The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“Of course, dear. . . .”

They went together to the room, and his father opened the door and pulled up one of the blinds. Mrs. Bagley, the charwoman who did odd work in the house and was an expert in this melancholy office, had drawn a clean white sheet over the bed. His mother lay there in a cotton nightdress with her hands folded in front of her, and her lips gently smiling. Even her cheeks were faintly flushed, but the rest of her face and her hands were of a waxen pallor. She looked very small and childlike. She looked like a small wax doll. In this frail and strangely beautiful creature Edwin could only recognise a shadow of the mother that he knew. It was a little girl that lay there, not his mother.

Edwin spoke in a whisper,—

“Should I kiss her?”

His father nodded and turned away.

But he did not kiss her as he had thought he would. For some reason he dared not, for he could not feel certain that it was she at all. He only touched her hands, the hands that he had always worshipped, with his fingers. They were cold; and still her lips smiled. The room was full of the odour of Sanitas which some one had sprayed or sprinkled over the floor. For the rest of his life the smell was one which Edwin hated; for in his mind it became the smell of death.

IV

On the evening after the funeral Edwin sat alone in the drawing-room. He sat there because the other room was still cumbered with the remnants of a melancholy repast: several leaves of mahogany had been dragged down from the dust of the attic and had lengthened the dining-room table to such an extent that there was scarcely room to move in it, and round this table, in the sunny afternoon, had clustered a large collection of people who smelt of black crape and spoke in lowered, gentle voices, out of respect for the woman whom, it seemed to Edwin, they had never known.

Everybody who entered the house—and there were many, for Mr. Ingleby was much respected in Halesby—wore the same grave air. Even the undertaker, a brisk little man with a fiery red beard and one shoulder lower than the other from the constant carrying of coffins, treated his daily task with the same sort of mute reverence. His face, at any rate, wore an expression that matched that of the mourners; and Edwin was only disillusioned as to the sincerity of his expression when he heard him swearing violently at the driver of the first mourning carriage. This moment of relaxation caused him to forget himself so far as to whistle a pantomime song as he crossed the drive.

The black-coated people in the dining-room did not hear him: they were far too busy being serious: and behind them, from time to time, Edwin could see the grey face of his father, with curiously tired and puzzled eyes. Puzzled . . . that was the only word for them. It was just as if the man were protesting, in all simplicity, against the unreason and injustice of the blow which had fallen on him. Edwin, savagely hating the presence of all these hushed, uninterested people, found in his father’s suffering face a sudden reinforcement to his anger. It was a shame, a damned, ghastly shame, that a simple man like that should be hit in the dark; and even more pathetic that he should be simple enough to take the sympathy of his neighbours at its face value. Edwin glowed with a new and protective love for his father. It was as well that some generous emotion should be born to take the place of his numb grief.