The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“Edwin. . . .” Aunt Laura clutched nervously at her breast. It was funny to see this big blowzy woman crumple up like that. She flopped down in a red plush chair and started crying softly in a thin voice. Edwin didn’t mind. Let her cry. She deserved it. Nothing of that kind could soften his indignant heart.

“Where’s father?” he asked at last.

“I don’t know. He’s upstairs somewhere,” she said between her sobs. “For goodness’ sake, Edwin, don’t go and say things like this to the poor man. We all have this trouble to bear. And we’ve had the strain of nursing her. Now, don’t be hasty,” she pleaded.

“All right,” said Edwin, and left her.

Upstairs on the landing he found a pale, shadowy figure in which he could scarcely recognise his father. Neither of them could speak at all. Edwin had been ready with the reproaches that had come to his lips in the presence of Aunt Laura; but he couldn’t do it. This man was too broken. He was face to face with a grief as great as his own. There were no words for either of them. The boy and the man clung together in each other’s arms, overcome with pity and with sorrow. On the landing, outside the door of the room where she lay dead, they stood together and cried quietly to each other. And now it seemed to Edwin as if pity for his father were overriding even the intensity of his own grief; for she had been everything to him, too, and for so many years. He felt that he would have done anything in the world to comfort this desolate man, whom he had always taken for granted and never really loved. But his mother had loved him. He wondered if they could do anything to assuage the bitterness of their loss by loving one another. They were two people left alone with nothing else in the world but each other. Why not . . .? That, he thought, was what his mother would have wished.

He felt his father’s tears on his forehead, the roughness of his father’s grey beard. He felt the man’s body quivering with sobs, and the arms which clutched his body as if that were the only loved thing left to him in life. They went together into the little room that had always been Edwin’s, and there they knelt together beside the bed. He didn’t exactly know why they knelt, but kneeling there at his side, with his arm still clasped about his waist, he supposed that his father was praying; and though Edwin could not understand what good prayer could do, it seemed to him a simple and a beautiful thing. It made him feel that he loved his father more than ever. He wished that he could pray himself. He tried to pray . . . for what? There was nothing left in this world for him to pray for. At last his father rose to his feet in the dim room, and Edwin rose with him. He spoke, and the tears still choked his voice and his bearded lip trembled. “Edwin,” he said, “I shall never be able to get over this. I’m broken. . . . My life . . . my life has . . .” He stopped.

“You don’t know what she was to me, Eddie. I can’t realise, Eddie, there are only two of us left. We must help each other to bear it. We must be brave.”

Strange that a phrase which had sounded like cant on the lips of Aunt Laura should now seem the truest and most natural thing imaginable.

“We . . . we were like children together,” said his father.

Again they stood for a little while in silence. At last Edwin, still gripping his father’s arm, said,—“Father, may I see her?”