The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“Well, while I was working at Cold Harbour, my mother died. I forgot to tell you that Grannie had died some years before, and her cottage under Silbury had been left empty—there was no one living in Highberrow to fill it—and was already tumbling into ruins. I haven’t told you about your grandmother—my mother. I don’t know that I can tell you much. I think she was in some ways a little hard. I don’t know. . . . I thought the world of her, and perhaps it was my father’s difficult nature that made her seem harder than she was. Besides, being brought up with Grannie, I was a sort of stranger to her. I don’t know how father came across her. There’s no doubt about she was a superior woman. If you’re still feeling a little sore about your social origin, Eddie, you can console yourself with the fact that she had a cousin who was a solicitor—or was it a solicitor’s clerk?—somewhere near London. At any rate, poor soul, she died. She was ill for several months, and I, being the youngest, had to stay at home and nurse her. It was in that way that I met Dr. Marshall. . . .

“I’ll tell you about him in a moment; but thinking of the days of my mother’s death puts me in mind of a strange thing that happened at the time that will show you what sort of man your grandfather was. Early on in the family there had been a girl that died to whom my mother was particularly devoted; and a little before the end—she knew that it couldn’t be many weeks—mother told my father that she would like to be buried in a particular corner of the churchyard near to this daughter of theirs.

“Father never spoke of it. He rarely spoke of anything. But I suppose he took it in all the same. Anyway, when she was dead, the old sexton came up to see father about the grave, and he told him where she had said she wanted to lie. The next night the sexton came up again. I can see him now—a funny, old-fashioned little man with red whiskers—and said it couldn’t be done, because the soil was so shallow at that particular point. I can see my father now. He hadn’t been drinking; but be flew suddenly into such a black rage that the poor little gravedigger (Satell was his name) ran out frightened for his life. I think I was pretty frightened too, for father went out after him carrying one of the great iron bars that the miners use for drilling. I thought for a moment that the loss of mother had turned his head. It hadn’t. He just went there and then, in the night, to the churchyard, and worked away with his mining tools at the rock that poor old Satell said he couldn’t dig. He bored his holes and he blasted the rock with the black powder they used in those days, and he dug my mother’s grave in the place where she wanted it. You see what a strange man he was! You may say what you like, Eddie—I’ve often thought of it since—but that was a grandfather worth having.”

“Yes . . . he was worth having,” Edwin agreed.

“But I was speaking of Dr. Marshall,” his father continued. “He was the beginning of my new life. But for the accident of my mother’s illness I don’t suppose I should ever have met him. During the last month he came fairly often: not that he could do much good for her, poor thing, but because she was—it’s a wretched phrase—a superior woman, and because no doubt she liked to talk to him, and he knew it. Practice in Highberrow can’t have been very profitable; though I’m sure that my father paid him every penny that he owed him. He was that kind of man.

“And when she died, Dr. Marshall took a fancy to me. I could tell you a good deal about him if it were worth while. He was a physician of the old school, learned in experience rather than in books. It is probable that he made mistakes; but I’m equally certain that he learned by them. The week after mother died he asked your grandfather if he could have me to wash bottles and make myself generally useful in his surgery at Axcombe. And my father didn’t refuse. It would have been unlike him if he had done so; for I think his idea in life was to let every individual work out his own salvation for himself. It was a good plan, for it made the responsibility definite. . . .

“So I went to Axcombe to Dr. Marshall’s house. There was plenty of hard work in it. I think a country doctor earns a poor living more honestly than most men. I had to share the doctor’s work—getting up early in the morning (that was no hardship to a miner’s son)—to clean up the surgery (and I can tell you it took some cleaning), to turn out of bed in the middle of the night to harness the pony if the message that called him took him over roads, or to saddle the cob if the hill tracks were too rough for wheels.

“Sometimes I had long night journeys on my own; for the doctor, in spite of his practical head for dealing with disease, was curiously unmethodical and would often leave behind the particular instrument that he wanted most, and in the middle of the night a boy of my own age from one of the hill villages would come battering at the door as though his life depended on it. And they’d go on battering, you know, as if they thought that the sound of it would make me get up more quickly. Perhaps it did: at any rate I can remember scrambling downstairs in the dark and reading the notes that the doctor sent by candlelight: and then I would turn out, half asleep, and walk over the hills above Axcombe when the gorge was swimming to the brim with fine milky mist and a single step, if one were silly enough to go dreaming, would have sent one spinning down, a sheer four hundred feet like the hunting king in the legend. I’m forgetting that you don’t know the legend and have never seen the gorge. . . .

“Still, I shall never forget those strange night-journeys. I don’t think I had begun to appreciate Mendip until I walked the hills at night. I found that I could think so clearly, and I was just beginning, you see, to have so much to think about. Books. . . .

“At Highberrow, in my father’s cottage, there were only two books altogether: the Bible, and a tract by Miss Hannah More called ‘The Religion of the Fashionable World.’ But Dr. Marshall’s house at Axcombe was crammed with books: rubbish, most of them, I expect; but printed books; and whenever I was not working I was reading. It was the pure excitement of attaining knowledge of any kind that made me read; and of course I wasted a great deal of valuable time in ways that were unprofitable. The doctor did not help me much; he was far too busy to worry much about my education; but I know that he approved of my eagerness, and liked to see me reading. I used to sleep in the loft above the stable in those days, and I know that my candles made him rather nervous of fire. But he did help me, in his own way. He put me on to a little Latin, with the strictly practical idea of making it more easy for me to dispense the prescriptions that he wrote in the old manner without abbreviations; and he also introduced me to another book that I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of: called Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne.”