WITH GRENFELL ON THE
LABRADOR
[Illustration: DR. GRENFELL, A.B.
(Three ratlins were broken on the ascent).]
WITH GRENFELL ON
THE LABRADOR
BY
FULLERTON L. WALDO
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK CHICAGO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1920, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
To
DORIS KENYON
OF
COMPANY L., 307th INFANTRY,
77th DIVISION;
HONORARY SERGEANT, U.S.A.
FOREWORD
Aboard the _Strathcona_,
Red Bay, Labrador, Sept. 9, 1919.
DEAR WALDO:
It has been great having you on board for a time. I wish you could stay
and see some other sections of the work. When you joined us I hesitated
at first, thinking perhaps it would be better to show you the poorer
parts of our country, and not the better off—but decided to let you
drop in and drop out again of the ordinary routine, and not bother to
‘show you sights.’ Still I am sorry that you did not see some other
sections of the people. There is to me in life always an infinite
satisfaction in accomplishing anything. I don’t care so much what it is.
But if it has involved real anxiety, especially as to the possibility of
success, it always returns to me a prize worth while.
Well, you have been over some parts, where things have somehow
materialized. The reindeer experiment I also estimate an accomplished
success, as it completely demonstrated our predictions, and as it is now
in good hands and prospering. The Seamen’s Institute, in having become
self-supporting and now demanding more space, has also been a real
encouragement to go ahead in other lines. But there is one thing better
than accomplishment, and that is opportunity; as the problem is better
than the joy of writing Q. E. D.
So I would have liked to show you White Bay as far as La Scie, where our
friends are fighting with few assets, and many discouragements. It
certainly has left them poor, and often hungry and naked, but it has
made men of them, and they have taught me many lessons; and it would do
your viewpoint good to see how many debts these people place me under.
If life is the result of stimuli, believe me we ought to know what life
means in a country where you are called on to create every day
something, big or small. On the other hand, if life consists of the
multitude of things one possesses, then Labrador should be graded far
from where I place it, in its relation to Philadelphia.
A thousand thanks for coming so far to give us your good message of
brotherly sympathy.
Yours sincerely,
WILFRED T. GRENFELL.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD, by Doctor Grenfell 7
I “DOCTOR” 15
II A FISHER OF MEN 27
III AT ST. ANTHONY 39
IV ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK 53
V THE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY 78
VI THE SPORTSMAN 97
VII THE MAN OF SCIENCE 106
VIII THE MAN OF LAW 114
IX THE MAN OF GOD 119
X SOME OF HIS HELPERS 130
XI FOUR-FOOTED AIDES: DOGS AND 139
REINDEER
XII A WIDE, WIDE “PARISH” 150
XIII A FEW “PARISHIONERS” 173
XIV NEEDS, BIG AND LITTLE 183
[Illustration: LABRADOR AND NEWFOUNDLAND
PREPARED FOR DR. WILFRED T. GRENFELL, C.M.G.
_From “AMONG THE DEEP SEA FISHERS”_
_By Courtesy of The Grenfell Association of America_]
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Dr. Grenfell, A.B. Title
Fritz and His Master 38
“Doctor” 38
Battle Harbour, Spreading Fish for 60
Drying
“Please Look at My Tongue, Doctor” 98
“Next” 98
Dr. Grenfell Leading Meeting at 120
Battle Harbour
St. Anthony Hospital in Winter 134
Some of the Helpers 134
Signal Hill, Harbour of St. Johns 150
Happy Days at the Orphanage St. 180
Anthony
I
“DOCTOR”
Grenfell and Labrador are names that must go down in history together.
Of the man and of his sea-beaten, wind-swept “parish” it will be said,
as Kipling wrote of Cecil Rhodes:
“Living he was the land, and dead
His soul shall be her soul.”
Some folk may try to tell us that Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, C.M.G.,
gets more credit than is due him: but while they cavil and insinuate the
Recording Angel smiles and writes down more golden deeds for this
descendant of an Elizabethan sea-dog. Sir Richard Grenville, of the
_Revenge_, as Tennyson tells us—stood off sixty-three ships of Spain’s
Armada, and was mortally wounded in the fight, crying out as he fell
upon the deck: “I have only done my duty, as a man is bound to do.” That
tradition of heroic devotion to duty, and of service to mankind, is
ineradicable from the Grenfell blood.
“We’ve had a hideous winter,” the Doctor said, as I clasped hands with
him in June at the office of the Grenfell Association in New York. His
hair was whiter and his bronzed face more serious than when I last had
seen him; but the unforgettable look in his eyes of resolution and of
self-command was there as of old, intensified by the added years of
warfare with belligerent nature and sometimes recalcitrant mankind. For
a few moments when he talks sentence may link itself to sentence very
gravely, but nobody ever knew the Doctor to go long without that keen,
bright flash of a smile, provoked by a ready and a constant sense of
fun, that illumines his face like a pulsation of the Northern Lights,
and—unless you are hard as steel at heart—must make you love him, and
do what he wants you to do.
The Doctor on this occasion was a month late for his appointment with
the board of directors of the Grenfell Association. His little steamer,
the _Strathcona_, had been frozen in off his base of operations and
inspirations at St. Anthony. So he started afoot for Conch to catch a
launch that would take him to the railroad. He was three days covering a
distance which in summer would have required but a few hours, in the
direction of White Bay on the East Coast. He slept on the beach in wet
clothes. Then he was caught on pans of ice and fired guns to attract the
notice of any chance vessel. Once more ashore, he vainly started five
times more from St. Anthony harbour. Finally he went north and walked
along the coast, cutting across when he could, eighty miles to Flower’s
Cove. In the meantime the _Strathcona_, with Mrs. Grenfell aboard, was
imprisoned in the ice on the way to Seal Harbour; and it was three weeks
before Mrs. Grenfell, with the aid of two motor-boats, reached the
railroad by way of Shoe Cove.
At Flower’s Cove the Doctor rapped at the door of Parson Richards. That
good man fairly broke into an alleluia to behold him. With beaming face
he started to prepare his hero a cup of tea. But there came a cry at the
door: “Abe Gould has shot himself in the leg!”
Out into the cold and the dark again the Doctor stumbled. He put his
hand into the leg and took out the bone and the infected parts with such
instruments as he had. Then he sat up all night, feeding his patient
sleeping potions of opium. With the day came the mail-boat for the
south, the Ethie, beaten back from two desperate attempts to penetrate
the ice of the Strait to Labrador.
Two months later I rejoined the Doctor at Croucher’s wharf, at Battle
Harbour, Labrador.
The little _Strathcona_, snuggling against the piles, was redolent of
whalemeat for the dogs, her decks piled high with spruce and fir, white
birch and juniper, for her insatiable fires. (Coal was then $24 a ton.)
“Where’ve you been all this time?” the Doctor cried, as I flung my
belongings to his deck from the _Ethie’s_ mail-boat, and he held out
both hands with his radiant smile of greeting. “I’m just about to make
the rounds of the hospital. This is a busy day. We pull out for St.
Anthony tonight!” With that he took me straight to the bedside of his
patients in the little Battle Harbour hospital that wears across its
battered face the legend: “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least
of these my brethren ye did it unto me.”
The first man was recovering from typhoid, and the Doctor, with a smile,
was satisfied with his convalescence.
The next man complained of a pain in the abdomen. Dr. Grenfell inquired
about the intensity of the pain, the temperature, the appetite and the
sleep of the patient.
“He has two of the four cardinal symptoms,” said the Doctor, “pain and
temperature. Probably it’s an appendical attack. We had a boy who—like
this man—looked all right outwardly, and yet was found to have a bad
appendix.”
The Doctor has a way of thinking aloud as he goes along, and taking
others into his confidence—frequently by an interrogation which is
flattering in the way in which he imputes superior knowledge to the one
of whom the question is asked. It is a liberal education in the healing
craft to go about with him, for he is never secretive or mysterious—he
is frankly human instead of oracular.
“How about your schooner?” was his next question. “Do you think that
they can get along without you?”
He never forgets that these are fishermen, whose livelihood depends on
getting every hour they can with their cod-traps, and the stages and the
flakes where the fish is salted and spread to dry.
The third patient was a whaler. He had caught his hand in a winch. The
bones of the second and third fingers of the right hand were cracked,
and the tips of those fingers had been cut off. The hand lay in a hot
bath.
“Dirty work, whaling,” was the Doctor’s comment, as he examined the
wound. “Everything is rotten meat and a wound easily becomes infected.”
Number four was a baffling case of multiple gangrene. This Bonne Bay
fisherman had a nose and an ear that looked as if they had turned to
black rubber. His toes were sloughing off. The back of his right hand
was like raw beef. His left leg was bent at an angle of 90 degrees, and
as it could not bear the pressure of the bedclothes a scaffolding had
been built over it. The teeth were gone, and when the dressings were
removed even the plucking of the small hairs on the leg gave the patient
agony.
“What have you been eating?”
“Potatoes, sir.”
“What else?”
“Turnips, sir.”
“You need green food. Fresh vegetable salts.”
The Doctor looked out of the window and saw a dandelion in the rank
green grass. “That’s what he ought to have,” was his comment.
On the verandah were four out-of-door patients to whom fresh air was
essential. One had a tubercular spine. A roll of plaster had been coming
by freight all summer long and was impatiently awaited. But a delay of
months on the Labrador is nothing unusual. Dr. Daly, of Harvard,
presented the _Strathcona_ with a searchlight, and it was two years on
the way—most of that time stored in a warehouse at North Sydney.
Around these fresh-air cases the verandah was netted with rabbit-wire.
That was to keep the dogs from breaking in and possibly eating the
patients, who are in mortal terror of the dogs.
When the Doctor took a probe from the hand of a trusted assistant he was
careful to ask if it was sterile ere he used it. He constantly took his
juniors—in this instance, Johns Hopkins doctors—into consultation.
“What do you think?” was his frequent query.
The use of unhallowed patent medicines gave him distress. “O the stuff
the people put into themselves!” he exclaimed.
“Have we got a Dakin solution?” he asked presently.
“We’ve been trying to get a chloramine solution all summer,” answered
one of the young physicians.
The Doctor made a careful examination of the man with the tubercular
spine, who was encased in plaster from the waist up. “After all,” was
his comment as he rose to his feet, “doctors don’t do anything but keep
things clean.”
In the women’s ward the Harris Cot, the Torquay Cot, the Northfield Cot,
the Victoria Cot, the Kingman Cot, the Exeter Cot were filled with
patient souls whose faces shone as the Doctor passed. “More fresh air!”
he ejaculated, and other windows were opened. Those who came from homes
hermetically sealed have not always understood the Doctor’s passion for
ozone. One man complained that the wind got in his teeth and a girl said
that the singing on Sundays strained her stomach.
He had a remarkable memory for the history of each case. “The day after
you left her heart started into fibrillation,” said an assistant. “It
was there before we left,” answered the Doctor quietly.
At one bedside where an operation of a novel nature had been performed
he remarked, “I simply hate leaving an opening when I don’t know how to
close it.”
He never pretends to know it all: he never sits down with folded hands
in the face of a difficulty or “passes the buck” to another. In his
running commentary while he looks the patient over he confesses his
perplexities. Yet all that he says confirms rather than shakes the
patient’s confidence in him. Those whom he serves almost believe that he
can all but raise the dead.
“Now this rash,” he said, “might mean the New World smallpox—but
probably it doesn’t. We’ve only had two deaths from that malady on the
coast. It ran synchronously with the ‘flu.’ In one household where there
were three children and a man, one child and the man got it and two
children escaped it.
“This woman’s ulcers are the sequel to smallpox. She needs the vegetable
salts of a fresh diet. How to get green things for her is the problem.
And this patient has tubercular caries of the hip. The X-ray apparatus
is across the Straits at St. Anthony, sixty miles away. If we only had a
portable X-ray apparatus of the kind they used in the war! Now you see,
no matter what the weather, this woman must be taken across the Straits
because we are entirely without the proper appliances here.”
Screens were put around the cots as the examination was made, so that
the others wouldn’t be harrowed by the sight of blood or pain.
The sick seemed to find comfort merely in being able to describe their
symptoms to a wise, good man. Much of the trouble seemed actually to
evaporate as they talked to him. Miss Dohme and the other nurses kept
the rooms spotlessly clean, and gay bowls of buttercups were about.
“I don’t feel nice, Doctor,” said the next woman. “Some mornings a kind
of dead, dreary feeling seems to come out of me stummick and go right
down me laigs. Sometimes it flutters; sometimes it lies down. The wind’s
wonderful strong today, and it’s rising.”
Usually the diagnosis is not greatly helped by the patient, who meekly
answers the questions with “Yes, Doctor,” or “No, Doctor,” or describes
the symptoms with such poetic vagueness that a great deal is left to the
imagination. It takes patient cross-questioning—in which the Doctor is
an adept—to elicit the truth.
Here is a dear little baby, warmly muffled, on the piazza with the
elixir of the sun and the pine air. The pustular eczema has been treated
with ammoniate of mercury—but what will happen when the infant goes
home to the old malnutrition and want of sanitation? If only the Doctor
could follow the case!
Bathtubs are a mystery to some of the patients, who after they have been
undressed and led to the water’s edge ask plaintively, “What do you want
me to do now?”
So many times in this little hospital one was smitten by the need of
green vegetables which in so many places are not to be had—“greens”
(like spinach), lettuce, radishes and the rest.
As we came away the Doctor spoke of the feeling that he used to have
that wherever a battle for the right was on anywhere he must take part
in it. “But I have learned that they also serve who simply do their duty
in their places. These dogs hereabouts seem to think they must go to
every fight there is, near or far. But none of us is called upon to do
all there is to do. I often read of happenings in distant parts of the
earth and feel as though I ought to be there in the thick of things.
Then I realize that if we all minded our own business exactly where we
are we’d be doing well. And when such thoughts come to me I just make up
my mind to be contented and to buckle down to my job all the harder.”
II
A FISHER OF MEN
That evening Dr. Grenfell spoke in the little Church of England, taking
as his text the words from the twelfth chapter of John: “The spirit that
is ruling in this world shall be driven out.” Across the tickle the
huskies howled at the moon, and one after another took up the challenge
from either bank. But one was no longer conscious of the wailful
creatures, and heard only the speaker; and the kerosene lamps lighted
one by one in the gloom of the church became blurred stars, and the
woman sitting behind me in a loud whisper said, “Yes! yes!” as Dr.
Grenfell, in the earnest and true words of a man who speaks for the
truth’s sake and not for self’s sake, interpreted the Scriptures that he
has studied with such devotion.
“When I was young,” he said, “I learned that man is descended from a
monkey, and I was told that there is no God.
“When I became older and did my own thinking I refused to believe that
God chose one race of mankind and left the rest to be damned.
“No one has the whole truth, whether he be Church of England, Methodist
or Roman Catholic.
“The simple truth of Christianity is what the world needs. How foolish
seem the tinsel and trumpery distinctions for which men struggle! What
is the use of being able to string the alphabet along after your name?
Character is all that counts.
“Some say that religion is for the saving of your soul. But it is not a
grab for the prizes of this world, and the capital prize of the life
eternal.
“The things the world holds to be large, Christ tells us, are small.
Jesus says the greatest things are truth and love.
“Love is so big a thing that it forgets self utterly.
“How many of us know what it is to love? It is not mere animal desire.
“If we all truly loved, what a world it would be!
“Suppose a doctor loved all his patients. He wouldn’t be satisfied then
to say: ‘Your leg is better,’ or ‘Here is a pill.’
“Suppose a clergyman loved his people. He wouldn’t say: ‘I wonder how
many in this congregation are Church of England.’
“God Himself is love and truth. Jesus lived the beautiful things He
taught. He was them.
“Every man has something in him that forces him to love what is
unselfish and true and altogether lovely and of good report.
“In the war, in the midst of all the horror and the terror and the pity
of it, a noble spirit was made manifest among men—a heroic spirit of
self-control and a sense of true values.
“If I couldn’t have a palace I could have a clean house; if I couldn’t
speak foreign languages I needn’t speak foul language. We may be poor
fishermen or poor London doctors: we can serve in our places, and we can
let our lives shine before men. If I have done my duty where I am, I
don’t care about the rest. I shall not care if they leave my old body on
the Labrador coast or at the bottom of the Atlantic for the fishes, if I
have fought the good fight and finished the course. Having lived well, I
shall die contented.”
As soon as the service in the church was over a meeting was held in the
upper room of the hospital. The room was filled, and Dr. Grenfell spoke
again. Before his address familiar hymns were sung, and—noting that two
of those present had violins and were accompanying the cabinet organ—he
referred to their efforts in his opening words.
“We all have the great duty and privilege of common human friendliness,”
he said. “We may show it in the little things of every day. For
everybody needs help, everywhere. There is no end to the need of human
sympathy. It may be shown with a fiddle—or perhaps I ought to say
‘violin’ (apologizing to a Harvard student who was officiating).
“I have always loved Kim in Kipling’s story of that name. Kim is just a
waif. Nobody knows who his father is; but he is called ‘the little
friend of all the world.’
“There is a book which has found wide acceptance called ‘Mrs. Wiggs of
the Cabbage Patch.’ Mrs. Wiggs lived in a humble cottage with only her
cabbage patch, but everybody came to her for sunshine and healing. She
had plenty of troubles of her own, but just because she had them she
knew how to help others. Whoever we are, whatever we are, we may wear
the shining armour of the knights of God: there is work waiting for our
hands to do, there is good cheer for us to spread.”
Dreamer and doer live side by side in amity in Dr. Grenfell’s make-up.
At the animated dinner-table of the nurses and the doctors in the Battle
Harbour hospital, after asking a blessing, he was talking eagerly about
the League of Nations, the industrial situation in England and America
and the future for Russia while brandishing the knife above the meat pie
and letting no plate but his own go neglected.
Dr. Grenfell is happy and his soul is free at the wheel of the
_Strathcona_. That wheel bears the words, “Jesus saith, Follow me and I
will make you fishers of men.” At the peak of the mainmast is likely to
be the blue pennant bearing the words, “God is Love.” The _Strathcona_
is ketch-rigged. Her mainmast, that is to say, is in the foremast’s
place; and above the mainsail is a new oblong topsail that is the
Doctor’s dear delight. The other sail has above it a topsail of orthodox
pattern, and there are two jibs. So that when she has her full
fuel-saving complement of canvas spread, the _Strathcona_ displays six
sails at work. Could the Doctor always have his way, all the sails would
be up whenever a breeze stirs. With a good wind the ship is capable of
eight knots and even more an hour: five knots or so is her average speed
under steam alone. In the bow, his paws on the rail, or out on the
bowsprit sniffing the air and seeing things that only he can see, is the
incomparable dog Fritz—Fritz of “57 varieties”—brown and black, like
toast that was burned in the making. No one knows the prevailing
ancestry of Fritz, but a strain of Newfoundland is suspected. He will
take a chance on swimming ashore if we cast anchor within half a mile of
it, though the water is near congealment, and he knows that a pack of
his wolfish brethren is ready to dispute the shoreline with him when he
clambers out dripping upon the stony beach with seaweed in his hair.
When he swims back to the ship again his seal-like head is barely above
the waves as he paddles about, a mute appeal in his brown eyes for a
bight of rope to be hitched about his body to help him aboard.
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.
[Illustration: FRITZ AND HIS MASTER.]
[Illustration: “DOCTOR.”]
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.
The Doctor operates at the foot of the companion-ladder leading down
into the saloon, which is dining-room, living-room and everything else.
“I always have a basin of blood at the foot of the ladder,” he grimly
remarks.
I told him I thought I would call what I wrote about him “From Topsails
to Tonsils,” since with such versatility he passed from the former to
the latter. “That reminds me,” he said with a laugh, “of the time I went
ashore with Dr. John Adams, and the first thing we did was to lay three
children out on the table and remove their tonsils. That was a mighty
bloody job, I can tell you!”
The hatchway over his head as he operates is always filled with the
heads of so many spectators—including frequently the Doctor’s dog,
Fritz—that the meagre light which comes from above is nearly shut off.
Often a lamp is necessary, and as electric flash-lamps are notoriously
faithless in a crisis, it is usually a kerosene lamp. Often an impatient
patient starts to come down before his time, or an over-eager parent or
husband thinks he must accompany the one that he has brought for the
doctor’s lancet. It is hard to get elbow-room for the necessary surgery,
and every operation is a more or less public clinical demonstration.
Usually the description of the symptoms is of the vaguest.
“I’m chilled to the cinders,” said an anxious Irishman.
“Well, we can put on some fresh coal,” was the Doctor’s answer. “How old
are you?”
“Forty-six, Doctor!”
“A mere child!” the doctor replies, and the merry twinkle in his eyes
brings an answering smile to the face of the sufferer. The Doctor
himself was fifty-five years old in February, 1920.
So many fishermen get what are called “water-whelps” or
“water-pups,”—pustules on the forearm due to the abrasion of the skin
by more or less infected clothing. Cleaning the cod and cutting up fish
produces many ugly cuts and piercings and consequent sores, and there is
always plenty of putrefying matter about a fishing-stage to infect them.
So that a very common phenomenon is a great swelling on the forearm—and
an agonizing, sleep-destroying one it may be—where pus has collected
and is throbbing for the lance. It is a joy to witness the immediate
relief that comes from the cutting, and as the iodine is applied and
deft fingers bandage the wound the patient tries to find words to tell
of his thankfulness.
One afternoon just as the Doctor thought there was a lull in the
proceedings four women and a man came over the rail at once. The first
woman had a “bad stummick”; the second wanted “turble bad” to have her
tooth “hauled”; the third had “a sore neck, Miss” (thus addressing Mrs.
Grenfell); the fourth woman had something “too turble to tell”; the man
merely wanted to see the Doctor on general principles.
Here is a bit of dialogue with a woman who couldn’t sleep.
“What do you do when you don’t sleep?”
“I bide in the bed.”
“Do you do any work?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you cook?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you wash the children?”
“Scattered times, sir.”
Then the husband put in: “She couldn’t do her work and it overcast her.
She overtopped her mind, sir.”