Part 5
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.
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 the _Strathcona_.” 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 the _Strathcona_—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.
VII THE 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.
VIII THE 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 the _Strathcona_: 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 the _Strathcona_ hove 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 the _Strathcona_ to 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.
IX THE 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 the _Strathcona_ for 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.