The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

It was all very romantic and thrilling. Edwin, conscious now for the first time of the extreme foolhardiness of his racecourse adventure, felt himself a greater dog than ever. And then, when the stage was set, and the audience attuned to an atmosphere of tragedy by so much thunder-weather, Griffin, from whom the glamour of the heroic had been gradually fading in the shame of his captivity, achieved the dramatic. He bolted. With a ladder of knotted sheets he climbed down the waterspout and disappeared into open country. Griffin lived somewhere in Kent. In half a day he would reach home.

For Selby’s house it was a great morning. Edwin, in spite of his hatred of Griffin, shared in the general elation. Such private feuds were small concerns in the face of the common enemy. Douglas was flown with insolence.

“I knew old Griff would do them,” he said. “By God . . . that’s a man if you like. It’s the nastiest knock old Selby’s had in his life. Think of it . . . a chap with a weak heart like old Griff shinning down a waterspout!”

Edwin wondered if the meeting in the Big Schoolroom would be off, or whether, perhaps, it would be postponed and Griffin hauled back from the bosom of his family to go through with it.

“You silly ass,” said Douglas. “Of course they can’t fetch him back. He’s done them brown.”

But the morning went on without any alteration in the programme. At twelve o’clock the solemn procession began: the whole black-coated population of St. Luke’s filtering through narrow corridors and the wide folding doors into the big Schoolroom. The whole business was impressive; for nobody spoke and no sound came from the crowd but the drag of slowly-moving feet and arms that brushed one another. They were like a flock of sheep driven away from market on a narrow road between dusty hedges, for none of them knew what was coming. Rumour was busy with whispers.

Griffin had been found in a ditch with his leg broken and had been hauled back to fulfil his sentence. Like Monmouth, Edwin thought. Griffin, in company with the pale skivvy from “D” had been arrested by the police at Waterloo. Other rumours, less credible, as, for instance, that Cleaver, meeting a jockey friend of his in a little pub called the Grenadier in the Downs Road, had walked into a taproom full of School House bloods on Sunday morning. Indeed, these were strenuous days.

The school settled down. The Head, lean, crow-like, flapped the wings of his gown. He seemed to find it difficult to make a beginning, and while he waited for a word his left arm twitched. Then he began. It was obvious that his pause had been nothing more than a rhetorical trick designed to fix the attention of an audience already thrilled by uncertainty. He wasn’t at a loss for words at all. He boomed, he ranted, he bellowed, he rolled his “r’s” and his eyes. The masters, sitting at their high desks, remained discreet and rather bored . . . all except Mr. Leeming, to whom the orator appeared as an inspired prophet of God. For the subject of his harangue was Mr. Leeming’s own: Impurity; and the whole meeting the immediate result of Mr. Leeming’s investigations. The curtain had gone up with a most theatrical flourish upon the Great Smut Row.

The essence of the Head’s speech was a general threat. Certain things had been discovered; certain further inquiries were to be made; the fate of a large number of boys lay in the balance; more details were known, in all probability, than any of the victims suspected; to the youngest among them he made a special appeal; confession, immediate confession, would be the better part of valour; he looked to every member of the school to aid him in the task, the sacred duty, of purging St. Luke’s of this abominable thing. Indeed it is possible that he meant what he said. His port was bad, and he knew better than to drink it; but the heady vintage that he brewed from sonorous words knocked him over every time.

The meeting dissolved in silence. For the moment the school was impressed, less by the gravity of the charge than by its indefiniteness. The same evening brought tales of segregated suspects, of tearful and terrible interviews in the rooms of housemasters, of prefects suspended: of a veritable reign of terror—lettres de cachet and the rest of it—in Citizen Leeming’s house. “D” dormitory and the others in charge of the languid Selby suffered least. When evening came to set a term to rumours only two were missing—the black Douglas, and an insignificant inky creature of the name of Hearn, whom the threats of the headmaster had driven to some grubby confession. An atmosphere of immense relief fell upon the awed dormitory and found vent in a memorable “rag.”