the life of him, imagine why. It was ridiculous, in any case, that the mere sight of a woman’s eyes should have worked so extraordinary a miracle. Yet this was no less than the truth. Suddenly, without a shadow of warning, all the happiness and light and colour had gone out of his adventure. That which had been, at least, magnificent, had now become childish or nearly silly. Reflecting, he couldn’t be satisfied that anything was changed. Nothing had really changed except himself; and he didn’t want to admit that he had changed either. No, he hadn’t changed. Only his mind was just like the dewpond at his feet in which the burning sky was mirrored. Some days it would be blue and white and others black with thunder. But the pool would be just the same. “I oughtn’t to be more miserable now than I was when I came up here; and then, apart from being a bit funky, I felt ripping.” None of these sober reflections relieved him. All the rest of the way back he felt hunted and miserable, and something very near to panic seized him at the point when he reached the college palings.

At the corner, looking horribly scared, Widdup was waiting.

“Thank goodness you’ve come,” he said. Then he suddenly went white.

“What’s the matter?” cried Edwin.