The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“I scarcely took any notice of what he said. I only knew that I was going to lose the only friend I had. He died early next morning, and I was just like a dog: I couldn’t bring myself to leave him.

“I stayed in the house . . . you see, it seemed as if I couldn’t go anywhere else, until after the funeral. Then the lawyers told me that he had left me a hundred and fifty pounds in his will. It seemed to me a tremendous lot of money. I didn’t realise what a little way it would go; but it seemed to make my dreams possible. I would be a doctor, like him . . . as near like him as it was possible to be. That was my first idea; but then I remembered what he had told me, and decided that it would be better to become a chemist first. In that way I could make sure of my living.

“I left Axcombe. It was necessary that I should go to some big city to study and more or less by accident I chose North Bromwich. It was a tremendous change for me who had lived all my life in the country: I was very lonely and awkward at first. But that wasn’t the worse of it. I began to discover my own ignorance: to see that, as a matter of fact, I knew nothing but the homely routine of the doctor’s surgery, the names of a few drugs and their doses, a smattering of Latin, and the botany of the local wild flowers. I knew nothing of life. I couldn’t even pull out a tooth without breaking it.

“It came as an awful shock to me. I began to see the reasons of the doctor’s cautious advice. He realised that I had a great deal of the dreamer in me. I rather think that you have it too, Eddie. No doubt it comes to both of us from those strange, dark, mining-people. I saw that I should have to pull myself together and drive myself hard if my ambitions were not to end in disaster. I had to pinch and scrape. I had to set out and learn the most elementary things from the beginning. I had thought that my fortune was made. Perhaps it was a wise thing that the doctor had left me no more money. It taught me that nobody could make my fortune but myself.

“It was a hard fight, I can tell you: for while I was building my schemes for the future I had to provide for the present. You see I had soon realised that it wouldn’t do to spend any of my little capital. I won’t tell you now how I lived. It would be too long a story. But I can assure you that I had a hard time in North Bromwich, getting all my dreams knocked out of me one by one, thirsting—literally thirsting for clean air and country ways.

“It sounds rather like a tract, but it’s quite true to say that town life has a lot of temptations too for a country boy. I could see everywhere the power of money and the luxuries that money could purchase without realising the work that money represents, and all this was very disconcerting to a boy of my temperament with more than a hundred pounds in the bank. Still, as it happened, nothing went wrong. In the day-time I worked with my hands. At night I tried to educate myself, very slowly, very hardly—for in those days poor people had not the opportunities of education that are open to them in these. I sometimes wonder if people to-day realise the difference.

“I worked on quietly for years, never wasting a penny or an hour. Don’t take it for virtue in me. It wasn’t that. It was just that the old doctor’s influence on me had been sound and I couldn’t afford to do otherwise. As a matter of fact I suppose there must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men in that city in exactly the same situation. Only I didn’t know one of them. I was lonely . . . absolutely solitary. I never heard an accent of my own country’s speech. I never saw a patch of real green or a sky that hadn’t smoke in it. I made my friends in books: not the kind of books that you’ve been brought up on—I hadn’t time for poetry or frills of that kind: books of solid facts: knowledge for the sake of knowledge. You see all the things that you would take for granted, having known them as a birthright, so to speak, were new and unknown to me. One book was a sort of gospel to me. It was called Self Help, written by a man named Smiles.

“So when you hear of a self-made man it may mot mean much; but a self-educated man, I can tell you, means a good deal. In the end, of course, I gradually came within sight of my ambition. From a van-driver to a firm of wholesale chemists I became an assistant, an apprentice in their retail house. I took my examinations. I qualified as a dispensing chemist. Later, by a curious piece of chance, I met your mother. We became friends. She was the first person in whom I had confided since I left Mendip. She seemed to understand. It was a strange thing for me, after all those years, to be able to talk about myself. I can’t tell you what a wonderful relief it was. And then we found that we loved one another and married. We went out into the country near North Bromwich to find a village to make a home in, and we came across Halesby. The place was very different from what it is now twenty years ago. We were very happy. No. . . . I won’t talk about it. But you can see now, that behind your life there were quite a lot of complicated things that don’t appear on the surface. It’s really better that you should know them.”

“It makes me love you, father,” said Edwin. “Because, of course, it is all so wonderful. I expect if I had been you I should still have been in Axcombe. I don’t think I could have done what you did.”

“You might have done a great deal more. There’s no knowing what’s in us until we are tried. That sounds like Samuel Smiles; but it’s quite true. At any rate it’s time we were asleep, boy. I think the rain has stopped.”