The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

I

The next evening, when Edwin and his father reached Bristol, a steady drizzle had set in from the west. They pushed their bicycles out of the station yard at Temple Meads and rode between slippery tramway lines towards a small hotel, a stone’s-throw from Bristol Bridge, where Mr. Ingleby had decided to put up for the night. “It’s no use trying to ride on to Wringford this evening,” he said, “for the wind will be against us and it’s collar work most of the way. I think we can be comfortable here to-night. I used to know the landlord of this place. He was a Mendip man.”

The Mendip landlord, of course, had been dead for many years, having made his descent by the route that is particularly easy for licensed victuallers; but it happened that his daughter had married the new tenant, and this woman, a comfortable creature who spoke with the slight burr that appeared in Mr. Ingleby’s speech in times of anger or any other violent emotion, welcomed them for her father’s sake, and gave them a bare but cleanly room on the second story.

The windows of this room looked down obliquely on to the tidal basin of the Avon, thronged with small coasting tramps and sailing ships: and Edwin was content to stay there watching them; for he had never seen the traffic of a harbour before. It was still too wet to think of going out onto the quays; but even from a distance the misty spectacle, enveloped in veils of driving rain, was romantic.

Edwin watched while a pair of busy tugboats pushed and pulled and worried the hull of a wooden schooner in to mid-stream. The water was high, and she was due to catch the falling tide to Avonmouth. Whither was she bound? He did not know. Perhaps her way lay down channel to pick up a cargo of bricks from Bridgewater. Perhaps she was setting out at that moment to essay the icy passage of the Horn. Perhaps, in another four months, she would have doubled the Cape and lie wallowing in the torpid seas about Zanzibar. It inspired Edwin to think that he was standing at one of the gateways of the world. From the site of the stone bridge above their lodging, just four hundred years ago, the Venetian pilot, Cabot, had cast loose in the selfsame way, and sailed westward with his three sons, Lewes, Sebastyan, and Sancto, to the mainland of unknown America. To-day, from the same wet quays, other adventurous prows were stretching forth to the ends of the earth. To China . . . To Africa. Here begins the sea that ends not till the world’s end.

With his accustomed curiosity as to the origins of his own emotions Edwin was not long in deciding that his growing eagerness to see the beauty and strangeness of the world must have sprung from the fact that his ancestors had lived upon the shores of this great waterway. From Highberrow, his father had told him, you could see the whole expanse of the Bristol Channel. From Highberrow, perhaps, some forbear of his own had watched the caravels of Cabot setting down channel with the ebb tide. He was bewildered with the splendour of his heritage. It was impossible to imagine that Sir Joseph Hingston’s family had the least share in such a romantic past.

In the evening, after supper, the rain ceased, and Mr. Ingleby proposed that they should go for a walk through the city. He had known it well in his youth, and it seemed to fill him with an almost childish delight to show Edwin the things that he remembered. They passed through many narrow winding streets where the overhanging houses of the merchant venturers stood, and ancient churches had been huddled into corners by the growing city. “I remember every inch of it,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a happy laugh. Again they crossed the river, and skirting a line of shipping warehouses, now cavernous and deserted, they plunged into a sordid quarter full of sailors’ drinking dens that smelled of rum, and marine stores that smelled of tar.

“Where are we going?” Edwin asked.

“You’ll see in a minute,” said Mr. Ingleby. And, in a minute, Edwin saw.

They had emerged from the huddled houses into a large open space, and in the midst of it rose a miracle of beauty such as Edwin had never seen before: a structure too delicate in its airy loveliness to have been built of stone; so fragile in its strength that it seemed impossible that the slender flying buttresses should support it. The shadowy spire could be seen dimly piercing a sky that had been washed to clearness by the rain; but inside the church, for some reason unknown, the lamps had been lighted, and the whole building glowed as though it had been one immense lantern. There could not be another miracle of this kind in the world, Edwin thought.