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.
“It doesn’t do to take a single text. For instance—we read ‘The world
is established so that it cannot be moved,’ but we know that it is all
movement: we know that it moves at a pace six times as fast as the
fastest aeroplane. But the Church looked at that verse and said that he
who denied it was denying the truth. I was reading this morning about
Copernicus, who insisted that this world is round. Up to his time men
had insisted that it was flat and that you might fall off the edge. Then
there was Galileo, who said that it moved: and they put him under the
thumbscrews, and when he came out he said, ‘and still it does move.’
[Illustration: DR. GRENFELL LEADING MEETING AT BATTLE HARBOUR.]
“So often Christian people think it’s their duty to forbid and to
repress and to bring gloom with a long face where they go. But that
wasn’t Christ’s way and it isn’t God’s way. If religious people do these
things people begin to suppose that religion is something to destroy the
joy of living. But that isn’t what it’s for. It’s to make us kinder to
fathers and mothers and sisters and friends, and true to the duty
nearest our hand.
“I love to think of David as the master musician who went about
scattering good and dispelling the clouds of heaviness. We ought to
follow his example. Sometimes we say ‘Oh, they’ve all been so mean to me
I’ll take it out on them by being sour and dull and jealous and bitter!’
Here in this crew we get to know one another almost as well as God knows
us, and we see one another’s faults. It’s so easy to spy out faults when
we’re so close together, day after day. But we should be blind to some
things—like Nelson at Copenhagen. You remember when they gave the
signal to retreat he put his blind eye to the telescope.
“If God looked for the faults in us, who could stand before Him? None of
us is perfect. Let us judge not that we be not judged, and mercifully
learn to make allowances. I knew a man who had been the cause of a loss
of $20,000 to his employer, through costly litigation that was the
result of his mistakes. His master, nevertheless, gave him a second
chance, with an even better job. Later I asked him if the man was making
good. He replied, ‘He is the best servant I have.’ Even so we ought to
learn to be long-suffering with others, as God is lenient until seventy
times seven with us.”
In the little church at Flower’s Cove the Doctor spoke on the meaning of
the words of Christ in Mark 8, 34, as given in the vernacular version:
“If any man wishes to walk in my steps, let him renounce self, take up
his cross, and follow me.”
“What is there that a man values more than his life?
“When I was here early in the spring there was a man who was in a
serious way. I told him he should come to the hospital at St. Anthony
for an operation. He said he must get his traps and his twine ready.
Then when I came again in June I saw that he was worse, and I again gave
him warning that in six months at most the results might be fatal. Still
he said that he could not go. When I came ashore today I learned that he
was dead. The twine was ready—but he was gone. That is the way with so
many of us. We say we are too busy—we can always give that excuse—and
then death finds us, grasping our material possessions, perhaps, but
with the great ends of life unwon. Its only a stage that we cross for a
brief transit, coming in at this door and going out at that. It won’t do
to play our part just as we are making our exit—we must play it while
we are in the middle of the stage.
“At Sandwich Bay we followed a stream and the two men on the other side
called my attention to the tracks of a bear: and when we came back to
the boat the men aboard said they had seen two bears wandering about.
The bears were unable to hide their tracks, and even so you and I cannot
conceal the traces of our footsteps where we went. Captain Coté at the
Greenly Island Light showed us the model of a steamship—made with a
motor costing a dollar and a half that ran it in a straight line for an
hour. It had no volition of its own. Man is not like that soulless boat:
he has a mind of his own. We are surrounded by amazing discoveries:
great scientists are ever toiling on the problem of communication with
the dead. Men laughed at the alchemists of old: we laugh no longer at
the idea of changing one substance into another. We can change water
with electricity and change one frog’s egg into twins. We can fly from
St. John’s to England in a day. We can see through solid
substances—come to St Anthony and I will show it to you with the X-ray
apparatus. What fools we are to deny immortality and the resurrection!
What are realized values as compared with the spiritual? There was the
ship _Royal Charter_ for Australia that went ashore at Moidra in Wales.
A sailor wrapped himself in gold and it drowned him. Would you say that
he had the gold or that the gold had him?
“The carol of good King Wenceslaus tells us of the blessings that came
to the little lad who followed in the footsteps of the king. Even so,
better things than any temporal benefits come to us if we walk in the
steps of Christ.