Part 2

Dr. Grenfell keeps unholy hours, and dawn is one of his favourite out-door sports. He may nominally have retired at twelve—which is likely to mean that he began to read a book at that hour. He may have risen at two, three and four to see how the wind lay and the sea behaved: and perhaps five o’clock will find him at the wheel, bareheaded, the wind ruffling the silver locks above his ruddy countenance, his grey-brown eyes—which are like the stone labradorite in the varying aspects they take on—watching the horizon, the swaying bowsprit, the compass, and the goodness of God in the heavens.

The Doctor is a great out-of-doors man. He scorns a hat, and in his own element abjures it utterly. He wears a brown sweater, high in the neck, and above it he smokes a briarwood pipe that is usually right side up but appears to give him just as much satisfaction when the bowl is inverted. The rest of his costume is a symphony of grey or brown, patched or threadbare but neat always, ending in boots high or low of red rubber or of leather.

You may think that the dog Fritz out on the bowsprit is enjoying all the morning there is, but the Doctor is transformed.

“I love these early mornings,” he says—and he is innocent of pose when he says it: it is not a mere literary emotion. “It’s a beautiful sight in autumn with the ice when the banks are red with the little hills clear-cut against the sky and the sea a deep, deep blue. Isn’t it a beautiful world to live in? Isn’t it fun to live?”

You have to admit that it is.

“A man can’t think just of stomachs all the time. Sometimes I have to go away for a day or two. But I can’t say when I’ve ever been tired.

“A great little ship she is. She is very human to me. She has done her bit—she has carried her load. On that small deck and down below we once took 56 Finns from the wreck of the _Viking_ off Hamilton Inlet. We had nothing but biscuit and dry caplin on which to feed them. Once we were caught in a storm with seven schooners. We had 60 fathoms out on two chains for our anchors. Six of the other seven ships went ashore. Then the seventh overturned—ours was the only ship that stood. All of a sudden our main steampipe burst. We had to use cold sea-water. It was a hard struggle to bring our ship into shallow water at 1½ fathoms. Another time we had to tow 19 small boats at once.

“We always have something up our sleeve to get out of trouble.”

Then suddenly spying other vessels with their sails up, Dr. Grenfell proceeds to study them for a lesson as to the way his own ship is to take. He calls out to Albert Ash, his pessimistic mate, “She’s well-ballasted, that two-master. Have those others tacked?” His talk runs on easily as he swings the ship about and the sails are bellying with a favouring breeze. “This wind’ll run out three knots. I’m cheating it up into the wind. We’ll let her go by a bit. This is Chimney Tickle in here. A beautiful harbour. The tide and the polar current meet here. It’s always open water. It’s the place they’re thinking of for a transatlantic harbour. It’s only 1,625 miles from here to Galway. The jib and mainsail aren’t doing the work. That man has no idea of trimming a jib!” He rushes out to the wheelhouse and does most of the work of setting the mainsail himself.

“I’m so fond of those words ‘The sea is His,’” he says, coming back to the spokes again. “I think it runs in the blood. I like to think of the old sea-dogs—like Frobisher and Drake and Cabot. Shackleton told Mrs. Grenfell that the first ship that came to Labrador was named the _Grenfell_.”

“The comings and goings of the _Strathcona_ mean much to these people,” said Dr. McConnell. “At Independence a woman met us on the wharf, the great tears rolling down her cheeks. She lost her husband and her son in the ‘flu’ epidemic. She told me that her son said to her: ‘Mother, if Dr. Grenfell were only here, he could save me.’ At Snack Cove the people went out on the rocks and cried bitterly when the _Strathcona_ passed them by—as we learned when to their great relief we dropped in upon them a fortnight later.”

We cast anchor at Pleasure Harbour because of rough weather and for a few hours had one of the Doctor’s all too infrequent play-times, while waiting for the Strait to abate its fury to permit of a possible crossing.

Here a delicious trout stream tumbled and swirled from sullen, mist-hung uplands into a piratical cove where two small schooners swung at anchor. Like so many of these places the cove was a complete surprise—you came round the rock with no hint that it was there till you found it, placid as a tarn and deep and black, with big blue hills stretching to the northward beyond the fuzzy fringes of the nearer trees and the mottled barrens where the clouds were poised and the ghosts of the mist descended. (A tuneful, sailor-like name it is that the Eskimoes give to a ghost—the “Yo-ho”: and they say that the Northern Lights are the spirits of the dead at play).

An unhandy person with a rod, I was allowed by Dr. Grenfell and Dr. McConnell to go ahead and spoil the nicest trout-pools with my fly. Even though cod fishermen at the mouth of the stream had unlawfully placed a net to keep the trout from ascending, there were plenty of trout in the brook, and in the course of several hours forty-nine were good enough to attach themselves to my line. The banks were soggy under the long green grass: the water was acutely cold: and in two places there were small fields of everlasting snow in angles of the rock. It was an ideal trout-brook, for it was full of swirling black eddies, rippling rapids, and deep, still pools. The brook began at a lake which was roughened by a wind blowing steadily toward us. Dr. Grenfell cast against the wind where the lake discharged its contents into the brook, and the line was swept back to his boots. With unwearying patience he cast again and again, and while I strove in vain to land a single fish from the lake he caught one monster after another, almost at his own feet. All the way up the brook he had successfully fished in the most unpromising places, that we had given over with little effort, and here he was again getting by far the best results in the most difficult places of all. There seemed to be a parallel here with his medical and spiritual enterprise on the Labrador. He has worked for poor and humble people, when others have asked impatiently: “Why do you throw away your life upon a handful of fishermen round about a bleak and uncomfortable island where people have no business to live anyway?” He could not leave the fishermen’s stage at the mouth of the brook this time without being called upon to examine a fisherman troubled by failing eyesight. On the run of a couple of hundred yards in a rowboat to the _Strathcona_ the thunder-clouds rolled up, with lightning, and as we set foot on board the deluge came.

III AT ST. ANTHONY

Next evening found us at St. Anthony. Doctors and nurses were on the wharf to greet their chief after his absence of several weeks. Dr. Curtis showed the stranger through the clean and well-appointed hospital, with its piazza for a sun-bath and the bonny air for the T. B. patients, its X-ray apparatus and its operating room, its small museum of souvenirs of remarkable operations. I saw Dr. Andrews of San Francisco perform with singular deftness an operation for congenital cataract, with a docile little girl who had been blind a long time, and whose sight would probably be completely restored by the two thrusts made with a needle at the sides of the cornea. Her eyes were bandaged and she was carried away by the nurse, broadly smiling, to await the outcome. For ten years or so this noted oculist, no longer young except in the spirit, has crossed the continent to spend the summer in volunteer service at St. Anthony—a fair type of the men that are naturally drawn to the work in which the Doctor found his life.

One of the St. Anthony doctors visiting out-patients came upon a woman who was carefully wrapped in paper. This explanation was offered: “If us didn’t use he, the bugs would lodge their paws in we.” “Bugs” are flies, and the use of “he” for “it” is characteristic. A skipper will talk about a lighthouse as he, just as he feminizes a ship, and the nominative case serves also as the objective.

Another woman had been wrapped by her neighbours in burnt butter and oakum. “Now give her a bath,” was Dr. Grenfell’s advice after he had made his examination. “You can if you like, Doctor,” the volunteer nurse said. “If you do it and she dies we shan’t be blamed.”

In the hospital the Doctor was concerned with a baby twelve months old whose feet were twisted over till they were almost upside down. The mother had massaged the feet with oil for hours at a time. The baby cried constantly with pain, and neither the child nor the mother had known a satisfactory night’s rest since it was born. When the Doctor said the condition was curable, because she had brought her child in time, the look of relief in the mother’s face defied recording. It is a look often seen with his patients, and since he scarcely ever asks or receives a fee worth mentioning, it constitutes a large part of his reward.

The herd of reindeer that the Doctor imported from Lapland and installed between St. Anthony and Flower’s Cove with two Lapp herders are now flourishing under Canadian auspices in (Canadian) Labrador in the vicinity of the St. Augustine River. The Doctor himself took a hand in the difficult job of lassoing them and tying their feet, and still there were about forty of the animals that could not be found. The Doctor says it was “lots of fun” catching them—but he gives that description to many transactions that most of us would consider the hardest kind of hard work.

Next in importance after the hospital, Exhibit A is the spick-and-span orphanage, with thirty-five of the neatest and sweetest children, polite and friendly and more than willing to learn. The boys who are not named Peter, James or John are named Wilfred. “Suffer little children to come unto me” is in big letters on the front of the building. On the hospital is the inscription: “Faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love.” Over the Industrial School stands written, “Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord.” Here the beautiful rugs are made—hooked through canvas—according to lively designs of Eskimoes and seals and polar bears prepared in the main by the Doctor. Even the bird-house has its legend: “Praise the Lord, ye birds of wing.” There is a thriving co-operative store, next door to the well-kept little inn. A sign of the Doctor’s devising and painting swings in front of the store. On one side is a picture of huskies with a komatik (sled) bringing boxes to a settler’s door, and the inscription is, “Spot cash is always the leader.” On the other side of the sign a ship named _Spot Cash_ is seen bravely ploughing through mountainous waves and towering bergs. Underneath it reads: “There’s no sinking her.” “That is a reminiscence,” smiled the Doctor, “of my fights with the traders. Do you think these signs of mine are cant? I don’t mean them that way. I want every one of them to count.”

A school, a laundry, a machine-shop and a big store are other features of the plant at St. Anthony. The dock is a double-decker, and from it a diminutive tramway with a hand-car sends “feeders” to the various buildings and even up the walk to the Doctor’s house. All the mail-boats now turn in at this harbour. The captain of a ship like the _Prospero_—which in the summer of 1919 brought on four successive trips 70, 70, 60 and 50 patients to overflow the hospital—appreciates the facilities offered by this modern wharfage.

As the Doctor goes about St. Anthony he does not fail to note anything that is new, or to bestow on any worthy achievement a word of praise, for which men and women work the harder.

To “The Master of the Inn” he expressed his satisfaction in the smooth-running, cleanly hostelry. “He is one of my boys,” he remarked to me after the conversation. “He was trained here at St. Anthony, and then at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.”

Then he meets the electrician. “Did you get your ammeter?” he asks. And then: “How did you make your rheostat?”

He points with satisfaction to a little Jersey bull recently acquired, and then he critically surveys the woodland paths that lead from his dooryard to a tea-house on the hill commanding the wide vista of the harbour and the buildings of the industrial colony. “Nothing of this when we came here,” he observes. “The people seem possessed to cut down all their trees: we do our best to save ours, and we dote on these winding walks, which are an innovation.” Then he laughs. “A good woman heard me say that lambs were unknown in Labrador, and that we had to speak of seals instead when we were reading the Scriptures. She sent me a lamb and some birds, stuffed, so that the people might understand. She meant well, but in transit the lamb’s head got sadly twisted on one side, and the birds were decrepit specimens indeed with their bedraggled plumage.”

The house itself is delightful, and it is only too bad that the Doctor and his wife see so little of it.

It is a house with a distinct atmosphere. The soul of it is the living-room with a wide window at the end that opens out upon a prospect of the wild wooded hillside, with an ivy-vine growing across the middle, so that it seems as if there were no glass and one could step right out into the clear, pure air. There is a big, hearty fireplace; there is a generously receptive sofa; there is an upright Steinway piano, where a blind piano-tuner was working at the time of my visit.

Lupins, the purple monk’s hood and the pink fireweed grow along the paths and about the house. A glass-enclosed porch surrounds it on three sides, and in the porch are antlered heads of reindeer and caribou, coloured views of scenery in the British Isles and elsewhere, snowshoes and hunting and fishing paraphernalia, a great hanging pot of lobelias, and—noteworthily—a brass tablet bearing this inscription:

To the Memory of Three Noble Dogs Moody Watch Spy whose lives were given for mine on the ice April 21, 1908 Wilfred Grenfell St. Anthony

It is the kind of house that eloquently speaks of being lived in.

It is comfortable, but the note of idle luxury or useless ostentation is absent. There is no display for its own sake. The books bear signs of being fireside companions. Dr. Grenfell is fond of running a pencil down the margin as he reads. He is very fond of the books of his intimate friend Sir Frederick Treves, in whose London hospital he was house-surgeon. “The Land that is Desolate” was aboard the _Strathcona_. Millais’ book on Newfoundland was on the writing desk at St. Anthony, and had been much scored, as, indeed, had many of his other books.

I asked him to name to me his favourite books. Offhand he said: “The Bible first, naturally. And I’m very fond of George Borrow’s ‘The Bible in Spain.’ I admire Borrow’s persistence until he sold a Testament in Finisterre. ‘L’Avengro’ and ‘Romany Rye’ are splendid, too. I’m very fond of Kipling’s ‘Kim.’ Then I greatly care for the lives of men of action. Autobiography is my favourite form of reading. The ‘Life of Chinese Gordon’—the ‘Life of Lord Lawrence’—the ‘Life of Havelock.’ You see there is a strong strain of the Anglo-Indian in my make-up. My family have been much concerned with colonial administration in India. The story of Outram I delight in. He was everything that is unselfish and active—and a first-class sportsman. Boswell’s ‘Johnson’ is a great favourite of mine. I take keen pleasure in Froude’s ‘Seamen of the 16th Century.’ In the lighter vein I read every one of W. W. Jacob’s stories. Mark Twain is a great man. What hasn’t he added to the world!

“Then there is ‘Anson’s Voyages.’ It’s a capital book. He describes how he lugged off two hundred and ten old Greenwich pensioners to sail his ships, though they frantically fled in every direction to avoid being impressed into the service. All of them died, and he lost all of his ships but the one in which he fought and conquered a Spanish galleon after a most desperate battle.

“I used to have over my desk the words of Chinese Gordon:

‘To love myself last; To do the will of God,’

and the rest of his creed.

“The only man whose picture is in my Bible is the Rev. Jeremiah Horrox, a farmer’s son. He was the first to observe the transit of Venus. That was in 1640. The picture shows him watching the phenomenon through the telescope. It inspired me to think what a poor lonely clergyman could accomplish. He and men like him stick to their jobs—that’s what I like.

“I have in my Bible the words of Pershing to the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1917—the passage beginning ‘Hardship will be your lot.’”

I was privileged to look into that Bible. It is the Twentieth Century New Testament This he likes, he says, because the vernacular is clear, and sheds light on disputed passages which are not clear in other versions.

“I care more for clearness than anything else,” he declared. “When I read to the fishermen I want them to understand every word. But I have often read from this version to sophisticated congregations in the United States and had persons afterwards ask me what it was. Many passages are positively incorrect in the King James Version. For instance, the eighth chapter of Isaiah, which is the first lesson for Christmas morning, is misleading in the Authorized Version.”

We debated the relative merits of the King James Version and the Twentieth Century Version for a long time one evening. I was holding out for the old order, in the feeling that the revised text deliberately sacrificed much of the majestic beauty and poetry of the style of the King James Version and that—despite an occasional archaism—the meaning was clear enough, and the additional accuracy did not justify putting aside the earlier beloved translation. Dr. Grenfell earnestly insisted that the most important thing is to make the meaning of the Scriptures plain to plain people—that the sense is the main consideration, and the truth is more important than a stately cadence of poetic prose.

“I don’t want the language of three hundred years ago,” he asserted. “I want the language of today.”

It is his custom to crowd the margins of his Bibles with annotations. He fills up one copy after another—one of these is in the possession of Mrs. John Markoe of Philadelphia, who prizes it greatly.

By the name of George Borrow and the picture of Jeremiah Horrox on the fly-leaf of the copy he now uses, he has written “My inspirers.”

There is much interleaving and all the inserted pages are crowded with trenchant observations and reflections on the meaning of life.

Adhering to the inner side of the front corner is a poem:

“Is thy cruse of comfort failing? Rise and share it with another. . . . . . . Scanty fare for one will often Make a royal feast for two.”

There is a clipping from the _Outlook_, of an article by Lyman Abbott quoting Roosevelt to American troops, June 5, 1917, on the text from Micah, “What more doth the Lord require of thee than to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Then there is a quotation from Shakespeare:

“Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do, Nor light them for ourselves. For if our virtues Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike As if we had them not.”

Pages of meditation are given to dreams—service—conversion—going to the war in 1915 with the Harvard Medical Unit—the place of religion in daily life—the will—the religion of duty.

Another clipping—in large print—bears the words: “Not to love, not to serve, is not to live.”

In the back of the book is pasted an extended description of the death of Edith Cavell.

In one place he writes: “I don’t want a squashy credulity weakening my resolution and condoning incompetency—but just a faith of optimism which is that of youth and makes me do things regardless of the consequences.”

His marginal annotations disclose the profound and the devoted student of the Bible—the man who without the slightest shred of mealy-mouthed sanctimoniousness searches the Scriptures, and lives close to the spirit of the Master. Anyone who sees even a little of Grenfell in action must realize how faithful his life is to the pattern of Christ’s life on earth. There are many passages of Christ’s experience—as when the crowd pressed in upon Him—or when learned men were supercilious—or when He perceived that virtue had gone out of Him—or when He was reproached because He let a man die in His absence—that remind one of Grenfell’s thronged and hustled life. Many believe that Grenfell can all but work a miracle of healing; and the lame, the halt and the blind are brought to him from near and far, at all times of the day or the night, even as they were brought to the Master. In his love of children, in his patience with the doer of good and his righteous wrath aflame against the evil-doer, in his candour and his sunny sweetness and his unfailing courage Grenfell translates the precepts of the Book into the action and the speech of the living way. He cannot live by empty professions of faith; he is happy only when he is putting into vivid practice the creed which guides his living.

IV ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK

It was hard to say where the Doctor’s day began or ended. One night he rose several times to inspect wind and weather ere deciding to make a start; and at twenty minutes before five he was at the wheel himself. Mrs. Grenfell clipped from “Life” and pinned upon his tiny stateroom mirror a picture of a caterpillar showing to a class of worms the early bird eating the worm. The legend beneath it ran: “Now remember, dear children, the lesson for today—the disobedient worm that would persist in getting up too early in the morning.”

His books and articles are usually written between the early hours of five and seven o’clock in the morning. The log of the _Strathcona_, religiously kept for the information of the International Grenfell Association, was likely to be pencilled on his knee while sitting on a pile of firewood on the reeling deck. Just as Roosevelt wrote his African game-hunting articles “on safari,” while so wearied with the chase that he could hardly keep his eyes open, the Doctor has schooled himself to do his work without considering his pulse-beat or his temperature or his blood pressure. After a driving day afloat and ashore, as surgeon, magistrate, minister and skipper, he rarely retires before midnight, and often he sits up till the wee small hours engrossed in the perusal of a book he likes.

When the Doctor enters a harbour unannounced and drops anchor, within a few minutes power-boats and rowboats are flocking about the _Strathcona_, and the deck fills with fishermen, their wives and their children, all with their major and minor troubles. Sometimes it requires the whole family to bring a patient. Often after a diagnosis it seems advisable to place a patient in the hospital at Battle Harbour or St. Anthony, and so the “Torquay Cot” or another in the diminutive hospital on the _Strathcona_ is filled, or perhaps the passenger goes to hob-nob with the good-natured crew and consume their victuals. Many a crying baby, in the limited space, makes the narrow quarters below-decks reverberate with the heraldry of the fact that he is teething or has the tummyache.