The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

The high summer weather held. Never was there such a June. Edwin, in the joy of perfect health, would get up very early in the morning when the dew lay on the roses, and run in a sweater and flannel trousers down the lane and over the field to the mill-pond where he and his mother had walked so often in the evenings of spring. Here, where the water was deepest and great striped perch stole slowly under the camp-shedding, he would strip and bathe, lying on his back in the water so that low sunbeams came dancing over the surface into his eyes that were on the level of the flat water-lily leaves and their yellow balls now breaking into cups.

Afterwards when he would sit glowing on the bank, the sun would be rising and growing warmer every minute, and this new warmth would seem to accentuate the odour of the place that was compact of the yellow water-lily’s harsh savour, the odour of soaked wood, and another, more subtly blended: the composite smell of water that is neither fast nor stagnant, the most provocative and the coolest smell on earth.

On the way home he would sometimes get a whiff of the miller’s cowhouse, when the door was thrown open, and from within there came a sound of quiet breathing or of milk hissing in a pail. And sometimes, from the garden, the scent of a weed bonfire would drift across his path. All things smelt more poignantly at this early hour of the morning. All things smell more wonderfully early in life. . . .

With these wonders the day began; but stranger things lay in store for him. He revisited all his old haunts: the tangled woods and gardens of Shenstone on the hill-side: the ruins of the Cistercian abbey on whose fall the poet had moralised, the little chapel that marked the grave of the murdered Mercian prince. His bicycle took him farther. Westward . . . always westward.

In those days it always seemed to him as if the mountainous country that his mother had shown him that evening on Uffdown, rolling away into remote and cloudy splendours, must be the land of his heart’s desire: and though he could never reach it in a day, he managed several times to cross the Severn and even to scale the foothills upon the farther bank from which he could see the Clee Hills rising in a magnificent bareness, shaking the woods and pastures from their knees. And these distant hills would tempt him to think of the future and other desires of his heart: in the near distance Oxford, where Layton and other demigods in grey flannel trousers abode, and beyond the fine untravelled world, rivers and seas and forests, desolate wonderful names. China . . . Africa . . . “Some day,” he said to himself, “I will go to Africa. . . .”

In this way he began to think of his present adventures as a kind of prelude to others remoter and more vast. One day he had ridden farther away than usual, and having taken his lunch at the bridge town of Bewdley, he pushed his bicycle up the immense hill that overshadows the town along the road to Tenbury. For all its steepness this mountain road was strangely exhilarating, the air that moved above it grew so clean and clear. Below him, between the road and the river, lay the mighty remnants of the Forest of Wyre.

His way tumbled again to a green valley, where no mountains were to be seen; and while Edwin was deciding to turn off down the first descending lane and explore the forest, he heard a sound of spades and pickaxes and came upon a group of navvies, several of them stripped to the waist in the sun, working at a cutting of red earth that was already deep on either side of the road. For the most part they worked in silence; but one of them, a little one-eyed man, with a stiff soldierly back, encouraged them with a string of jokes. They called him “Gunner,” and the elaboration with which his chest had been tattooed with nautical symbols led Edwin to suppose that he was a sailor. When he saw Edwin leaning on his bicycle and watching the work, he called out to him, asking if he wanted a job. Edwin shook his head. “I reckon,” said the Gunner, “that a foreman’s job would be more in your line, Gaffer. It’s a fine sight to see other people working. The harder the better.”

The men laughed and stretched their backs, leaning, on their spades, and Edwin could see how a fine dew of sweat had broken out under the hair on their chests. It seemed to him a noble sight. “What are you working at?” he asked. “Is it a railway?”

“To hell with your railway,” said the Gunner. “Who would make a railway heading for the river Severn? No . . . It’s a pipe-track. This here’s the Welsh water scheme.”

“Where is it going to?”