VITHE SPORTSMAN

As we were coming off to theStrathconaone evening, the Doctor, bareheaded, pulling at the oars with the zest of a schoolboy on a holiday, and every oar-dip making a running flame of phosphorescence, said: “At college we worshipped at the shrine of athletics. Of course that wasn’t right, but it did establish a standard—it did teach a man that he must keep his body under if he would be physically fit. I realized that if I wanted to win I couldn’t afford to lose an ounce, and so I was a rigid Spartan with myself. The others sometimes laughed at me as a goody-goody, but they saw that I could do things that couldn’t be done by those who indulged in wild flings of dissipation.

“My schooling before Oxford I now feel was wretched. They didn’t teach me how to learn. The teachers themselves were mediocre. They may have had a smattering of the classics—but that doesn’t constitute fitness to teach. Have you read the chapter on education in H. G. Well’s ‘Joan and Peter’? That strikes me as true.

“I’m glad my orphan children at St. Anthony are getting the right kind of training from those who understand their business.”

The Doctor still cherishes the insignia of rowing and athletic clubs to which he was attached while at Oxford. One of his pet coats wears the initials “O. U. R. F. C.” for the Oxford University Rugby Football Club. He also stroked theTorpidcrew, and the crew of the London Hospital.

He hates—in fact, he refuses, like Peter Pan—to grow up or to grow old. “Isn’t it too bad that just when our minds have struck their stride and are doing their best work we should have to end it all?” Not that he has the least fear of Death. In the country of his loving labour, the fisher-folk face Death so often in their lawful occasions, for the sake of you and me who enjoy the savour of the codfish and the lobster, that when Death finally comes he comes not as a dark and awful figure but as a familiar and a friend.

“PLEASE LOOK AT MY TONGUE, DOCTOR!”

“NEXT!”

The conflict of elemental forces in nature finds at once an echo in the breast of him who has met “with a frolic heart” every mood and tense of sky and sea “down north.” At Pleasure Harbour the sunset amid dark purple clouds edged with a rosy fleece brought “vital feelings of delight”: and when we came nearest the Dominion’s northern tip the Doctor said: “I wish you could see the strait ice and the Atlantic ice fight at Cape Bauld. They go at each other hammer and tongs, with a roaring and rending like huge wild animals, rampant and foaming and clashing their tusks.”

On a foggy, super-saturated day, the sails and the deck beaded and dripping, he will fairly rub his hands in ecstasy and exclaim: “Oh, what a fine day!” Or he will thrust his ruddy countenance out of his chart-room door to call: “Isn’t it great to be alive?”

Off Cape Norman, when the foghorn was blaspheming and the sea ran high, I tried to get the Doctor to concede that it was half a gale, but he would only admit that it was a “nice breeze.” The new topsail stubbornly declined to blossom out as it should, though the five other sails were in full bloom. “We’ll burst it out,” said the Doctor. The offending sail was forthwith hauled down and stretched like a sick man on the deck; then it was tied in three places with tarry cords, the Doctor scurried up the mast, the sail was raised into place by means of the clanking winch, and then, with violent tugs of the fierce wind like a fish plucking at a tempting bait the three confining strings snapped in explosive succession and like a flag unfurling the sail sprang out to the breeze. We raised a cheer as the perceptible lift of the additional sail-cloth thrilled the timbers underfoot.

You’d hear him trotting about the deck in the cool dawn inquiring about steam or tide and humming softly (or lifting with the fervour of a sailor’s chantey), that favourite Newfoundland hymn, written by a Newfoundlander, “We love the place, O God, wherein thine honour dwells.”

In the wheelhouse as he looks out over the sea and guides the prow, as if it were a sculptor’s chisel, through calm or storm, there comes into his eyes a look as of communing with a far country: his soul has gone to a secret, distant coast where no man and but one woman can follow.

Sometimes of an evening the Doctor brought out the chessboard and I saw another phase of his versatile entity—his fondness for an indoor game that is of science and not blind chance. The red and white ivory chessmen, in deference to the staggering ship, had sea-legs in the shape of pegs attaching them to the board. Two missing pawns—“prawns,” the Doctor humorously styled them—had as substitutes bits of a red birthday candle, and two of the rooks were made of green modelling-wax (plasticine).

“I love to attack,” said the Doctor, and his tactics proved that he meant what he said. He has what Lord Northcliffe once named to me as the capital secret of success—concentration.

When he has once moved a piece forward he almost never moves it back again. He likes to go ahead. He seeks to get his pieces out and into action, and a defensive, waiting game—the strategy of Fabius the Cunctator—is not for him.

Once in a while he defers sufficiently to the conventions to move out the King’s pawn at the start, but often his initial move is that of a pawn at the side of the board. He works the pawns hard and gives them a new significance. His delight is to march a little platoon of them against the enemy—preferably against the bishops. Somehow the bishops seem to lose their heads when confronted by these minor adversaries.

If you get him into a tight corner, the opposition stiffens—the greater the odds the more vertebral his attitude.

“I make it a rule to go ahead if I possibly can, and not to be driven back.” This remark of his over the board of the mimic fray applies just as well to his constant strife with the sea to get where he is wanted—as on the present occasion when we were threading the needle’s eye of the rocky outlet at Carpoon.

The Doctor has the real chess mind—the mind that surveys and weighs and analyzes—with the uncanny faculty of looking many moves ahead, of balancing all the alternatives, of remembering the disposal of the forces at a previous stage of the game. He becomes so completely immersed in the playing—though he rarely finds an antagonist—that it is a real rest to him after the teeming day, where many a man would only find it a culminant exhaustion. “Isn’t it queer,” he observed, “that most men who are good at this game aren’t good for much else?”

His use of the pawns in chess is like his use of the weaker reeds among men in his day’s work. Since he cannot always get the best (though his hand-picked helpers at St. Anthony, Battle Harbour and elsewhere are as a rule exceptionally able), he learns to use the inferior and the lesser, and with exemplary gentleness and patience he keeps his temper and lets them think they are assisting though they may be all but hindering. He gives you to feel that if you hold a basin or sharpen a knife or fetch a bottle or bring him a chair you are of real value in the performance of an operation—even if the basin was upset and the knife was dull and the bottle wasn’t the one and the chair had a broken leg.

“Christ used ordinary men,” he remarked. “He was a carpenter, and I try to teach people that he was a good sportsman.”

All through his chess games, too, runs the Oxford principle of sport for its own sake: he wins, but the strife is more than the victory. He is never vainglorious when the checkmate comes; he is neither unduly elated by success nor depressed by adversity—indeed, his enjoyment is keenest when he is beset. He shows then the same strain that comes out when the ship is anchored and Mate Albert Ash pokes his head in and says: “If she drags, we’ve got but one chain out!” Then he will say nothing, or with a humorous twinkle he will cry in mock despair: “All is lost!” or “if you knew how little water there was under her you would be scared!”—and then he will go on with what he is doing. Whether it is the chessboard or life’s battlefield, he plays the game.

On the end of a hackmatack (juniper) log lying on the deck for firewood I pencilled for fun: “The Log of theStrathcona.” The Doctor saw it, laughed, and got a buck-saw. Two fishermen clambered over the rail between him and the woodpile, to get zinc ointment and advice. When he had “fixed them up” he sawed off the log-end, and drew a picture of theStrathcona—an entirely correct picture, of course, as far as it went—and then put his signature (à la Whistler butterfly) in the form of a roly-poly elf, as rotund as a dollar. “I like to draw myself stout and round,” he laughed. The strange gnome he drew was the very antithesis of his own lithe, spare, close-knit figure.

So good a playmate and so firm a master—so rare a combination of gentleness and strength, of self-respect and rollicking fun is difficult to match in real life or in biographic literature.

Were one to seek a historic parallel for Grenfell one might not go far wrong in picking Xenophon. Xenophon was a leader who pointed the way not from the rear but from the head of the column, and asked of his men nothing that he would not do himself. The reader of the “Anabasis” will remember that Xenophon awoke in the night and asked himself “Why do I lie here? For the night goes forward. And with the morn it is probable that the enemy will come.” Even so, Grenfell feels that he must do the works of the Master while it is yet day, for all too soon the night cometh when no man can work.

Xenophon had sedition on his hands, and his men would not go out into the snows of the mountains of Armenia and cut the wood. So he left his tent and seized an ax and hewed so valorously that they were shamed into following suit. That is just what Wilfred Grenfell would have done: it is what his forbear Sir Richard Grenville would have done. In such ways as this when the hour strikes the born leader of men asserts himself and takes command.

VIITHE MAN OF SCIENCE

The Doctor admires certain of his scientific colleagues greatly: he is candidly a hero-worshipper. “I love Cushing and Finney,” he says outspokenly of the noted Harvard and Johns Hopkins surgeons. A clinic by Dr. George de Schweinitz or an operation by Dr. John B. Deaver is a rare treat to him. Sir Frederick Treves, the great English surgeon, has been among his closest friends since Grenfell served under him in a London hospital: he has leaned on him always for perceptive advice and sympathy unfailing. It is one of the paramount satisfactions of his life to meet other minds in his profession that stimulate his own. In the ceaseless round of his activities little time is left him to read books: but if he could he would enjoy no pastime more than to browse in a well-chosen library. The victories of science hold for him the fascination of romance.

The discovery of the electron, in his opinion, might make it possible to have an entire city in which every material substance should be invisible. “There is no reason why the forces in action should make a visible city. We believe today in the unity of matter. It has almost been demonstrated that we can turn soda into copper. Uranium passes into radium. Carrel is growing living protoplasm outside the body. Adami has shown how an electric stimulus applied to the ovum of frogs produces twins. The electron is the manifestation of force.

“It is almost certain that there is no such thing as physical life. No matter could exist without movement—the sort of movement you behold when the spinthariscope throws the radiations from bromide of radium on a fluorescent screen. If there is no physical life, there is no death. So many things exist that we do not see. We cannot see ether or weigh it, but we know that it exists. There is a physical explanation of the resurrection. The whole universe is incessant motion, just as sound is vibration—the ordinary C with 256 vibrations, the octave with 512, the next octave with 1,024 vibrations to the second.

“Tin is a mass of whirling electrons. Gold is composed of a different number of electrons. That’s why we can’t cross from one to the other.”

It is not quite fair to put down these random remarks, on an extremely abstruse matter—thrown over the Doctor’s shoulder as he flits about a village, the dogs at his heels—without quoting his more deliberate formulation of his ideas in an article in “Toilers of the Deep.” In that article he writes:

“If chemistry of today has made it certain that there is no such thing in the human body as a transcendental entity called ‘life,’ and every function and every organ of the body can be chemically or physically accounted for, then it is obvious that we have no reason to weep for it. More infinitely marvellous the more we learn of it, so marvellous that no one can begin to appreciate it but the man of science, it helps us to realize how easily He who clothed us with it can provide another equally well adapted to the needs of that which awaits us when we go ‘home.’ We have learned to enlarge our physical capacities, our ‘selves,’ the microscope, the ultramicroscope, the spectroscope, the electroscope, the spinthariscope, the ophthalmoscope, the fluoroscope, the telescope, and other man-made machines have made the natural range of the eye of man a mere bagatelle compared with what it now commands and reveals. The microphone, the megaphone, the audophone, the wireless and other machinery have as greatly enlarged our command of the field of sound. Space has been largely conquered by electric devices for telephoning, telegraphing, and motor power. On the land, under the sea, in the air, man is rapidly acquiring a mastery that is miraculous.

“The marvels of manufacture are miracles. Machinery can now do anything, even talk and sing far beyond the powers of normal human capacities. The plants and animals of normal nature can be improved beyond recognition. The old deserts are being forced to blossom like roses; the most potent governing agencies of the life of the body, like adrenalin, can be made from coal tar. Seas are linked by broad water pathways, countries are united by passages through mountains and under the water. We can see through solid bodies, we can weigh the stars in balances, we can tell their composition without seeing them. We can describe the nature and place of unseen heavenly bodies, and know the existence and properties of elements never seen or heard of. We know that movement is not a characteristic of life, unless we are to believe that the very rocks are alive, for we can see that it is movement alone that holds their ultimate atoms together.

“The mere ‘Me,’ the resultant of all past and present influences on the ‘I,’ is so marvellous, that we must find it ever increasingly impossible to conceive that we are the products of blind chance, or the sport of a cruelty so horrible as to make the end one inconceivable tragedy.

“No, if science teaches that there is no entity called ‘life,’ and it seems to do so, I for my part gladly accept it as yet another tribute at the feet of the Master Builder who made and gave my spirit—mine, if you please—a spirit so insignificant, so unworthy, such an unspeakable gift as that of a body with capacities such as this one, to be the mechanical temple and temporary garment of my spirit, and to offer me a chance to do my share to help this wonderful world. ‘No life,’ says science, ‘there is no life.’ But a knowledge more reliable than current knowledge, that entered the world with the advent of man, and that has everywhere in every race of mankind been in the past his actually most valued possession, replies ‘Yes, and there is no death either.’ ”

One day his morning greeting was: “Nitrogen is gone!” “Too bad!” I said. “You can search me. I haven’t got it.” “I mean,” he explained, “that here in this copy of the ‘Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’ Sir Ernest Rutherford sets forth the theory that the molecule of nitrogen is a helium universe with hydrogen for its satellites and helium as the sun.” He was almost as much interested in the discovery as if it were a hole in the bottom of his boat.

“I’ve just been reading a magazine article on the subject of psychic research by Booth Tarkington,” he added presently. “It’s well written and exceedingly interesting. Most men of science have been convinced of the reality of the spiritual body.”

He is an artist of no slight attainment and in his home at St. Anthony specimens of his handicraft abound, but not obtrusively. Dr. Grenfell never puts anything that he is or has done on view to be admired.

He is a keen ornithologist, and even when he is at top speed to get back to his boat and weigh anchor he will pause to note the friendly grackles hopping about a wharf or the unfettered grace of the gyrations of the creaking gulls. He is a collector of butterflies. “I was out driving with a man who didn’t see the butterflies and had no interest in them. Just think what such a man misses in his life!”

He also collects birds’ eggs, flowering plants (many of which have been named at Cambridge), seaweed and shells. The great book he wrote and edited on Labrador gives a clear idea of his interest in the geology as well as the fauna and flora of the region.

I found him the last thing at night at St. Anthony trying to discover why one of a pair of box kites he had made wouldn’t remain aloft as it should.

He is perpetually acquisitive and inquisitive: the diversity of his interests rivals the appetite of Roosevelt for every sort of information. Sir Frederick Treves mourned that a great surgeon was lost to London when Grenfell embarked on the North Sea to the healing and helping of fishermen. But Grenfell has become much more than a great surgeon. With all that he is and does, he gives to every part of his almost boundless field of interests a careful, methodical, analytic intellect. Haste and the constant pressure of his over-driven life have not made him superficial. He sets a sail with the same care he gives to the setting of a compound fracture: he is of the number of those who believe that there is but one right way to do everything. Of such is the kingdom of science and of inestimable service.

VIIITHE MAN OF LAW

In his capacity as magistrate, the Doctor never sidesteps trouble. Law in his part of the world is a matter not merely of the letter but of the spirit—not of the statute alone but of shrewd common sense. His decisions are luminous with a Lincolnian light of acumen and sympathy at once. He lets the jot and tittle—the mint, anise-seed and cummin—take care of themselves, and considers the real significance of the situation and the essential nature of the offence. Red tape is not the important thing, and the imaginary dignity of an invisible judicial ermine is not besmirched because Magistrate Grenfell discusses the case with a culprit as a father might talk things over with a son, and makes it plain why wrong was done—if it was done—and why there must henceforth be a different course on the part of the offender. He “lays down the law” not as if it were a Mosaic dispensation from a beclouded mountain top, but as if it were the simple and discreet way to walk for God-fearing and reasonable mankind. To him, forever, a man’s own soul is a matter more important than an ordinance, and he spares no pains to make his meaning so plain that the dullest apprehension cannot fail to grasp it. You will see Grenfell at his best when—in a whipping wind, bareheaded, sweatered, rubber-booted—he stands in the clear glitter of a bracing sunny day on the beach with the dogs aprowl around him, painstakingly explaining to a fisherman why it is right to do thus and reprehensible to do otherwise. And now and then a hearty laugh or a timely anecdote—Lincoln’s trait again—clears the atmosphere. Sometimes there are more formidable leets and law courts held among the whalemeat barrels and the firewood on theStrathcona: but more often it is a plain matter of a tête-à-tête while Grenfell is on his rambling rounds of a hamlet with his dilapidated leather bag of instruments and medicines.

Forteau offered its own problems to Dr. Grenfell, the Magistrate. There is an isle not far away where that sometimes toothsome bird the puffin makes his home. Fishermen from Forteau, hard put to it to secure anti-scorbutic fresh meat, might now and then shoot one of the birds, and the duty of the faithful lighthouse-keeper, Captain Coté, an appointed game-warden, was to see that the law’s majesty made itself respected. One day Coté caught a hunter red-handed. “By what warrant do you arrest me?” said the man behind the gun. “By this!” said Coté, flourishing a revolver. Is a magistrate to blame if he believes that common sense should differentiate between a poor fisherman desperate with hunger, and a pot-hunter who commits wholesale murder among the eider-ducks sitting on their nests? Usually it is the poor fisherman who is fined and made to give up his gun, because he pleads “guilty,” while the pot-hunter who unblushingly pleads “not guilty” goes scot-free. A fisherman at Flower’s Cove told me that a late lamented coast magistrate—who got half of the fines he imposed—was making “big money” from his calling. He fined one man $100 for importing a second-hand stove without paying customs duties. When theStrathconahove in sight, bearing Dr. Grenfell, this profiteering magistrate weighed anchor in haste, and in a heavy beam sea and shallow water made his “get-away.”

There are always disputes between traders and fishermen to be adjudicated. Two men within an hour of each other clambered over the rail of theStrathconato display dire written threats of wrath to come from the same West Coast merchant, in a court summons served by a constable. This document, accompanying a bill of particulars, says that if they don’t pay at once the balance due they’ll have to go to St. John’s at a cost of fifty dollars in addition to whatever the amount may be which the law assesses against them. It isn’t just the amount of the ticket to St. John’s, or the board while they are there: it’s the loss of time from the traps that is exacerbating.

The trader isn’t in the wrong just because he is a trader. The fisherman hasn’t all the right on his side by the fact of being a fisherman, but the bookkeeping of these traders seemed to be at very loose ends indeed. Long after the debtor thought he had paid all his debt, in cash or in kind, the trader unearthed on the books items of 1915, 1916 or 1917 which he forgot to charge for. Here they bob up like a bay seal, to the consternation of the man who thought the slate had been sponged off clean “far away and long ago.”

One of the two who brought their present perplexity to the Doctor had had the misfortune to lose his house by fire, and all the trader’s receipts therein, so that he had no written line to show against the trader’s bill.

I found out later that the trader’s daughters kept the books—in fact, I saw them behind the counter at their father’s store—and they were said to be indifferent and slovenly misses indeed, who used their thumbs for erasures and made as many mistakes in a day’s work as there are blueberries on Blomidon. Perhaps they were in love—but their hit-or-miss accountancy meant a terrible worriment for sea-faring men two hundred miles distant, and a pother of trouble for Dr. Grenfell and a St. John’s lawyer—a friend of the Doctor’s who befriends those who cannot afford or do not know how to obtain legal advice.

IXTHE MAN OF GOD

In his formal addresses Dr. Grenfell exemplifies the homely, pithy eloquence that comes from speaking directly “to men’s business and bosoms” out of the fulness of the heart: but those who have heard him in the little, informal, offhand talks he gives among his own people in his own bailiwick appreciate them even more than what he has to say to a congregation of strangers in a great city far from the Labrador.

It must be understood that the quotations that follow are merely extemporaneous, unrevised sentences taken down without the Doctor’s knowledge, and of a nature wholly casual and unpremeditated.

At a service held in the tiny saloon of theStrathconafor the crew and the patients who happened to be with us, the Doctor said:

“We so often think that religion is bound to be dull and solemn and monotonous: we don’t follow the example of Christ who spread light and joy wherever he went. None of us is perfect, but God doesn’t denounce Dr. Grenfell and Will Sims and Albert Ash (naming members of the crew) for their shortcomings. That isn’t his way. He knows us as we are, with all our weaknesses. He loved David—he said that David was a man after his own heart. Yet David was a bad man—he was an adulterer and incidentally a murderer, and he got his people into trouble that lost thousands of their lives. But God loved him in spite of his human frailties, because he did such a lot of good in the world.

“It doesn’t do to take a single text. For instance—we read ‘The world is established so that it cannot be moved,’ but we know that it is all movement: we know that it moves at a pace six times as fast as the fastest aeroplane. But the Church looked at that verse and said that he who denied it was denying the truth. I was reading this morning about Copernicus, who insisted that this world is round. Up to his time men had insisted that it was flat and that you might fall off the edge. Then there was Galileo, who said that it moved: and they put him under the thumbscrews, and when he came out he said, ‘and still it does move.’

DR. GRENFELL LEADING MEETING AT BATTLE HARBOUR.

“So often Christian people think it’s their duty to forbid and to repress and to bring gloom with a long face where they go. But that wasn’t Christ’s way and it isn’t God’s way. If religious people do these things people begin to suppose that religion is something to destroy the joy of living. But that isn’t what it’s for. It’s to make us kinder to fathers and mothers and sisters and friends, and true to the duty nearest our hand.

“I love to think of David as the master musician who went about scattering good and dispelling the clouds of heaviness. We ought to follow his example. Sometimes we say ‘Oh, they’ve all been so mean to me I’ll take it out on them by being sour and dull and jealous and bitter!’ Here in this crew we get to know one another almost as well as God knows us, and we see one another’s faults. It’s so easy to spy out faults when we’re so close together, day after day. But we should be blind to some things—like Nelson at Copenhagen. You remember when they gave the signal to retreat he put his blind eye to the telescope.

“If God looked for the faults in us, who could stand before Him? None of us is perfect. Let us judge not that we be not judged, and mercifully learn to make allowances. I knew a man who had been the cause of a loss of $20,000 to his employer, through costly litigation that was the result of his mistakes. His master, nevertheless, gave him a second chance, with an even better job. Later I asked him if the man was making good. He replied, ‘He is the best servant I have.’ Even so we ought to learn to be long-suffering with others, as God is lenient until seventy times seven with us.”

In the little church at Flower’s Cove the Doctor spoke on the meaning of the words of Christ in Mark 8, 34, as given in the vernacular version: “If any man wishes to walk in my steps, let him renounce self, take up his cross, and follow me.”

“What is there that a man values more than his life?

“When I was here early in the spring there was a man who was in a serious way. I told him he should come to the hospital at St. Anthony for an operation. He said he must get his traps and his twine ready. Then when I came again in June I saw that he was worse, and I again gave him warning that in six months at most the results might be fatal. Still he said that he could not go. When I came ashore today I learned that he was dead. The twine was ready—but he was gone. That is the way with so many of us. We say we are too busy—we can always give that excuse—and then death finds us, grasping our material possessions, perhaps, but with the great ends of life unwon. Its only a stage that we cross for a brief transit, coming in at this door and going out at that. It won’t do to play our part just as we are making our exit—we must play it while we are in the middle of the stage.

“At Sandwich Bay we followed a stream and the two men on the other side called my attention to the tracks of a bear: and when we came back to the boat the men aboard said they had seen two bears wandering about. The bears were unable to hide their tracks, and even so you and I cannot conceal the traces of our footsteps where we went. Captain Coté at the Greenly Island Light showed us the model of a steamship—made with a motor costing a dollar and a half that ran it in a straight line for an hour. It had no volition of its own. Man is not like that soulless boat: he has a mind of his own. We are surrounded by amazing discoveries: great scientists are ever toiling on the problem of communication with the dead. Men laughed at the alchemists of old: we laugh no longer at the idea of changing one substance into another. We can change water with electricity and change one frog’s egg into twins. We can fly from St. John’s to England in a day. We can see through solid substances—come to St Anthony and I will show it to you with the X-ray apparatus. What fools we are to deny immortality and the resurrection! What are realized values as compared with the spiritual? There was the shipRoyal Charterfor Australia that went ashore at Moidra in Wales. A sailor wrapped himself in gold and it drowned him. Would you say that he had the gold or that the gold had him?

“The carol of good King Wenceslaus tells us of the blessings that came to the little lad who followed in the footsteps of the king. Even so, better things than any temporal benefits come to us if we walk in the steps of Christ.

“Some of the soldiers of the war returning to this country are not acting as soldiers should. They are importing foreign vices. I have seen lately horrible examples of the suffering of the innocents as a result of their misdeeds. There are more communicable diseases in the present year than we have ever had before on this coast. A man has no right to the title of a soldier who does not walk in Christ’s steps—he has no right to the name, when he pleases self and damns his country and his fellow-men and fellow-women.

“We have among us the deplorable spectacle of many weak sectarian schools—and it is a wicked thing that we do not combine them in strong undenominational ones. So many things cry out for changing. Today I visited a family and found the father had tuberculosis. The mother?—tuberculosis. The children?—tuberculosis. Then I saw a baby whose head was not filled up, whose arms were puny, whose shoulders were constricted. From what? From rickets. The rickets came from bad feeding due to ignorance. I saw another child with the same complaint from the same cause.

“American bank-notes are made of paper that comes from Dalton, Massachusetts. The finest quality of paper is made of rags. They can use old rags and dirty rags—but they cannot use red ones. In explaining the manufacture to children I heard the manager speak of the rags as being ‘willing’ or ‘unwilling.’ The red ones were the ‘unwilling’ ones, and one of the children afterward said she’d rather be a willing rag. We may be poor and sorry objects—we may be rags—but there is something to be made of us if only we are willing rags.

“I came to a paralyzed boy. He said, ‘What can I do, Dr. Grenfell?’ I said, ‘You can smile upon all those who minister to you or come where you are. You can spread the spirit of good cheer even from your bedside.’ ”

“I was present at Pilley’s Island when a soldier came home who had won the V. C. What a welcome he received! There was a triumphal arch and the town turned out to do honour to its hero. He was the right sort of soldier.”

Norman Duncan wrote a delightful book called “Doctor Luke of the Labrador” which very faithfully mirrors the atmosphere of Dr. Grenfell’s days and doings. But the book is not to be taken as faithful biographyverbatim et literatim, in the passages relating to the titular hero.

The Doctor has nothing in the open book of his past life for which he needs to make amends; but the hero of “Doctor Luke” has something mysterious to live down, the precise nature of which is not divulged. In many admirable qualities the portrait of “Doctor Luke” is a faithful likeness of Dr. Grenfell, and that is why there is a danger that the reader will think that in all particulars the book man and the real man correspond. “Doctor Luke” goes to the Labrador to flee from his own shadow—a man pursued by bitter memories of what he has done, and by mocking wraiths of sin, their fingers pointed at him. Dr. Grenfell went to the Labrador because the spirit moved him to go to the help of men whose lives were as cold as the ice and as hard as the rock that hemmed them in. He went not as one who sorrows over misspent years but as one who rejoices in the belief that his work has the smile of God upon it. Dr. Grenfell has the spirit of any first-rate missionary—he will not admit that he has elected a life of brain-fag, bodily travail and spiritual torment. His joy in doing and giving is unaffected. When he invites the rest of us to find life beautiful and bountiful he does not pose nor prate. He walks in the steps and in the name of Christ with a child’s humility, a man’s strength, an almost feminine tenderness and never a breath of that maudlin, unctuous sanctimoniousness which always must repel the virile and vertebrate fibre of the Thomas Hughes brand of “muscular Christianity.” Dr. Grenfell likes gospel hymns where some prefer sonatas and concertos, but he likes them when they carry a plain and pointed message from the heart to the heart, and build up a consciousness of our human interdependence: he would not care for them if they merely blew into flame the emotional fire-in-straw that burns itself out uselessly because of the want of substantial fuel.

To the humble millionaire or the haughty workingman his manner is the same. He knows what it means “to walk with kings nor lose the common touch.” Nor is he easily fooled. “Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”

“I talked with Mr. A.,” he told me, referring to his visit with a Croesus of New York who to certain ends has given largely, “and I felt somehow that, with all his giving, he had not given himself!”

That is the secret, it seems to me, of Dr. Grenfell’s own cogent power upon other lives—that he goes and does in his own energetic person. He does not stand at a distance issuing commands. He is entirely willing to help anybody, anywhere. He holds back nothing that he can bestow, and he never despairs. His ruddy optimism is a matter of actual daily practice and not of a cloistered philosophy. You never could persuade him that with all the heavy burden that he bears, the myriad interruptions and vexations that occur, he is not having a grand good time. He would be entirely ready to say with Stevenson:

“Glad did I live and gladly dieAnd I laid me down with a will!”

“Glad did I live and gladly die

And I laid me down with a will!”

XSOME OF HIS HELPERS

I should like to write a whole book about his helpers. He is not a man who seeks to shine by surrounding himself with mediocrities. He would be ready to say with Charles M. Schwab: “I want you to work not for me but with me.” His presence is quickening and engenders loyalty. It is fun to be wherever Dr. Grenfell is because something is always going on.

His helpers never are given to feel that they are ciphers while he is the integer. Some of the ablest surgeons of America and of Europe have ministered to the patients at Battle Harbour, Indian Harbour and St. Anthony and on theStrathcona. There is an utter absence of “side” and “swank” in this the good physician, and he never decks himself out in the borrowed plumage of another’s virtue. He delights to see a thing well done, and is the first to bestow the word of earned praise on the doer. Conversely, he is not happy if a job is put through in a bungling, half-hearted, messy fashion; but he keeps his breath to cool his porridge, and never wastes it by mere “blowing off” when the mischief is done and palaver will not mend matters.

Human beings are not angels, and even those who are upheld by a sense of righteous endeavour may get tired and short-tempered and disheartened and lonely. Those who attach themselves to this enterprise for the weeks of summer sunlight only do not have much time to develop nostalgia. But “there ain’t no busses runnin’ from the bank to Mandalay,” and the Labrador has no theatres, no picnics, no ball games and few dances. Think of the large-hearted Moravian Brethren of the Labrador whose missions are linked with London by one visit a year from their mission ship theHarmony. Think of the man (Mr. Stewart) who sticks it out by himself at Ungava round the chill promontory of Cape Chidley in Ungava Bay. Think of the agents of the Hudson Bay and other companies dealing with the “silent, smoky Indian” in the vast reaches of the North. Whoever essays to serve God and man in this country must haul his own weight and bear others’ burdens too. He must lay aside hindrances—he must forfeit love of home and kindred—he must learn to keep normal and cheerful in the aching solitudes.

Many are with the Doctor for a season or so. Some like Dr. Little, Dr. Paddon and Dr. Andrews and certain others who deserve to be namedhonoris causa—have stood by him year after year. But by this time there is a small army of short-term or long-term Grenfell graduates—men and women—who had “their souls in the work of their hands” and whose precious memories are of the days they spent in assuaging the torment, physical or spiritual, of plain fisher-folk. It is not possible to separate in this case the care of bodies from the cure of souls. The “wops” who brought the schoonerGeorge B. Cluettfrom Boston year after year, laden with lumber and supplies, and then went ashore to be plumbers and carpenters and jacks-of-all-trades for love and not for hire have their own stories to tell of “simple service simply given to their own kind in their human need.” Most of them knew just what they would be up against; they knew it would not be a glorified house-party; but they accepted the isolation and the crudeness and the cold and the unremitting toil, and in the spirit of good sportsmanship which is the ruling spirit of the Grenfell undertaking they played the game, and what they did is graven deep in the Doctor’s grateful memory.

The Doctor wins and keeps the enthusiastic loyalty of his colleagues because he is so ready with the word of emphatic praise for what they do when it is the right thing to do. He is fearless to condemn, but he would rather commend, and the flush of pleasure in the face of the one praised tells how much his approval has meant to the recipient. He knows how many persons in this human, fallible world of ours travel faster for a pat than for a kick or a blow.

A halt was called at Forteau for a few hours’ conference with one of the remarkable women who have put their shoulders under the load of the Labrador—Sister Bailey, once a co-worker with Edith Cavell. At Forteau she has a house that holds an immaculate hospital-ward and an up-to-date dispensary. For twelve years—except for two visits in England—she has held the fort here without the company of her peers, except at long intervals. She has kept herself surrounded with books and flowers, and her geraniums are exquisite. Sister Bailey’s cow, bought for $40 in a bargain at Bonne Esperance (“Bony,”) is a wonder, and I took pains to stroke the nose of this “friendly cow” and praise her life-giving endeavours. For each day at the crack of dawn there is a line-up of people with all sorts of containers to get the milk. The dogs, of course, would cheerfully kill the animal if they could pull her down, but she fights them off with her horns, and they have learned a wholesome fear. She is not like the cow at Bonne Esperance today, which has suffered the loss of part of its hind quarters because it was too gentle.

Under Sister Bailey’s roof three maids, aged 12, 13 and 22, are being educated in household management. She has a garden with the dogs fenced out, and there is a skirmish with the weeds all through the summer into which winter breaks so suddenly. There is no spring; there is no fall; flowers, vegetables and weeds appear almost explosively together.

Artificial flowers are beautifully made—with dyes from Paris—by the girls of Forteau Cove, under Sister Bailey’s supervision. The hues are remarkably close to the original and the imitation of petal and leaf is so close as to be startling.

ST. ANTHONY HOSPITAL IN WINTER.

SOME OF THE HELPERS.

No description of Dr. Grenfell’s “parish,” as Norman Duncan aptly styled it, could be complete without mention—that would be much more extended did she permit—of the part Mrs. Grenfell fills in all that the Doctor does. Mrs. Grenfell was Miss Anna MacClanahan, of Chicago, and she is a graduate of Bryn Mawr. The Doctor went to the Labrador years before his marriage, but since she took her place at his side with her tact, her humour, her common sense, her sound judgment and her broad sympathies, she has been a tower of strength, a well-spring of solace and of healing, and altogether an indispensable factor in her husband’s enterprise.

She is his secretary, and the number of letters to be written, of patients’ records to be kept, of manuscripts to be prepared for the press is enormous. The Doctor pencils a memorandum when and where he can—perhaps sitting atop of a woodpile on the reeling deck of theStrathcona; and then Mrs. Grenfell tames the rebellious punctuation or supplies the missing links of predicates or prepositions and evolves a manuscript that need not fear to face the printer.

The letters of appeal are almost innumerable, of protest occasional, of sympathy and friendship—with or without subscriptions—very numerous, and Mrs. Grenfell has the happy gift of saying “thank you” in such warm and gracious, individualizing terms that the donor is enlisted in a lifelong friendship for the Grenfell idea.

Mrs. Grenfell is “the life of the party” wherever she goes. Like the Doctor, she refuses to grow tired of the great game of living, and it is a game they play together in a completely understanding and sympathetic copartnership.

General “Chinese” Gordon once gave as the reason for not marrying the fact that he had never found the woman who would follow him anywhere. Dr. Grenfell has been more fortunate. A friend of theirs tells me that Dr. Grenfell proposed on shipboard, almost the minute he met his wife. Astounded by his precipitancy, she said: “But, Doctor, you don’t even know my name!” “That doesn’t make any difference; I know what it’s going to be,” is said to have been his characteristic answer.

Mrs. Grenfell was translated from a life that might have been one of ease and pleasure and social preoccupation into a life of unremitting toil and no small measure of actual hardship, and she meets the day and whatever it brings in the same high-hearted mood that her husband carries to the various phases of his crowded existence. She is his mentor—without being a tormentor; she is his business memory and a deal of his common sense and social conscience: but she never lets her fine, keen mind, her quick wit and her readily divining intuition become absorbed in the mechanic phases of the regulation of household or boatload business. She has the happy faculty of instant transplantation from the practical task to the ideal atmosphere. She is the Doctor’s workmate, playmate and helpmate: the complete and inspiring counterpart. She knows better than anybody else that she has a great man for a husband, but she never lets that consciousness become oppressive, and she knows that it is good for them both to yield to the playful spirit of rollicking nonsense and absurd horseplay now and then. So you needn’t be surprised if you should find the pair chasing each other about the deck pretending a mortal combat with billets of birch-wood, while the distracted Fritz the dog cannot make up his mind whether he is in duty bound to bite his mistress or his master. You needn’t be surprised if the Doctor goes through a mighty pantomime of barricading his chart-room as though his better half had no business in it, or hides some one of her cherished Lares and Penates and assumes an innocent ignorance of its whereabouts. When he is at play Dr. Grenfell is not a bit older than the youngest of his three delightful children whose combined ages cannot be much more than fifteen years. He is the same sort of amusing and devoted father as the mourned and beloved head of the household at Sagamore Hill, who to Dr. Grenfell—of course—is the pattern of all that the head of a family and the soul of a nation should be.

The family life of the Grenfells and the perfect mutuality of thought and feeling between Dr. Grenfell and his wife stand out in clear-cut lines as an example to those who never have known the meaning of the complete community of ideals in the family life and in the relationship of wife and husband. It stands in rebuke to the sorrowful travesty the modern marriage so often exhibits. It shows how the strength of either partner in the marriage of true minds is multiplied tenfold and how the yoke is easy and the burden is light when love has entered in⁠—

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