how tender he was toward his poor fidgety, neurasthenic spouse. She
hadn’t any teeth worth mentioning, and her lips were pursed together
with a vise-like grip. I shall not forget how Doctor Grenfell murmured
to me in a humorous aside: “Teeth certainly do add to a lady’s charm!”
When medicine is administered, it is hard to persuade the afflicted one
that the prescription means just what it says.
This lady was told to take three pills, and she took two. But most of
them exceed their instruction. To a woman at Trap Cove Dr. Fox gave
liniment for her knee. It helped her. Then she took it internally for a
stomach-ache, arguing logically enough that a pain is a pain, a medicine
is a medicine, and if this liniment was good for a hurt in the knee it
must be good for any bodily affliction. Luckily she lived to tell the
tale.
“When I was in the North Sea the sailors if they got the chance
ransacked my medicine cupboard and drank up everything they could lay
their hands on.” Such autobiographic confessions are often made while
the Doctor mixes a draught or concocts a lotion. “Here it is the same
way. I have had my customers drain off the whole bottle of medicine at
once, on the theory that if one teaspoonful did you good, a bottle would
be that much better.” His questions, like his lancet, go right to the
root of the trouble. Nothing phases him. He answers every question. He
never tells people they are fools; his inexhaustible forebearance with
the inept and the obtuse is not the least Christlike of his attributes.
It is difficult for these men to come to the hospital in summer, for
their livelihood depends on their catch, and then on their salting and
spreading the fish: and after the cod-fishery has fallen away to zero
the herring come in October, and the cod to some extent return with
them.
“When I tell them they must go to the hospital, they always say ‘I
haven’t time: I want to stay and mind my traps.’”
The Doctor hates above all things—as I have indicated—to leave a wound
open, or a malady half-treated, and hustle on. It is the great drawback
and exasperation in his work that the interval before he sees the
patient again must be so long. He mourns whenever he has to pull a tooth
that might be saved if he could wait to fill it.
He is always working against time, against the sea, against ignorance,
against a want of charity on the part of nominal Christians who ought to
help him instead of carping and denouncing.
But he is working with all honest and sincere men, all who are true to
the high priesthood of science, all who are on the side of the angels.
One man thus describes his affliction, letting the Doctor draw his own
deductions:
“Like a little round ball the pain will start, sir; then it will full me
inside; and the only rest I get is to crumple meself down.”
An unhappy woman reciting the history of her complaint declared: “The
last doctor said I had an impression of the stomach and was full of
glams.”
“Bless God!” exclaimed another, speaking of her children. “There’s
nothing the matter with ’em. They be’s off carrying wood. They just
coughs and heaves, that’s all.”
One mother, asked what treatment she was administering to her infant
replied: “Oh, I give ’er nothing now. Just plenty of cold water and
salts and spruce beer; ne’er drop o’ grease.”
When there is no doctor to be had the services of the seventh son of a
seventh son are in demand.
[Illustration: BATTLE HARBOUR—SPREADING FISH FOR DRYING.]
Elemental human misery made itself heard in the dolorous accents of a
corpulent lady of fifty. “I works in punishment on account of my eyes.
Sometimes I piles two or three fish on top of each other and I has to do
it over. I cries a good deal about it.” Her gratification as she was
fitted to a pair of “plus” glasses that greatly improved her sight was
worth a long journey to witness. Many pairs of glasses were put on her
nose en route to the discovery of the most satisfactory pair, and each
time she would say “Lovely! Beautiful!” with crescendo of fervour.
I heard a fond father tell the Doctor that there was a “rale squick
(real squeak) bawling on the inside of” his offspring.
A man who climbed down the companion way with an aching side, a rupture,
and a hypertrophic growth on his finger, was asked what he did for his
ribs.
“I rinsed them,” was the response.
The Doctor is always on the lookout for the “first flag of warning”—as
he calls it—of the dreaded “T. B.” which is responsible for one death
in every four in Newfoundland. Much of his talk with a patient has to do
with fresh air and fresh vegetables. The Eskimoes may know better than
some native Newfoundlanders. “I like air. I push my whiphandle through
the roof,” said one of the Eskimoes.
Here is a typical excerpt, from a conversation with a young man who to
the layman looked very robust.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two, sir.”
“Have any in your family had tuberculosis?”
“Father’s brother Will and Aunt Clarissa died of it, sir.”
“Are you suffering?”
“It shoots up all through my stomach, sir.”
“Do you read and write?”
“No, Doctor.”
“See clearly?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Are you able to get any greens?”
“Sometimes, sir.”
“Dock-leaves?”
“No, sir.”
“What greens have you?”
“Alexander greens, sir.”
“Any berries?”
“Yes, Doctor. And bake apples.”
“That’s good. You must eat plenty of them. You must have good food. As
good as you can afford. I’m sorry it’s so hard where you live to get
anything fresh. Do you sleep well?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Anybody else sleep in the same bed?”
“No, Doctor.”
“When you go to bed do you keep the windows open?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“That’s right. That’s very important. Do people spit around you?” (The
Doctor is always on the war-path against this disgusting and dangerous
habit.)
“No, sir.”
“Quite sure?”
“Well, we use spit-boxes.”
“Do you burn the contents?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you wear warm things?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Sweat a lot?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“You mustn’t get wet without changing your clothes. Now, when you eat
potatoes I want you to eat them baked, with the skins on. I don’t mean
eat the skins. But the part right under the skins is very important.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
As one listens to such catechizing it becomes clear that the Doctor lays
great stress on fresh air and fresh food as medicines, “Cold is your
friend and heat is your enemy” is his oft-reiterated dictum to
consumptives.
Once he said to me, “I attach great importance to the sun-bath. I
believe in exposing the naked body to all it can get of the air.” In the
nipping cold of the early morning on the _Strathcona_ I emerged from
beneath four double blankets to hear the Doctor joyfully cry: “I’ve just
had my bucket on deck. You could have had one too, but I lost the bucket
overboard.” It has been a pastime of his to row with a boatload of
doctors and nurses to an iceberg and go in swimming from the platform at
the base of the berg.
Sometimes the Macedonian cry comes by letter.
Here is a pencilled missive from an old woman who evidently got a kindly
neighbour to write it for her, for the signature is misspelled:
“Pleas ducker grandlield would you help me with a little clothing I am a
wodow 85 yars of age.”
“Grandlield” is not further from the name than a great many have come.
Here are some other common variants:
Gumpin
Grinpiel
Greenfield
Gramfull
Gremple
Gransfield
From a village in White Bay, where the fishing was woefully poor in
1919, comes this pathetic plea:
“To Dr. and Mrs. Grenfell: Dear Friends: I am writing to see if you will
help me a little.—My husband got about 1 qtl of fish (1
quintal—pronounced kental—of 112 pounds, worth at most $11.20) this
summer, and I have four children, 15, 13, 11, 6 years, and his Father,
and we are all naked as birds with no ways or means to get anything.
What can I do; if you can do anything for me I hope God will bless you.
It is pretty hard to look at a house full of naked children.”
Mrs. Grenfell visited White Bay in July and in two villages found a
number of people all but utterly destitute. They were living on “loaf”
(bread) and tea. They had icefields instead of fish. Six of the
breadwinners got a job at St. Anthony. The villagers had few pairs of
shoes among them, In several instances the foot-gear was fashioned of
the sides of rubber boots tied over the feet with pieces of string. The
people of this neighbourhood are folk of the highest character, and
richly deserving, though poverty-stricken.
Another characteristic letter:
“Dr. dear sir. please send two roals fielt (rolls of felt) one Roal
Ruber Hide (rubberoid) one ten Patent for Paenting Moter Boat some glass
for the bearn (barn) thanks veary mutch for the food you sent me. Glad
two have James Home and his Leg so well you made a splended Cut of it
this time I will all way Pray for you while I Live Potatoes growing well
on the Farm Large Enough two Eaght all redey. But I loast my Cabbages
Plants wit the Big falls rain and snow i the first of the summer, but I
have lotes of turnips Plants I have all the Caplen (a small fish) I
wants two Put on the farm this summer.
“dr—dear sir I want some nails to finesh the farm fance I farn.”
In a fisherman’s house in an interval between examinations of children
for tonsils and adenoids the Doctor related this incident to a
spellbound group. He never has any trouble holding an audience with
stories that grow out of his work, and the fishermen delight as he does
in his informal chats with them and with their families.
“We had a long hunt for a starving family of which we had been told by
the Hudson Bay Company agent, on an island at Hamilton Inlet in
Labrador. The father was half Eskimo. He had a single-barrelled shotgun
with which he had brought down one gull. With his wife and his five
naked children he was living under a sail. The children, though they had
nothing on, were blue in the face with eating the blueberries, and they
were fat as butter. The mate took two of the little ones, as if they
were codfish, one under each arm, and carried them aboard. There were
tears in his eyes, for he had seven little ones of his own, and he was
very fond of children. Both were carefully brought up at our Childrens’
Home and one of them, who can now both read and write, is aboard at
present as a member of the crew of the _Strathcona_.”
After evening prayers on Sunday, at which the Doctor has spoken, he has
treated as many as forty persons.
In one place after removing a man’s tonsils it was a case of eyeglasses
to be fitted, then came one who clamoured to have three teeth extracted.
The teeth were “hauled” and a bad condition of ankylosis at the roots
was revealed. Then a girl had a throat abscess lanced, and she was
followed by a boy with a dubious rash and a tubercular inheritance. The
Doctor is ever on the lookout for the “New World” smallpox: but the
stethoscope detected a pleuritic attack, and strong supporting bandages
were wound about the lower part of his chest.
Another group was this:
1. An operation on a child’s tonsils. A local anaesthetic was given—10
per cent. cocaine. A tooth was also removed. The total charge was $1.00.
2. A fisherman came for ointments—zinc oxide and carbolic.
3. An eight months old infant was brought in, blind in the right eye.
This condition might have been obviated had boric acid been applied at
the time of the baby’s birth. The mother said that only a little warm
water had been used.
So many, though they may not say so, appear to believe with Mary when
she said to Jesus, “Lord, if thou hadst been here my brother had not
died.” They think the Doctor has something like supernatural powers.
With the utmost care he prepared to administer novocaine and treat the
wound of a man who had run a splinter into his left hand between the
first and second fingers, leaving an unhealed sinus. “Wonderful stuff,
this novocaine!” he remarked, as he put on a pair of rubber gloves,
washed them in alcohol, and then gave his knives a bath in a soup-plate
of alcohol.
“In the inflamed parts none of these local anaesthetics work very well,”
was his next comment.
But the patient scarcely felt it when he ran a probe through the hand
till it all but protruded through the skin on the inner side.
The bad blood was spooned out, and then the deep cavity swallowed about
six inches of iodoform gauze. When the wound had been carefully packed
the hand was bandaged. For nearly an hour’s work requiring the exercise
of rare skill and the utmost caution the charge was—a dollar. And that
included a pair of canvas gloves and another pair of rubber mitts, of
the Doctor’s own devising, drawn over the bandages and tied so that the
man might continue at his work without getting salt-water or any
contaminating substance in the wound and so infecting it badly.
These two importunate telegrams arrived while he was paying a flying
visit to headquarters at St. Anthony:
“Do your best to come and operate me I have an abscess under
right tonsil will give you coal for your steamer am getting
pretty weak.
Capt. J. N. Coté, Long Point.”
A second telegram arriving almost simultaneously from the same man read:
“Please come as fast as you can to operate me in the throat and save my
life.”
Captain Coté is the keeper of the Greenly Island Lighthouse, near Blanc
Sablon. It is a very important station.
The Doctor, true to form, at once made up his mind to go. Greenly Island
is about 100 miles from St. Anthony, and on the opposite side of the
Straits, on the Canadian side of the line that divides Canadian Labrador
from Newfoundland Labrador. The short cut took us through Carpoon
(Quirpon) Tickle, and there we spent the night, for much as the Doctor
wanted to push ahead the wind made the Strait so rough that—having it
against us—the _Strathcona_ could not have made headway. “I remember,”
said the Doctor with a smile, “that once we steamed all night in
Bonavista Bay, full speed ahead, and in the morning found ourselves
exactly where we were the night before. Coal is too scarce now.” On one
occasion the _Strathcona_ distinguished herself by going ashore with all
sails set.
By the earliest light of morning we were under way. The tendency of a
land-lubber at the wheel off this cruel coast was naturally to give the
jagged and fearsome spines of rock as wide a berth as possible. In the
blue distance might be seen a number of bergs, large and small, just as
a reminder of what the ice can do to navigation when it chooses; and in
the foreground were fishermen’s skiffs bobbing about and taking their
chances of crossing the track of our doughty little steamer. But the
Doctor called in at the door of the wheelhouse: “Run her so close to
those rocks that you almost skin her!” He was thinking not of his ship,
not of himself, but of the necessity of getting to the lonely
lighthouse-keeper at the earliest possible moment, to perform that
operation for a subtonsillar abscess. There was a picture in his mind of
the valiant French Canadian engineer gasping for breath as the orifice
dwindled, and now he was burning not the firewood but coal—a
semi-precious stone in these waters in this year of grace. The
_Strathcona_ labours and staggers; Fritz the dog goes to the bowsprit
and sniffs the sun by day and the moon by night; the ship is carrying
all the bellying sails she has; and the Doctor mounts to the crow’s-nest
to make sure that his beloved new topsail is doing its full share. He
tools the _Strathcona_—when he is at the wheel—as if she were a
taxicab. So the long diagonal across the Strait is cut down, seething
mile by mile, till between Flower’s Cove and Forteau—where the Strait
is at the narrowest, and the shores are nine miles and three-quarters
apart—it almost seems as if an hour’s swim on either hand would take
one to the eternal crags where the iris blows and the buttercup spreads
her cloth of gold.
We drew near Blanc Sablon (pronounced Sablow) with Grant’s Wharf by the
river. West of that river for several hundred yards it is no man’s land
between the two Labradors—that is to say, between Canada and
Newfoundland. A man stood up in a jouncing power-boat and waved an oar,
and then—his overcoat buttoned up to his ears—our patient, Captain
Coté, stood up beside him. They had come out to meet us to save every
moment of precious time. It was a weak and pale and shaky man that came
aboard—but he was a man every bit of him, and he did not wince when the
Doctor, in the crypt-like gloom of the _Strathcona’s_ saloon, while the
tin lamp was held in front of the Captain’s mouth, reached into the
throat with his attenuated tongs and scissors and made the necessary
incision after giving him several doses of the novocaine solution as a
local anaesthetic.
“Then the Captain sat back white and gasping on the settle, and—with a
strong Canadian French flavour in his speech—told us a little of his
lonely vigil of the summer.
“In eighteen days, Doctor, I never saw a ship for the fog: but I kept
the light burning—two thousand gallons of kerosene she took.
“All summer long it was fog—fog—fog. I show you by the book I keep.
Ever since the ice went out we have the fog. Five days we have in July
when it was clear—but never such a clear day as we have now. Come
ashore with me on Greenly Island and you shall have the only motor car
ride it would be possible for you to have in Labrador.”
We accepted the invitation. At the head of the wharf were men spreading
the fish to dry—grey-white acres of them on the flakes like a field of
everlastings. In the lee of a hill they had a few potato-plants, fenced
away from the dogs. In a dwelling house with “Please wipe your feet”
chalked on the door we found a spotless kitchen and two fresh-cheeked,
white-aproned women cooking. It was a fine thing to know that they were
upholding so high a standard of cleanliness and sanitation in that
lonely outpost—as faithful as the keeper of the light in his
storm-defying tower.
From the fish-flakes of the ancient “room” over half a mile of
cinderpath and planking we rode on the chassis of a Ford car, which the
keeper uses to convey supplies.
“The first joy-ride I ever had in Labrador,” said the Doctor, and the
Captain grinned and let out another link to the roaring wind that
flattened the grass and threatened to lift his cabbage-plants out of
their paddock under his white housewalls.
Safe in his living-room, with wife and children, two violins, a
talking-machine, an ancient Underwood typewriter and even a telephone
that connected him with the wharf, Captain Coté pulled out his wallet,
selected three ten-dollar bills and offered them to the Doctor, saying:
“I will pay you as much more as you like.”
Dr. Grenfell took one of the bills, saying, “That will be enough.”
The Captain, mindful of his promise about the coal, said, “How much coal
do you want?”
“On the understanding that the Canadian Government supplies it,”
answered the Doctor, “I will let you put aboard the _Strathcona_ just
the amount we used in coming here—5½ tons.”
The Captain went to the telephone and talked with a man at the wharf.
Then he turned away from the transmitter and said: “He tells me that he
can’t put the coal on board today, because it would blow away while they
were taking it out to the _Strathcona_ on the skiff. We have no sacks to
put it in.”
“Very well,” returned the Doctor, “when it’s convenient you might store
it at Forteau. They will need it there this winter at Sister Bailey’s
nursing station.” Then he dismissed the subject of the fee and the
fuel-supply to tell us how pleased he was to find that Mackenzie King,
author of “Industry and Humanity,” had become the Liberal leader in
Canada. King is a Harvard Doctor of Philosophy, a man of thought and
action of the type by nature and training in sympathy with Grenfell’s
work. It is a great thing for Canada that a man of his calibre and
scholarly distinction has been raised to the place he holds.
From the site of the lighthouse there are observed most singular wide
shelves of smooth brown rock presenting their edges to the fury of the
surf, and over the broad brown expanse are scattered huge boulders that
look as though the Druids who left the memorials at Stonehenge might
have put them there. Captain Coté said the winter ice-pack tossed these
great stones about as if it were a child’s game with marbles.
A happy man he thought himself to have his children with him. The
lighthouse-keeper at Belle Isle lost six of his family on their way to
join him; another at Flower’s Cove lost five. As a remorseless graveyard
of the deep the region is a rival of the dreaded Sable Island off
Newfoundland’s south shore.
A wire rope indicates the pathway of two hundred yards between the light
and the foghorn: and in winter the way could not be found without it.
The foghorn gave a solo performance for our benefit, at the instigation
of either member of a pair of Fairbanks-Morse 15 horse-power gasoline
engines. We were ten feet from it, but it can be heard ten miles and
more.
A “keeper of the light” like Captain Coté, or Peter Bourque, who tended
the Bird Rock beacon for twenty-eight years, is a man after Grenfell’s
own heart. For Grenfell himself lets his light shine before men, and
knows the need of keeping the flame lambent and bright, through thick
and thin.
V
THE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY
Dr. Grenfell in his battles with profiteering traders has incurred their
enmity, of course—but he has been the people’s friend. The favourite
charge of those who fight him is that he is amassing wealth for himself
by barter on the side, and collecting big sums in other lands from which
he diverts a golden stream for his own uses. The infamous accusation is
too pitifully lame and silly to be worth denying. The most unselfish of
men, he has sometimes worked his heart out for an ingrate who bit the
hand that fed him. His enterprise, whose reach always exceeds his grasp,
is money-losing rather than money-making.
The International Grenfell Association has never participated in the
trading business. Dr. Grenfell, however, started several stores with his
own money and took it out after a time with no interest. He delights in
the success of those whose aim is no more than a just profit, who buy
from the fisherman at a fair price and sell to him in equity. There is a
co-operative store of his original inspiration and engineering at
Flower’s Cove, and another is the one at Cape Charles, which in five
years returned 100 per cent. on the investment with 5 per cent.
interest.
Accusations of graft he is accustomed to face, and a commission
appointed by the Newfoundland Legislature investigated him, travelled
with him on the _Strathcona_, and completely exonerated him. Some
persons had even gone so far as to accuse him of making money out of the
old clothes business aboard what they were pleased to term his “yacht.”
They descended to such petty false witness as to swear that he had taken
a woman’s dress with $12 in it. It is wearisome to have to dignify such
charges by noticing them. They are about on a par with the letter of a
bishop who wrote to him: “I should like to know how you can reconcile
with your conscience reading a prayer in the morning against heresy and
schism, and then preaching at a dissenting meeting-house in the
afternoon.”
A vestryman objected to his preaching in the church at a diminutive and
forlorn settlement because “he talks about trade.”
The Doctor is never embittered by his traducers. He knows the meaning of
J. L. Garvin’s saying, “He who is bitter is beaten.” Nothing beclouds
for long his sunny temperament, but his unfailing good-humour never
dulls the fighting edge of his courage.
“I bought a boat for a worthy soul, to set him on his feet,” the Doctor
told me. “She had been driven ashore in North Labrador. I had to buy
everything separately—and the total came to $500. The boat was to work
out the payment. This she did—Alas! later on she went ashore on Brehat
(‘Braw’) Shoals. Only her lifeboat came ashore, with the
name—_Pendragon_—upon it.”