acting as soldiers should. They are importing foreign vices. I have seen
lately horrible examples of the suffering of the innocents as a result
of their misdeeds. There are more communicable diseases in the present
year than we have ever had before on this coast. A man has no right to
the title of a soldier who does not walk in Christ’s steps—he has no
right to the name, when he pleases self and damns his country and his
fellow-men and fellow-women.
“We have among us the deplorable spectacle of many weak sectarian
schools—and it is a wicked thing that we do not combine them in strong
undenominational ones. So many things cry out for changing. Today I
visited a family and found the father had tuberculosis. The
mother?—tuberculosis. The children?—tuberculosis. Then I saw a baby
whose head was not filled up, whose arms were puny, whose shoulders were
constricted. From what? From rickets. The rickets came from bad feeding
due to ignorance. I saw another child with the same complaint from the
same cause.
“American bank-notes are made of paper that comes from Dalton,
Massachusetts. The finest quality of paper is made of rags. They can use
old rags and dirty rags—but they cannot use red ones. In explaining the
manufacture to children I heard the manager speak of the rags as being
‘willing’ or ‘unwilling.’ The red ones were the ‘unwilling’ ones, and
one of the children afterward said she’d rather be a willing rag. We may
be poor and sorry objects—we may be rags—but there is something to be
made of us if only we are willing rags.
“I came to a paralyzed boy. He said, ‘What can I do, Dr. Grenfell?’ I
said, ‘You can smile upon all those who minister to you or come where
you are. You can spread the spirit of good cheer even from your
bedside.’”
“I was present at Pilley’s Island when a soldier came home who had won
the V. C. What a welcome he received! There was a triumphal arch and the
town turned out to do honour to its hero. He was the right sort of
soldier.”
Norman Duncan wrote a delightful book called “Doctor Luke of the
Labrador” which very faithfully mirrors the atmosphere of Dr. Grenfell’s
days and doings. But the book is not to be taken as faithful biography
_verbatim et literatim_, in the passages relating to the titular hero.
The Doctor has nothing in the open book of his past life for which he
needs to make amends; but the hero of “Doctor Luke” has something
mysterious to live down, the precise nature of which is not divulged. In
many admirable qualities the portrait of “Doctor Luke” is a faithful
likeness of Dr. Grenfell, and that is why there is a danger that the
reader will think that in all particulars the book man and the real man
correspond. “Doctor Luke” goes to the Labrador to flee from his own
shadow—a man pursued by bitter memories of what he has done, and by
mocking wraiths of sin, their fingers pointed at him. Dr. Grenfell went
to the Labrador because the spirit moved him to go to the help of men
whose lives were as cold as the ice and as hard as the rock that hemmed
them in. He went not as one who sorrows over misspent years but as one
who rejoices in the belief that his work has the smile of God upon it.
Dr. Grenfell has the spirit of any first-rate missionary—he will not
admit that he has elected a life of brain-fag, bodily travail and
spiritual torment. His joy in doing and giving is unaffected. When he
invites the rest of us to find life beautiful and bountiful he does not
pose nor prate. He walks in the steps and in the name of Christ with a
child’s humility, a man’s strength, an almost feminine tenderness and
never a breath of that maudlin, unctuous sanctimoniousness which always
must repel the virile and vertebrate fibre of the Thomas Hughes brand of
“muscular Christianity.” Dr. Grenfell likes gospel hymns where some
prefer sonatas and concertos, but he likes them when they carry a plain
and pointed message from the heart to the heart, and build up a
consciousness of our human interdependence: he would not care for them
if they merely blew into flame the emotional fire-in-straw that burns
itself out uselessly because of the want of substantial fuel.
To the humble millionaire or the haughty workingman his manner is the
same. He knows what it means “to walk with kings nor lose the common
touch.” Nor is he easily fooled. “Though I give my body to be burned,
and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”
“I talked with Mr. A.,” he told me, referring to his visit with a
Croesus of New York who to certain ends has given largely, “and I felt
somehow that, with all his giving, he had not given himself!”
That is the secret, it seems to me, of Dr. Grenfell’s own cogent power
upon other lives—that he goes and does in his own energetic person. He
does not stand at a distance issuing commands. He is entirely willing to
help anybody, anywhere. He holds back nothing that he can bestow, and he
never despairs. His ruddy optimism is a matter of actual daily practice
and not of a cloistered philosophy. You never could persuade him that
with all the heavy burden that he bears, the myriad interruptions and
vexations that occur, he is not having a grand good time. He would be
entirely ready to say with Stevenson:
“Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will!”
X
SOME OF HIS HELPERS
I should like to write a whole book about his helpers. He is not a man
who seeks to shine by surrounding himself with mediocrities. He would be
ready to say with Charles M. Schwab: “I want you to work not for me but
with me.” His presence is quickening and engenders loyalty. It is fun to
be wherever Dr. Grenfell is because something is always going on.
His helpers never are given to feel that they are ciphers while he is
the integer. Some of the ablest surgeons of America and of Europe have
ministered to the patients at Battle Harbour, Indian Harbour and St.
Anthony and on the _Strathcona_. There is an utter absence of “side” and
“swank” in this the good physician, and he never decks himself out in
the borrowed plumage of another’s virtue. He delights to see a thing
well done, and is the first to bestow the word of earned praise on the
doer. Conversely, he is not happy if a job is put through in a bungling,
half-hearted, messy fashion; but he keeps his breath to cool his
porridge, and never wastes it by mere “blowing off” when the mischief is
done and palaver will not mend matters.
Human beings are not angels, and even those who are upheld by a sense of
righteous endeavour may get tired and short-tempered and disheartened
and lonely. Those who attach themselves to this enterprise for the weeks
of summer sunlight only do not have much time to develop nostalgia. But
“there ain’t no busses runnin’ from the bank to Mandalay,” and the
Labrador has no theatres, no picnics, no ball games and few dances.
Think of the large-hearted Moravian Brethren of the Labrador whose
missions are linked with London by one visit a year from their mission
ship the _Harmony_. Think of the man (Mr. Stewart) who sticks it out by
himself at Ungava round the chill promontory of Cape Chidley in Ungava
Bay. Think of the agents of the Hudson Bay and other companies dealing
with the “silent, smoky Indian” in the vast reaches of the North.
Whoever essays to serve God and man in this country must haul his own
weight and bear others’ burdens too. He must lay aside hindrances—he
must forfeit love of home and kindred—he must learn to keep normal and
cheerful in the aching solitudes.
Many are with the Doctor for a season or so. Some like Dr. Little, Dr.
Paddon and Dr. Andrews and certain others who deserve to be named
_honoris causa_—have stood by him year after year. But by this time
there is a small army of short-term or long-term Grenfell graduates—men
and women—who had “their souls in the work of their hands” and whose
precious memories are of the days they spent in assuaging the torment,
physical or spiritual, of plain fisher-folk. It is not possible to
separate in this case the care of bodies from the cure of souls. The
“wops” who brought the schooner _George B. Cluett_ from Boston year
after year, laden with lumber and supplies, and then went ashore to be
plumbers and carpenters and jacks-of-all-trades for love and not for
hire have their own stories to tell of “simple service simply given to
their own kind in their human need.” Most of them knew just what they
would be up against; they knew it would not be a glorified house-party;
but they accepted the isolation and the crudeness and the cold and the
unremitting toil, and in the spirit of good sportsmanship which is the
ruling spirit of the Grenfell undertaking they played the game, and what
they did is graven deep in the Doctor’s grateful memory.
The Doctor wins and keeps the enthusiastic loyalty of his colleagues
because he is so ready with the word of emphatic praise for what they do
when it is the right thing to do. He is fearless to condemn, but he
would rather commend, and the flush of pleasure in the face of the one
praised tells how much his approval has meant to the recipient. He knows
how many persons in this human, fallible world of ours travel faster for
a pat than for a kick or a blow.
A halt was called at Forteau for a few hours’ conference with one of the
remarkable women who have put their shoulders under the load of the
Labrador—Sister Bailey, once a co-worker with Edith Cavell. At Forteau
she has a house that holds an immaculate hospital-ward and an up-to-date
dispensary. For twelve years—except for two visits in England—she has
held the fort here without the company of her peers, except at long
intervals. She has kept herself surrounded with books and flowers, and
her geraniums are exquisite. Sister Bailey’s cow, bought for $40 in a
bargain at Bonne Esperance (“Bony,”) is a wonder, and I took pains to
stroke the nose of this “friendly cow” and praise her life-giving
endeavours. For each day at the crack of dawn there is a line-up of
people with all sorts of containers to get the milk. The dogs, of
course, would cheerfully kill the animal if they could pull her down,
but she fights them off with her horns, and they have learned a
wholesome fear. She is not like the cow at Bonne Esperance today, which
has suffered the loss of part of its hind quarters because it was too
gentle.
Under Sister Bailey’s roof three maids, aged 12, 13 and 22, are being
educated in household management. She has a garden with the dogs fenced
out, and there is a skirmish with the weeds all through the summer into
which winter breaks so suddenly. There is no spring; there is no fall;
flowers, vegetables and weeds appear almost explosively together.
Artificial flowers are beautifully made—with dyes from Paris—by the
girls of Forteau Cove, under Sister Bailey’s supervision. The hues are
remarkably close to the original and the imitation of petal and leaf is
so close as to be startling.
[Illustration: ST. ANTHONY HOSPITAL IN WINTER.]
[Illustration: SOME OF THE HELPERS.]
No description of Dr. Grenfell’s “parish,” as Norman Duncan aptly styled
it, could be complete without mention—that would be much more extended
did she permit—of the part Mrs. Grenfell fills in all that the Doctor
does. Mrs. Grenfell was Miss Anna MacClanahan, of Chicago, and she is a
graduate of Bryn Mawr. The Doctor went to the Labrador years before his
marriage, but since she took her place at his side with her tact, her
humour, her common sense, her sound judgment and her broad sympathies,
she has been a tower of strength, a well-spring of solace and of
healing, and altogether an indispensable factor in her husband’s
enterprise.
She is his secretary, and the number of letters to be written, of
patients’ records to be kept, of manuscripts to be prepared for the
press is enormous. The Doctor pencils a memorandum when and where he
can—perhaps sitting atop of a woodpile on the reeling deck of the
_Strathcona_; and then Mrs. Grenfell tames the rebellious punctuation or
supplies the missing links of predicates or prepositions and evolves a
manuscript that need not fear to face the printer.
The letters of appeal are almost innumerable, of protest occasional, of
sympathy and friendship—with or without subscriptions—very numerous,
and Mrs. Grenfell has the happy gift of saying “thank you” in such warm
and gracious, individualizing terms that the donor is enlisted in a
lifelong friendship for the Grenfell idea.
Mrs. Grenfell is “the life of the party” wherever she goes. Like the
Doctor, she refuses to grow tired of the great game of living, and it is
a game they play together in a completely understanding and sympathetic
copartnership.
General “Chinese” Gordon once gave as the reason for not marrying the
fact that he had never found the woman who would follow him anywhere.
Dr. Grenfell has been more fortunate. A friend of theirs tells me that
Dr. Grenfell proposed on shipboard, almost the minute he met his wife.
Astounded by his precipitancy, she said: “But, Doctor, you don’t even
know my name!” “That doesn’t make any difference; I know what it’s going
to be,” is said to have been his characteristic answer.
Mrs. Grenfell was translated from a life that might have been one of
ease and pleasure and social preoccupation into a life of unremitting
toil and no small measure of actual hardship, and she meets the day and
whatever it brings in the same high-hearted mood that her husband
carries to the various phases of his crowded existence. She is his
mentor—without being a tormentor; she is his business memory and a deal
of his common sense and social conscience: but she never lets her fine,
keen mind, her quick wit and her readily divining intuition become
absorbed in the mechanic phases of the regulation of household or
boatload business. She has the happy faculty of instant transplantation
from the practical task to the ideal atmosphere. She is the Doctor’s
workmate, playmate and helpmate: the complete and inspiring counterpart.
She knows better than anybody else that she has a great man for a
husband, but she never lets that consciousness become oppressive, and
she knows that it is good for them both to yield to the playful spirit
of rollicking nonsense and absurd horseplay now and then. So you needn’t
be surprised if you should find the pair chasing each other about the
deck pretending a mortal combat with billets of birch-wood, while the
distracted Fritz the dog cannot make up his mind whether he is in duty
bound to bite his mistress or his master. You needn’t be surprised if
the Doctor goes through a mighty pantomime of barricading his chart-room
as though his better half had no business in it, or hides some one of
her cherished Lares and Penates and assumes an innocent ignorance of its
whereabouts. When he is at play Dr. Grenfell is not a bit older than the
youngest of his three delightful children whose combined ages cannot be
much more than fifteen years. He is the same sort of amusing and devoted
father as the mourned and beloved head of the household at Sagamore
Hill, who to Dr. Grenfell—of course—is the pattern of all that the
head of a family and the soul of a nation should be.
The family life of the Grenfells and the perfect mutuality of thought
and feeling between Dr. Grenfell and his wife stand out in clear-cut
lines as an example to those who never have known the meaning of the
complete community of ideals in the family life and in the relationship
of wife and husband. It stands in rebuke to the sorrowful travesty the
modern marriage so often exhibits. It shows how the strength of either
partner in the marriage of true minds is multiplied tenfold and how the
yoke is easy and the burden is light when love has entered in—
“The love you long to give to one
Made great enough to hold the world.”
XI
FOUR-FOOTED AIDES: DOGS AND REINDEER
In few places are the dogs so numerous and so noisy as at Forteau, and
Sister Bailey’s team held the primacy for speed and condition and
obedience to command—yet she ruled them by moral suasion and not by
kicks and curses. That does not mean they were dog angels. Every “husky”
is in part a wolf, and the gentlest and most amiable that fawns upon you
will in a twinkling go from the Dr. Jekyll to the Mr. Hyde in his
make-up when the breaking-point is passed. The leaders of the pack were
two monsters named Scotty and Carlo, and they were rivals to the end of
the tether. Carlo was a sentimentalist of a hue between fawn and grey:
his greatest pleasaunce was to put his forepaws on your shoulders and
lick your nose ere you could stave him off. Scotty’s nose—he was black
and white—was embossed with the marks of many bitter duels. Probably
the other dogs could read those marks, as a Bret Harte cowboy could read
the notches on a gun, and he won respect commensurate with the length
and breadth of the scratches. Scotty came with us on the _Strathcona_,
as his mistress was leaving for a rest in England shortly. It was a job
to persuade him aboard the boat, but once there he entered into a tacit
agreement, as between gentlemen, that he should have the after deck
while Fritz, our official dog, monopolized the prow. Scotty had the
better of the bargain, for his bailiwick included the cook’s galley. But
Fritz could sleep on the floor of my cabin, though whenever I looked for
him on the floor he was snugly ensconced in a forbidden lower bunk,
curled up like a jelly roll. He learned to vacate without even a word
when I gazed at him reproachfully.
All Sister Bailey’s dogs, and a great many more, converged upon the
beach when Fritz swam ashore and shook himself free from such marine
algae as he might have collected on his course. We kept Fritz close at
heel, but there were constant alarums and incursions. As we sauntered
along the shore path by the fish-flakes where the women were turning
over the fish under the threat of rain, Fritz was in a measure taken
into the loosely cohesive _plunderbund_ of Sister Bailey’s pack. They
seemed to be saying to him after their fashion: “Oh, well, you are a
foreigner from that ship out yonder in the cove, to be sure, but here we
are passing one hostile tribe after another, and we may need you any
time to help us out in a scrap, so you may as well travel along with our
bushy tails—though yours points toward the ground, and you can’t be
very much of a dog, after all.”
For dogs appeared in squads, platoons, companies, battalions, even as
iron-filings cluster to a magnet. There was a most outrageous and unholy
pow-wow when we had gone about five houses from the beach. All the dogs
from near and far piled into it like hornets from a broken nest. There
was no speech nor language known to dogdom in which their voices were
not heard with howls and imprecations. Alas! even the gentle Sister
Bailey had to abandon for the nonce her policy of moral suasion and get
in among her protégés with thwackings of a bit of driftwood and a few
well-directed pushes (not to say kicks) of the foot. Any moderate
impact, when a scrap is in full swing, rebounds from the tough
integuments like hailstones landing on a tin roof. Even an every-day
argument of these beasts sounds like wholesale murder. It is a pathetic
fact that with all the affectionate responsiveness of some of the
animals to human notice there always lurks a danger. If you are a
stranger, meeting a strange pack, it is well to keep your eyes upon
them, and if you have not a stick in your hand, or a stone ready to
throw, it is wholesome to stoop groundward and pretend you have a
missile. Then, nine times out of ten, they will scatter. So often one
would like to believe they are all dog, with all of the dog’s graces and
goodnesses—but there reigns in the breast of each a vulpine jealousy
that easily and instantly mounts to a blood-heat of maddened fury. Dogs
of the same litter will fight as furiously and savagely as born enemies,
though they may recognize in the traces intuitively the leadership of
their mother at an age far beyond that at which civilized puppies become
as contemptuous of their mother as she is of them.
Unhappily, there are many cases on authentic record when young children
and old people, unable to defend themselves, have been devoured by
dogs—not necessarily when the dogs were starving. A grewsome climax was
reached when in the “flu” epidemic of 1918-19 on the Labrador the dogs
fell on the dead and the dying and the enfeebled survivors could not
stem the onslaught. No wonder, then, that Dr. Grenfell, with all his
manifest affection for dogs that he has known, insists that the
importation of reindeer is the salvation and the solution. Stubbornly
the folk of the northern tip of the peninsula and the Labrador coast
cling to the huskies that were banished, in favour of cows, horses, pigs
and chickens, by their more sophisticated southern neighbours. Uncle
Philip Coates at Eddy’s Cove is the only man on that shore, as far as is
known, who keeps pigs.
A fisherman landing on an island off Cape Charles, on the side away from
his home, found himself the object of the unwelcome attentions of a pack
of dogs who were acting on the principle of the uncouth villager of the
old story who cried: “’Ere’s a stranger, Bill—let’s ’eave ’arf a brick
at him.” He is sure they would have pounced on him and polished off his
bones, had he not seen one dog he knew—the leader. He called the dog’s
name; the wolfish creature halted instantly. When the name was repeated,
the dog slunk off, his ragged retinue at his heels.
It is sad to think that the dogs that will perform so nobly in the
traces are such bad actors when they have nothing to do but to pick a
quarrel in places where perhaps there is no foliage but the proud curled
plumage of their tails. They are beside themselves with excitement when
after the summer siesta they are harnessed to the komatik again. When
the driver smartly rubs his hands and cries, “See the deer!”—or
anything he pleases—it augments the fever. In Labrador “ouk, ouk!”
turns the team to the right—perchance with a disconcerting
promptness—and “urrah, urrah!” swerves it to the left. The
corresponding directions in Newfoundland are “keep off!” and “hold in.”
No reins are used—some drivers use no whip. The books of Dr. Grenfell
abound in affectionate reference to the better nature of these animals
and their extraordinary fidelity to duty. Like most of the people of the
land, they do not fear to die. Their life is largely of neglect and
pain: they spend much of their time crawling under the houses to get out
of the way. Their pleasure is the greater when they find a human
playmate ready to throw a stick into the water for them. Grand swimmers
are they, and they will plunge into the coldest sea; and if they are
hungry they dive in for a small fish without concern. It is hard to find
a time when they are not ready to set their fangs to food—“full-fed” is
an ideal condition to which most of them seldom attain. A square meal of
whalemeat is their millennium. “I don’t see what satisfaction they get
out of it,” said “Bill” Norwood—one of the volunteer “wops” building
the Battle Harbour reservoir. “The meat in winter comes to them in
frozen hunks, and they slide it down at one gulp, to melt in their
stomach. That’s not quite my idea of enjoying a meal.”
In a yawl that the _Strathcona_ dragged astern three plaintive huskies,
to be committed to the pack at St. Anthony, hungrily sniffed the
meat-laden breeze that blew from our deck. They were perturbed at
finding themselves going to sea. I may add that when they got ashore the
youngest of the three—a mere baby—jumped on a rock and bit the nose of
the leader of the St. Anthony pack, Eric by name, thereby winning
respect for himself and his two comrades among the aborigines who might
otherwise have fallen upon them and rent them limb from limb.
The dogs at Battle Harbour live up to the name of the settlement. Like
all other “huskies,” they are ready to fight on slight provocation, and
the night is made vocal with their long-drawn ululations. Their appetite
is insatiable—they devour with enthusiasm whatsoever things are thrown
out at the kitchen door—they even ate a towel that went astray—and
when nothing better offers they will wade into the water in quest of
caplin, or cods’ heads. In their enthusiasm for food the dogs will dig
through boards to get at cattle and pigs, and cows and chickens seldom
live where the dogs are numerous.
The murderous proclivities of the dogs of the Labrador furnished one of
the chief reasons, as has been said before, why the Doctor went to such
great pains and to such a relatively large expense to import and
domicile the reindeer.