The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

She sighed. “I’m so glad, Eddie. I did want to show it you.”

“But why were you in such a hurry?”

“It was my last chance of showing it to you.”

“Whatever do you mean, darling?”

She turned her face away. Now it was quite dark. “I’m really dreaming,” he thought, “and this is a sort of stage on which they can do lightning tricks like that.” But there was no doubt about it being Uffdown. All round the sky the pit-fires of the black-country were flickering out. And though he couldn’t see her face, he could feel her soft hand in his. “At any rate, I’ve written . . .” she said at last.

That was the sentence which he carried in his mind when he awoke. A letter. But she didn’t usually write to him before Sunday, and it was now only Saturday. Yet, when he came into Hall for breakfast a letter was lying on his plate. There was something so strange about the whole business that he was almost afraid to open it. He had a sudden, awful intuition that she was dead. Ridiculous, of course, for dead people didn’t write letters. Smiling at himself, yet scarcely reassured, he opened the letter and read it.

“My Darling Boy (she wrote),—Did you really make fifteen? You must be getting on. Aunt Laura has just been in to tea, and we talked such a lot that I have only just time to write this before father goes down to business and can post it. I have some very interesting news for you. The other afternoon Mrs. Willis of Mawne came in to see me. She and Lilian are going to Switzerland for a month this summer, and now she suggests that I should join them there. It won’t be just yet, and I think—no, I’m sure—that I should be back again before your holidays. Father wants me to go. I haven’t been very well, and the doctor says he’s sure it would do me good. All my life I’ve wanted to see Switzerland. I’m most awfully excited about it, Eddie, and father says he can spare me. Won’t it be wonderful? They are going about the end of June. I won’t forget that postal order, but I’m rather poor myself just at present. Eddie, do you keep my letters? I think I should like you to. The double stocks which father planted in the long bed are just coming out.

“Good-bye, my darling,

“Your loving
“Mother.”

Of course nothing, in spite of the news of the Swiss excursion, could be more ordinary. That would be wonderful for her . . . of course it would. And yet, in spite of all these reasonable convictions he couldn’t get that dream out of his head. Something, he felt sure, was going wrong.

He tried to analyse the source of his disquietude. “Perhaps I’m jealous,” he thought. He was most awfully jealous of anything that other people had to do with his mother, and, anyway, he didn’t know these Willis people very well. They were new friends of hers: a family of wealthy iron-masters whose works had suddenly risen in the year of the Franco-Prussian war, and were now slowly but gigantically expanding. They lived at Mawne Hall, a sad but pretentious mansion of the departed Pomfrets, of which Edwin knew only the wrought-iron gates at the bottom of a steep drive. They had a son, Edward, of very much the same age as himself, but the Willises had no great educational ambitions (that was where Edwin’s mother came in), and had sent him to the ancient but decaying Grammar School of Halesby, an impossible concern in the eyes of any public-schoolboy. The Willises had pots of money. Here again Edwin suspected them. It rather looked as if they had “taken up” his mother; and nobody on earth had the right to do that. He hated the Willises (and particularly Edward) in advance. He always hated people he hadn’t met when he heard too much about them. He thought that the new intimacy probably had something to do with his Aunt Laura, who was diffuse and fussy and ornate, and not a patch on his mother. Nobody was a patch on his mother . . .

He couldn’t get rid of his anxiety, and so, in the heat of the moment, before morning school, he answered her letter. “Oh, darling, don’t go to Switzerland with a lot of strangers. If you do go, I feel that I shall never see you again,” he wrote. He knew it wouldn’t be any good. She couldn’t reasonably do anything but smile at his fancies. But he couldn’t help it. He even took the trouble to post the letter in the box at the Grand Entrance, so as to make certain that he couldn’t change his mind.