to cling like a leech to a rope fastened to a ring in the wall, for
the little ship was bouncing back and forth so fast and so far that it
was impossible to compare it with the motion of any other craft. Day
began to dawn about 3 A.M. By the dim light I could make out
mighty mountains of green foaming water. At each roll of the steamer
we seemed to be at the bottom of a huge emerald pit. Suddenly some one
yelled, "There she goes!" and that second the boat was dragged down,
down, down. An immense wave had caught us, rolled us so far over that
our dory in davits had filled with water to the brim. As the ship
righted herself, the weight of the dory snapped off the davit at the
deck, and the boat, still attached by her painter, was dragged
underneath our hull, and threatened to pull us down with it. In two
seconds the men had cut her away, but not before she had nearly banged
herself to matchwood against our side.
Now we are lying under the lea of St. Augustine Island waiting for the
wind to abate. The chief engineer has just offered to row me ashore to
hunt for young puffins. More later.
[Illustration: A PUFFIN GHETTO]
There were hundreds of them in every family, and so many families that
it resembled nothing so much as a puffin ghetto. I judged from the
turmoil that they were screeching for "a place in the sun." The noise
they made did not in the least accord with their respectable Quaker
appearance. Shall I bring you one as a pet? Its austere presence would
help you to remember your "latter end."
When I wrote you that there was ice about, I did not refer to the
field ice through which we travelled on my way north. This is the real
thing this time--icebergs, and lots of them. They call the little ones
"growlers," and big and little alike are classed as "pieces of ice"!
They are not my idea of a "piece" of anything. I know now what the
Ancient Mariner meant when he said:
"And ice mast high came floating by
As green as emerald."
It exactly describes them, only it doesn't wholly describe them, for
no one could. They loom up in every shape and size and variation of
form, pinnacles and towers and battlements, stately palaces of
glittering crystal, triumphal archways more gorgeous than ever
welcomed a conqueror home. Sometimes they are shining white, too
dazzling to look at; and sometimes they are streaked with great vivid
bands of green and azure which are so unearthly and brilliant that I
feel certain some fairy has dipped his brush in the solar spectrum and
dabbed the colours on this gigantic palette.
A sea without these jewels of the Arctic will forever look barren and
unfinished to me after this. Even the sailors, who know too well what
a menace they are to their craft, yield to their beauty a mute and
grudging homage. To sit in the sun or the moonlight, and watch a heavy
sea hurling mountains of water and foam over one of these ocean
monarchs is a never-to-be-forgotten experience. So too it is to listen
to the thunder of one of them "foundering"; for their equilibrium is
very unstable, and the action of the sea, as they travel southwards to
their death in the Gulf Stream, cuts them away at the surface of the
water. Blocks weighing unbelievable tons crash off them, or they will
suddenly, without a second's warning, break into a million pieces. I
can never conquer a creepiness of the spine as I listen to one of
these tragedies. It is a startling, new sensation such as we never
expect to meet again after childhood has shut its doors on us. In the
quiet that follows the gigantic disintegration one half expects to see
a new heaven and a new earth emerge out of the chaos of ice quivering
in the water.
You often warned me in the course of the past year how dull life would
be. You knew how I loved a city. I still do. But the last word on
earth one could apply to the life here is "dull." Nature takes care of
that. I defy you to walk along any street in London and see six
porpoises and a whale! That is what I saw this morning. Oh! of course
you may counter by telling me that neither can I see an automobile or
a fire engine, but I have you, because I can answer that I have seen
them already. How are you going to get out of that corner, except by
saying that you do not want to see the old porpoises and whales and
bergs?--and I know your "Scotch" conscience forbids such distortion of
facts.
I have come to believe in the personality of porpoises. They swam
beside the ship, playing about in the water all the while, rolling
over and diving, and chasing each other just as if they knew they had
a "gallery." We did not reward them very well either, for the Prophet
shot one, and we ate bits of him for lunch--the porpoise, I mean, not
the Prophet. I thought he would make a good companion-piece for the
polar bear, and he was quite edible. He only needed a rasher of bacon
to make you believe he was calf's liver.
So you see that between puffins and porpoises and whales, and
"growlers" and lost dories, I crowded enough into one day to give me
dreams that Alice in Wonderland might covet.
In your secret heart don't you wish that you too were
"Where the squat-legged Eskimo
Waddles in the ice and snow,
And the playful polar bear
Nips the hunter unaware;
Where the air is kind o' pure,
And the snow crop's pretty sure"?
_July 22_
It has been days since I wrote you, and they have slipped by so
stealthily I must have missed half they held.
Since coming aboard I have taken to rising promptly. It is a necessary
measure if I am to be able to rise at all. One morning I stuck my head
out just in time to see my favourite sweater, which I had counted on
for service on the homeward voyage, disappearing over the
rail--legitimately, so far as concerned the wearer. Last week, by the
merest fluke, I rescued my best boots from a similar fate. The doctor
explained lamely on each occasion that they got mixed with the
clothing sent for distribution to the poor. This may be a literal
statement of fact, but I doubt the manner of the mixing.
We celebrated to-day by running aground on the flats. You can "squeak"
over them if you happen to strike the channel. The difficulty is,
however, that the sandy bottom shifts. To-day it is, and to-morrow it
is not. I was eating one of those large, hearty breakfasts which the
combination of a dead flat calm and a sunshiny brisk air make such a
desideratum. I was, moreover, perched on the top of the wheel house,
and reflecting on the poor taste of the author of the Book of
Revelation when he said that in heaven "there shall be no more sea."
At this moment I came to with a lurch. "She's stuck!" yelled, or as he
himself would put it, "bawled," the Prophet. For once he was
undeniably right. Fortunately the tide was on the flood, and we
floated off a short while after.
In the afternoon we visited an Eskimo Moravian station. They--the
Eskimos, not the Moravians--are a jolly little people, and picturesque
as possible. Not that any aspersions on the Moravians are intended,
for I have the greatest respect for them. My shining leather coat made
a great hit. They fondled it and stroked it, and coo-ed at it as if
it were a new baby. All the women past their very first youth seemed
toothless. I wondered if it could be a characteristic of the
tribe--sort of Manx Eskimo. I asked the Prophet what was the cause of
the universal shortage, and was told that the Eskimo women all chew
the sealskin to soften it for making into boots. You can take this
statement for what it may be worth.
Speaking of which I have just finished reading a ludicrously furious
attack on the Mission in a St. John's paper, for its alleged
misrepresentations. It seems that last year the former superintendent
took down a boy from the Children's Home to give him a chance at
further education. He had a wooden leg, his own having been removed by
an operation for tuberculosis. On his arrival in Montreal the
omnivorous reporter saw in him excellent copy, and forthwith printed
the following purely fictitious account of the cause of his
disability. Little Kommak, so the story ran (the boy is of pure Irish
extraction, and is named Michael Flynn), was one day sitting with his
mother in his igloo when he saw a large polar bear approaching. Having
no weapon, and not desiring the presence of the bear in any capacity
at their midday meal, he stuck his leg out through the small aperture
of the igloo. The bear bit it off on the principle of half a loaf
being better than no bread. The whole thing was a fabric of lies from
beginning to end. The St. John's papers discovered the article,
pounced upon it, and printed the article "_que je viens de finir_."
Of course, if the local editor lacked humour enough to credit the
doctor with such a fairy tale, one could pity the poor soul, but his
diatribe has rather the earmarks of jealousy.
[Illustration: THE BEAR BIT HIS LEG OFF]
A lovely sunset is lighting up the sea and sky and hills, and turning
the plain little settlement, in the harbour of which we are anchored,
into the Never, Never Land. The scene is so bewitching that I find my
soul purged by it of the bad taste of the attack. I'll leave you to
digest the mixed metaphor undisturbed while I go below and help with
the patients who have begun pouring aboard.
_Same evening_
An old chap has just climbed over the rail, who looks like an early
patriarch, but his dignity is impaired by the moth-eaten high silk hat
which surmounts his white hair. The people regard him with apparent
deference, due either to the hat or his inherent character. Looking at
his fine old face, one is inclined to believe it is the latter.
The expressions these people use are so nautical and so apt! Every
patient who comes aboard expressed the wish to be "sounded" in some
portion of his or her anatomy for the suspected ailment which has
brought him. One burly fisherman solemnly took off his huge oily
sea-boot, placed a grimy forefinger on his heel, and remarked
sententiously that the doctor "must sound him right there." The
prescription was soap and water--a diagnosis in which I entirely
concurred. The next case was a young girl with a "kink in her glutch."
It has the sound of all too familiar motor trouble, but was dismissed
as psychopathic. I wish that a similarly simple diagnosis accounted
for the mysterious ailments of automobiles. My meditations on modern
science were interrupted by an insistent voice proclaiming that "my
head is like to burst abroad."
If I were a woman on this coast my temper would "burst abroad" to see
the men--some of them--spitting all over the floors of the cottages:
disgusting and particularly dangerous in a country where the
arch-enemy, tuberculosis, is ever on the watch for victims. But the
new era is slowly dawning. Now, instead of hooking "Welcome Home" into
the fireside mat, you find "DONT SPIT" worked in letters of
flame. It is the harbinger of the feminist movement in the land.
Speaking of the feminist movement makes me think of a woman at
Aquaforte Harbour. She deserves a book written about her. In the first
place, Elmira had the courage of her convictions, and did not marry.
Her convictions were that marriage was desirable if you get the right
man who can support you properly, and not otherwise. This is
generations in advance of the local attitude to the holy estate. She
has lived a life of single blessedness to the coast. In every trouble
along her section of the shore it is "routine" to send for "Aunt"
'Mira. She has more sense and unselfishness and native wit than you
would meet in ten products of civilization. For a year she acted as
nurse to the little boy of one of the staff, and never was child
better cared for. They once told 'Mira she really must make baby take
his bottle. (He had the habit of profound slumber at that time.) "Oh!
I does, ma'm," 'Mira replied. "If he dwalls off, I gives him a
scattered jolt." The family took her to England with them, and her
remarks on the trains showed where her ancestry lay. When they backed
she exclaimed, "My happy day! We're goin' astern!" She requested to be
allowed to "open the port"; and at a certain junction where there was
a long delay she asked to go "ashore for a spell."
That "hell is paved with good intentions" is no longer a glib phrase
to me; it is a conviction born of seeing some of the suffering of this
country. The doctor has just been ashore to see a woman with a
five-days old baby. No attempt whatever had been made to get her or
her bed clean or comfortable. She had developed a violent fever, and
the local midwives, with their congenital terror of the use of
water--internal or external--had larded the miserable creature over
from head to foot with butter, and finished off with a liberal coating
of oakum. The doctor said, by the time he had himself scraped and
bathed her, put her in a fresh cool bed with a jug of spring water
beside her to drink, she looked as if she thought the gates of
Paradise had opened.
Mails reached us at the Moravian station, and your most welcome
letters loomed large on the postal horizon. You ask if I have not
found the year long. I will answer by telling you the accepted
derivation of the name "Labrador." It comes from the Portuguese, and
means "the labourer," because those early voyagers intended to send
slaves back to His Majesty. Well-filled time, so the psychologists
tell us, is short in passing, and "down North," before you are half
into the day's tasks, you look up to find that "the embers of the day
are red." You must have guessed, too, that I should not have evinced
such contentment during these months if my fellow workers had not been
congenial. I shall always remember their devotion, and readiness to
serve both one another and the people; and I know that the years to
come will only deepen my appreciation of what their friendship has
meant to me.
How glad I was when the winter came, and I was no longer classed as a
newcomer! I had heard so much about dog driving that I remember
thinking the resultant sensations must be akin to those Elijah
experienced in his chariot. But now I have driven with dogs in summer,
and that is more than most of the older stagers can boast. In a
prosperous little village in the Straits lives the rural dean. He is a
devoted and practical example of what a shepherd and bishop of souls
can be. There is not a good work for the benefit of his flock--and he
is not bound by the conventional and unchristian denominational
prejudices--which does not find in him a leader. His interests range
from coöperation to a skin-boot industry. But the problem of getting
about when you have no Aladdin's carpet is acute. He goes by dog sled
and shanks' pony in winter, and used to go by boat and shanks' pony in
summer. Then one day he had the inspiration of building a two-wheeled
shay, and harnessing in his lusty and idle dog team. Now he drives
about at a rate that "Jehu the son of Nimshi would approve," and is
independent of winds and weather.
Sunday to-morrow. We are running south for the Ragged Islands. If I
were not on the hospital ship, and therefore an involuntary example to
the people, I would fall into my bunk at night with my clothes on, I
am so weary.
_Ragged Islands
Sunday night_
Just aboard again after Prayers at the little church. It is a quaint
and crude little edifice, and the people were so kindly and the
service so hearty that one feels "wonderfu' lifted up." To be sure,
during the sermon I was suddenly brought up "all standing" by the
amazing statement that the "Harch Hangels go Hup, Hup, Hup." One felt
in one's bones that this was a misapprehension. The very earnest
clergyman may have noticed my obvious disagreement, for at the close
he announced, "We will now sing the 398th hymn"--
"Day of Wrath, oh! Day of Mourning,
See fulfilled the Prophet's warning,
Heaven and earth in ashes burning."
This goes off into the blue on the chance of its reaching you before I
come myself and share a secret with you; for to-morrow we are due at
the Iron Bound Islands, and there I leave the Northern Light, and end
the chapter of my life as a member of the Mission staff. The
appropriateness of the closing hymn in the little church last night is
borne more than ever forcibly in upon me with the chill light of early
morning, for I verily feel as though my world were tottering about my
ears.
I am still optimist enough to know that life will hold many
experiences which will enrich it, but in my secret heart I cherish the
conviction that this year will always stand out as a keynote, and a
touchstone by which to judge those which succeed it. My greatest
solace in the ache which I feel in taking so long a farewell of a
people and country that I love is that I shall always possess them in
memory--a treasure which no one can take from me. As I look back over
the quickly speeding year I find that I have forgotten those trivial
incidents of discomfort which pricked my hurrying feet. All I can
recall is the rugged beauty of the land, the brave and simple people
with their hardy manhood and more than generous hospitality, and most
of all my little bairns who hold in their tiny hands the future of Le
Petit Nord.
[Illustration: P.S.]
The Riverside Press
Cambridge · Massachusetts
U.S.A.
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