THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN

BY FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG AUTHOR OF “MARCHING ON TANGA,” ETC.

NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 881 FIFTH AVENUE

p. ivCopyright, 1920, By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

First printing

March, 1920

Second printing

March, 1920

Third printing

September, 1920

Printed in the United States of America

p. vTo

Thomas Brett Young, M.D.

WITH THE LOVE AND ADMIRATION OF HIS SON

p. viiCONTENTS

BOOK I

CHAPTER

PAGE

I.

MURDERER’S CROSS

1

II.

GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY

16

III.

THE GREEN TREES

27

IV.

MIDSUMMER

42

V.

AIRS AND GRACES

57

VI.

THUNDER WEATHER

69

VII.

IMPURITY

86

VIII.

HOMEWARDS

107

IX.

THE DARK HOUSE

124

X.

THRENODY

153

XI.

THE THRESHOLD

184

XII.

THE HILLS

211

BOOK II.

I.

THE CITY OF IRON

249

II.

MORTALITY BEHOLD

272

III.

CARNIVAL

296

p. viiiIV.

SCIENCE

324

V.

ROMANCE

346

VI.

THE DRESSER

372

VII.

THE CLERK

403

VIII.

LOWER SPARKDALE

435

IX.

EASY ROW

460

X.

WHITE ROSES

487

p. ixBOOK I

p. xThe green trees, when I saw them first through one of the gates, transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy,—they were such strange and wonderful things. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars,—and all the world was mine,—and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. Thomas Traherne.

p. 1CHAPTER I MURDERER’S CROSS

I

Above and beyond the zone of villas, some still white with newly-mixed mortar and the latest unadorned by more than twelve-foot tendrils of ampelopsis or rambling roses, the downs bent their bow to the sky. The horizon loomed so smooth and vast that the plantations of pine and beech which fringed the summits were powerless to break the nobility and purpose of its contour, etched gray-black against the hem of a thunder-cloud that was of the colour of ink. Between the banks a chalk road climbed: an aspiring road, felted in the trodden parts with dust but cross-veined with flinty gutters through which rain poured, like London milk, in stormy weather. A smell of hot earth was in the air. The turf at the wayside was parched and slippery, so that Edwin Ingleby, plodding up the slope, was forced to keep to the white roadway by the slipperiness of his boot-leather. A rather pitiful figure he made, this small boy in an Eton jacket, his waistcoat now unbuttoned and his school cap crumpled in his hot hands. He walked and ran straight upward, as though the devil were p.

2at his heels; sometimes looking behind him to see if there were any one in pursuit, sometimes wiping the sweat from his forehead with the crumpled cap.

A wagonette, drawn by a pair of horses and burdened with trippers, jolted past him, throwing up a cloud of chalk-dust that made his eyes smart. Inside it swayed seven fat women in black bodices. The guard, who was sufficiently sober, in his own opinion, to ride on the step, was seen to laugh at the dust-smothered boy in the road.

“Poor lamb,” said the most motherly of the seven. “Wouldn’t ’e like a lift?”

“Gowing the hopposite way, mem,” said the guard. “One of them College lads.”

“’Ot ’e looks!” said the lady. “Going to rine kets and dorgs, too.”

Edwin Ingleby rubbed the dust out of, or into, his eyes and went plugging on to the top of the ridge where the road dipped through a belt of beeches into the trough between two billows of down, losing itself within high banks of turf which bordered the plough-land, satiny now with bearded wheat and infinitely restful. He sat down on the bank with his feet in the gutter and began to mop up tears with the cap that he had lately used for mopping up sweat. All the time that he was crying, his heart was really full of almost incontinent valour, and that was why his tears made him angry. He began talking to himself:—

“Damned beast . . . great beefy beast. . . . If only the men could see what a damned beast he is. If Layton or some one could give him what he wants. Only no one could fight him. . . . He’s got p. 3a weak heart, and it might kill him. I suppose that would be murder. . . .”

The word suddenly got a new significance. They called this road Murderer’s Cross Road. High up in the grassy bank some pious person had cut a St. Andrew’s cross to commemorate the murder of a postman who had been relieved of his bags and his life on a dark night a century ago. The college tradition said that it was haunted. Certainly it had an ugly sound. Murderer’s Cross Road: a name to be whispered.

“Funny . . .” said Edwin. “There’s nothing very awful about it. I could understand a chap wanting to murder a chap. Quite easily. Only he might be sorry about it afterwards. I wouldn’t mind murdering Griffin.”

He took a silver watch out of his pocket and laid it on the bank beside him. He could see that there was a full hour to spare before the bell in the water tower would jangle for the evening roll-call in the corner of the Quad; and so he lay back easily on the bank, stretching out his legs and arms in the form of the St. Andrew’s cross scored in the hedge a little farther on. Lying thus he could watch the shimmer on the bearded wheat. He had always loved the softness of this dip in the downs. He had loved it on winter mornings delicately dusted with rime, in November when flints lay like a bloom on the pale fallow, in March when the bloom turned green. Now the thunder-clouds had rolled away, rumbling, from the south, and a breath of cooler air was moving through the valley, throwing the surface of that green sea into p. 4wave-like motion; the waves shuddered faintly and the sound came to his ears as though re-echoed from the heavy woods which stood still in the heat, bounding the green ripples; and lying there, with his eyes half-closed, Edwin was

already afloat, bearing westward with the set of the tide in the track of Cortes and Columbus and Pizarro and other adventurous voyagers. It was not really very difficult for him to forget his tears. Although the fear of Griffin, that had first driven him afield, was a cruel obsession to which he was liable by night and day, he had long ago discovered that silence and solitude could make him free of any wonder which he chose to imagine. It had been like that even when he was quite little; he had always possessed the faculty of day-dreaming; and now that his imagination was beginning to flush at the sound of great names, and the pomps of chivalry and legend were slowly unfolding before him with their subtle suggestiveness unhampered by such knowledge of detail as would be alive to incongruities, his idleness became daily more precious. He suddenly remembered that Achaean assembly stirred by Agamemnon’s words “as when the West wind cometh to stir a deep cornfield with violent blast, and the ears bow down. . . .” And now the wind-moved wheat bent like a stricken

army before knightly lances, and the roll of retreating thunder awoke echoes of the guns of Waterloo. . . .

II

It was nearly three years since Edwin had first seen Griffin, oddly enough on the very first day of p. 5his life at St. Luke’s. Mrs. Ingleby had come down from the Midlands with him, a little anxious, for there were pitfalls in public school life (it was in ninety-five), but immensely proud of Edwin’s entrance scholarship. They had crossed London together in a hansom, and on the smoky platform at Victoria, she had bidden him a good-bye which cost her some pangs, for the poor boy was half dead with train-sickness. Edwin was her only child, and some smouldering ethic decreed that he must not be pampered, but when she raised her veil to kiss him, tears escaped beneath its rim. Those tears were very unsettling; they gave him a sudden glimpse of his mother in a new light; but he felt too ill even to watch her hurrying to the end of the platform. His head ached so violently in the sulphurous station air that he wouldn’t have minded much if some one, say his next-door neighbour in the train, a city clerk who smoked the most manly

tobacco, had relieved him of the half-sovereign, the last gift of all, that he clutched mechanically in his left-hand trouser pocket—or if the porters, in the fine free way they have, had smashed all the jampots in the playbox so obstrusively white and new, with

E. INGLEBY 115

in black lettering on the lid.

The rest of that journey he had been too prostrate and lethargic to realise. Somewhere the shouting of a familiar word had bundled him out of his p. 6corner; a porter whom he had tipped fumblingly had bundled him into a cab which smelt of straw, and at last the martial-looking personage who received him at the grand entrance had conveyed him up a broad flight of stone stairs and along a corridor that echoed their two pairs of foot-steps, to the housemaster’s room, where, in an atmosphere of mellow honeydew, Mr. Selby sat at his desk, trifling with a bath-list of the big dormitory. Ingleby sat at one end of a luxurious sofa, feeling very sick. It seemed as though he could never escape from the smell of tobacco. At the other end of the sofa sat another boy, perhaps three years older than Edwin. He was tall for his age and inclined to be fat. His feet were small and shapely, and their smallness accentuated the heavy build of his shoulders, so that the whole boy seemed to taper downwards on the lines of a peg-top. He had a broad face, covered with freckles, regular but

undistinguished features, and eyes, rather wide apart, of a peculiar cold and light blue. His hair was crisp and sandy; his whole get-up a little dandiacal within the limits of black and gray. He kept on fingering silver coins, that jingled together faintly in the depths of his pocket; perhaps he was counting them in the dark; perhaps he was merely fidgeting.

Mr. Selby looked up from his bath-list.

“Well, Griffin, and what is your pleasure?”

“Letter from father, sir.”

A letter from father would need an answer. Mr. Selby, although an expert in the tortuous psychology of parents, was a lazy man. He sighed as p. 7he opened it. “H’m . . . No games? You don’t look particularly ill, Griffin.”

“Doctor said I was growing too fast, sir . . . something about my heart.” Griffin’s manners were irreproachable.

Mr. Selby smiled.

“Very well, Griffin, very well. I will speak to the head-master about you. And who is this miserable weed?”

There had been no break in the drawl of Mr. Selby’s voice with this change of subject, and Edwin did not hear, or heard without understanding. Griffin shook him by the shoulder. He lurched forward like a creature coming out of a cellar into day light.

“Ingleby, sir,” he said.

“Ingleby . . . Oh, yes. Let me see. You won’t need to take the placing exam. to-morrow because of your scholarship papers. You’ll be in the lower fourth. So Griffin will look after you. Do you hear, Griffin? I think Ingleby will be in your form. You are not overwhelmingly likely to get a move, are you?”

Griffin murmured “No, sir.”

“Then you can conduct this Ingleby to D dormitory, Griffin.”

Griffin whispered “Come on,” and walked ahead down the length of the corridor and another flight of stairs to a room of immense length, with whitewashed walls, along which were ranged as many as thirty red-blanketed beds. Down the centre of the dormitory a trestled table of well-scoured wood p. 8held a double row of wash-hand basins and soap-dishes.

“There you are,” said Griffin, in a very off-hand way. “You’d better bag a bed.”

“Which one is mine, please?” Edwin asked. His head was aching so furiously that he could have lain down on the floor.

“I’ve told you, you’ve got to bag one. Don’t you hear? You’d better go and ask that man over there. Try the next one to his.”

That man over there was a stumpy boy with the face of a hyena and a shock of black hair, who scowled at Ingleby’s approach.

“Here, get away. You can’t come here. I don’t want any new kids near me. Keep him to yourself, Griffin.”

Ingleby was thrown violently into Griffin’s arms, and then buffeted backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between them. This game proved to be such excellent fun that wherever he sought a bed on which to lay his things it was continued by his immediate neighbours. He was greenly pale and beginning to cry when a tall, dark boy, wearing glasses, arrived and made straight for the group that surrounded him.

“Here’s Layton,” whispered some one.

“What’s this?” he asked. “A new boy?—What’s your name?”

“Ingleby.”

“What’s the matter?”

“They won’t let me find a bed.”

“Come along down this end, then.” He moved majestically to the end of the dormitory nearest p. 9to the door and pointed to a vacant bedstead, “There you are,” he said. He was kindly without the least trace of unbending. Ingleby took him for a prefect; already he had received the canonisation of heroism. He stood and watched Edwin spread out his nightshirt on the bed. At this moment the climax of his migraine arrived. Edwin was sick.

Layton’s lips curled. “Dirty little skunk,” he said as he hurried away.

A slipper, cleverly aimed from the other end of the room, caught Ingleby full on his burning cheek. The pain seemed to blind him.

And a skunk, in spite of himself, he remained, for small boys are as persistently unintelligent as parrots in their memory for names. Ingleby’s “skunkhood” became a tradition that he never wholly lived down during his first years at St. Luke’s. In them he experienced all the inevitable qualms of homesickness, although even these were more tolerable than the physical qualms which had complicated his arrival, for they passed quickly in the excitement of a new life, the adoption of new standards, the spring of new ambitions. It was a thousand times unfortunate that he should have made such a sensational débût, that chance should have included such circumstances as Griffin and a sick-headache in his first day; for all that was instinct in the boy rebelled against the category in which he found himself placed, the definition of his status that had been hastily formulated by a few small boys, and almost tacitly accepted by the masters.

To begin with, he had very few of the attributes p. 10of the skunk. He was neither dirty nor undersized: indeed he had a nice instinct for personal cleanliness, and all the slim, balanced beauty of a young boy’s figure. He was far from unintelligent—though this counts for little enough in the schedules of precedence at school. It amounted to this: he was not used to the company of other boys; he had never played games; he had made himself objectionable on his first night in the dormitory—and Layton had called him a skunk. Griffin saw to the rest, seconded by the lad with the hyena face, who bore the illustrious name of Douglas. Strangely enough no one but Ingleby seemed to have tapped the romance in the hyena-faced’s name. Setting out to find any tokens of Chevy Chase beneath the black mop, he was caught staring in Hall, and as a proper retribution for such insolence, subjected to the pain and indignity of a “tight six” with a gym shoe, his head wedged in two stocks of Mr. Griffin’s thighs. New boys of his own age, and smaller, seeing this

exhibition, formed a very low estimate of Ingleby. They shuddered also at the knowledge that he had been heard to ask the difference between a drop-kick and a punt.

This isolation, except for purposes of chastisement, weighed heavily on Edwin. He didn’t wish to be different from others, although he felt that his mind was somehow of a painfully foreign texture. He knew that things somehow struck him differently . . . but he was so far from taking this as a mark of superiority that he was heartily ashamed of it. His whole ambition was towards the normal; he tried vigorously to suppress p. 11imagination, humour, all the inconvenient things with which he had been cursed; to starve them, to destroy them. He became studious of the ways of normality. Griffin and the noble Douglas were handy exemplars; Layton, the head of the house, an unattainable ideal. Layton, indeed, was something of a variant; but Layton, by means of his slim skull’s capacity for retaining facts and an ingratiating piety, had passed beyond the pale of everyday endeavour. Edwin longed to be normal, and they wouldn’t let him. He cultivated assiduously the use of the fashionable slang; and that, of course, was easy. He whipped up an interest in

outdoor games; played his very hardest in the ordinary house football, and even volunteered to take part in the Soccer games organised on fag-days for small boys by Mr. Selby, who nursed a lazy grudge against the Rugby Code. “The Miserable Weeds,” they were called, enshrining his favourite epithet. But though he plunged out of school every morning to practise place-kicking in the fields before dinner, Ingleby was not destined to shine in sport. His habit of dropping off to sleep between fitful bursts of brilliance almost caused him to be uprooted from Mr. Selby’s plantation of weeds. This didn’t worry him much, because Soccer was not popular; but after two trials in the house third, which the baleful Douglas captained, he was degraded to the scratch side known as Small Boys; and even here the scrum extinguished a talent that might have shone in the three-quarter line.

And since he failed in every endeavour to attain normality, whether by devotion to games or by p. 12those attempts which he made to prove that he was neither “coxy” nor “pi,” by a retiring manner and a foul tongue, he began to crawl back into his shell, nursing a passionate hatred, not unmixed with envy, for all those people whom he couldn’t hope to be like. And so, in a little time, this dangerous humiliation turned to a sort of pride. It pleased him to count himself their superior even when he was most downtrodden. His form master had recently been boring the class with a little dissertation on Marcus Aurelius. Edwin became a Stoic, spending his days in far corners of the box-room, munching a slowly dwindling store of biscuits. Once Griffin caught him with his locker door open and pinioned him against the benches while Douglas made free with his Petits-Beurres to the rest of the box-room. For such contingencies as this the Emperor’s system of philosophy seemed hardly adequate.

Most of all he dreaded the dormitory; for here the abandonment of clothes laid him open to particularly painful forms of oppression; the shock and horror of bedclothes ragged just as he was falling off to sleep; the numbing swing of a pillow, the lancinating flick of wet towels; Oh!—a hell of a life, only to be terminated by the arrival of Layton, who had the privilege of sitting up till eleven, with black rings round his spectacled eyes. He was reading for a scholarship at Cambridge. Then Ingleby would really get off to sleep, or sometimes, if he were too excited, watch the moonlight, broken by the stone mullions of the windows, whiten the long washing-table and cast blue shadows so intense that p. 13they heightened the bareness of the dormitory; or else he would listen to the harsh breathing of Douglas, who slept with his mouth open, and wonder what all those heavy sleepers were dreaming of, or if they dreamed at all. And then his own magic casements were opened.

At St. Luke’s he had discovered the trick—quite a new thing for him—of historical dreaming. His form were busy with the age of the Stuarts, under the direction of a master named Leeming, a mild-eyed cleric, rather shy of boys and feverishly grateful whenever he sprung a response to his own enthusiasms.