The Young Physician

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 corner; 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 he 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 held 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 to 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.