Onion, and was running on, over a long diagonal, to cross the straits
in the bared teeth of the green and yeasty waves. That she was
top-heavy was plainly to be seen, with her barrels of whale-meat and
her high-piled fire-wood on deck, and almost no ballast or cargo
below.
As we stood out into the middle of the channel, I thought of the great
boats that must feel their way through the dense fog in evil weather.
They would have to be honking like wild geese, even though the straits
at their narrowest between Flower's Cove and Greenley Island are ten
miles wide. Fog is a terrible deceiver. I remember coming up the East
Coast on the mail-steamer _Invermore_ in 1913. In a day after leaving
Twillingate we were nearly wrecked three times. First, when we thought
we were ten miles offshore, we found a tiny skiff, with two persons
aboard, in our path--we nearly ran it down. Father and small son,
fourteen, were fishing for cod, and had their meagre catch in a tin
pail. Captain Kane had stopped our boat--we were going at quarter
speed--and he had the man come up on the bridge to show us where the
land lay. "Out yonder!" The ancient mariner pointed to the northwest.
A rowboat was manned: in a few minutes its crew came back and
reported that the rocks were not more than two hundred yards away. So
we backed off, and steamed hard in the opposite direction. But only an
hour or so later,--pulled steadily on and on toward the shore, by the
strong, insetting tide,--we saw the grey edge of the fog lifting like
a table-cloth, and there were those cruel rocks again, dragons in a
lair, waiting to receive us, crush our bones and drink our blood.
Again we backed away--and before long the fierce jangle of the bell in
the engine room and the captain's sharp accent of command from the
bridge once more halted us suddenly. There, directly before our prow,
was a great white wall of ice, which had taken almost the color of the
mist. It was an iceberg that barred our path, and if we had been
speeding like the _Titanic_ instead of creeping like a snail, it would
doubtless have been the end of the _Invermore_. Only one more tragedy
of a missing ship.
At four in the afternoon, when the great rock bastion of Belle Isle
loomed across our bows, we gave up for the night: and next morning,
between seven and eight, no fewer than eight enormous icebergs
crossed our bows in a glittering processional.
But to-day, mid-stream, there was no fog, and despite the roughness of
the water the cool air and clear sunlight were cause for rejoicing.
"Isn't it fun to live?" exclaimed the Doctor, as he swung the wheel;
and the _Strathcona_, feeling her master's hand, trembled and obeyed.
Fritz, out yonder on the prow, was staring toward the bleak Labrador
coast. Was he thinking of dogs to fight, and fish to eat, and a snooze
on the beach, after the run was over and the anchor was down? No--he
was looking at something near at hand--and his ears were even quicker
than ours to catch over the voice of waves or wind the cry of men in a
power-boat off the starboard bow.
There were three of them. Two of them held up the third man, whose
bare head flopped over on his chest. The collar of his overcoat was
turned up to shelter that agonizing throat. Yes, it was Captain Cote,
the man we came so far to seek.
"Doctor!" they called. "He couldn't wait! We've brought him out to
ye!"
A moment more and hands as tender as they were willing were lifting
him over the rail. A wee baby would have had no gentler handling.
Captain Cote's face was the greenish white of a boiled potato. It was
seamed with deep lines of pain and sleepless nights. He was carried to
the brass rungs of the ladder and lowered.
"Easy! easy!" those who let him down were saying to each other. They
seemed to fear he would break if they dropped him.
By the light of a battered tin lamp Grenfell ran a needle into his
throat with the novocaine that would destroy the pain of the
operation.
Then he took his thin scissors a foot long and thrust them into the
abscess under the tonsils.
Five minutes later, Captain Cote had found the use of his tongue
again, and, waving both hands round his ears as he talked, he was
thanking God and Dr. Grenfell, and giving us the full history of the
dreadful months he spent before help came.
Next day we landed on his island--Greenley Island. From the small
wharf where women were cleaning fish there were two lines of planking
laid, on cinders, for perhaps a thousand feet through the long green
grass to the red brick lighthouse tower. On these wooden rails was the
chassis of a Ford car, and we rode in state. But you had to stick
closely to the track, or you came to grief on the rough, shelly soil
alongside.
"It's the first automobile ride I ever had in Labrador!" the Doctor
gleefully exclaimed.
In the lighthouse was a living-room with a talking-machine, a violin,
a typewriter and other things to add to the comfort of a home and make
a family happy.
The patient was brought into the room by his beaming wife and two of
his children.
"How are you this morning, Captain?" asked Grenfell.
"Feeling fine, Doctor."
"Did you sleep?"
"Slept like a baby. First time in three months."
"And can you eat?"
"I can eat rocks, Doctor."
Then the Captain brought out a pocketbook stuffed with greenbacks.
Twelve hundred dollars a year, with nothing to spend it for, since he
gets his living, seems a fortune to a man in that part of the world.
"How much do I owe you?" He pulled out three ten-dollar bills.
"One of those will do," said the Doctor, quietly.
It was right for him to take the money. Self-respect on Captain Cote's
part demanded that he should pay. Grenfell lets his patients pay in
wood or fish or whatever they have, a value merely nominal compared
with what they receive. But he wants them to feel--and they, too, wish
to feel--that they are not beggars, living on the dole of his charity.
"Now then, Doctor, how about the coal you burned getting here? How
much does that come to? The Canadian Government'll give it back to
you. We've got some down on the wharf. We can take it out now and put
it on your boat."
The emergency run of the _Strathcona_ had used five tons and a
quarter. At twenty-four dollars a ton, this would be worth one hundred
and twenty-six dollars.
We went down to the wharf, and tried to put the coal, which was soft
coal, like dust, on a skiff, to take it two hundred yards in a
half-gale to the _Strathcona_.
But the mighty wind blew the coal out of the boat as fast as it was
shoveled aboard.
Then Captain Cote said, "We'll send it, when calm weather comes, to
Sister Bailey at Forteau." She was a wonderful trained nurse,--a
friend of Edith Cavell,--who lived in the near-by village, and had a
cow that fought off the dogs and gave milk to the sick babies.
So Captain Cote's life was saved and the great boats from Montreal and
Quebec with their hundreds of passengers could enter and traverse the
Straits in any weather, because the keeper of the light was at his
post once more.
XVI
THROUGH THE BLIZZARD
Another trip was to the north, in January, over the thirty miles from
St. Anthony to Cape Norman, to save a woman's life. It all looks so
easy when you get out the map and measure it across white space.
But when that white space is snow instead of paper, and there are
thirty miles of it to flog through, instead of three inches under your
hand--that, as Kipling would say, is another story.
Over the telegraph line from Cape Norman to St. Anthony came a piteous
message from a young fisherman. It said his wife was dying. Grenfell
telegraphed back, the message running something like this: "My
assistant has gone off with the dogs to answer another call. Cannot
leave my patients at the hospital and cannot get any dogs till he
comes back."
Then another message came from the distracted husband: "Doctor, my
wife is dying. For God's sake find another team somewhere and come."
The night, as the island saying is, was as dark as the inside of a
cow. Grenfell stumbled out into the blackness to hunt for dogs. The
trail to Cape Norman is very rough, and the January snow was deep. The
wind blowing over it threw the snow, biting and blinding, in the face
of anyone who attempted the trail.
But Grenfell did not hesitate. From house to house he went, to rouse
the occupants like another Paul Revere, and beg for dogs that he might
use on the desperate journey.
One man let him take four. Another, for pay, gave him a fifth animal.
A boy named Walter said he would get four more dogs and would drive
the ill-assorted team. By that time it was midnight.
"We'll start at 4:30," said the Doctor. At 4:30 it would still be
pitch-black.
Grenfell went back to the hospital, roused the head nurse, and went to
every patient to make sure that while he was gone no accident would
happen that he could possibly prevent.
At 4:30 he was ready to start. Few men are his match for staying up
all night and looking as fresh as a mountain daisy after the vigil.
He opened the door and a blizzard swept in and tried to rush him off
his feet. Through the whirling drift staggered Walter, dogless.
"Where are those dogs?" asked the Doctor. He expects men to keep
agreements made with him. He couldn't get through the length and
breadth of his big day's work if they didn't.
Walter shook his snow-covered head. "I ain't brought 'em, sir. It's
too bad a night to be startin' before sun-up. The dogs don't know each
other: they comes from here, there an' all over. They'll be fightin'
in the traces an' eatin' each other up in the dark. Us must be able to
see 'em in order to drive 'em. You know what dogs is like, sir."
"Yes, I do," said Grenfell. "But you're the driver, and I leave it to
you. We must get off as soon as we can."
Dr. Grenfell went to his room to snatch a catnap before the start.
Another telegram woke him as he was drowsing off.
"Come along soon. Wife worse."
The storm instead of going down was more violent than ever when the
grey day came. The sun was not seen at all. On the contrary, the air
was filled with a mad whirl of pelting, stinging flakes almost as hard
as Indian arrow-heads. The dogs would be no good in the teeth of such
a storm--for the team-mates who work with a will are those that are
best acquainted, and with an unknown driver this team suddenly thrown
together would have pulled as many different ways as there were fierce
and headstrong dogs. They would be at each other's throats before they
were out of sight of the houses.
As he waited, walking restlessly up and down, in his brown sweater and
thick leggins, Grenfell was plagued with the picture of the woman
fighting for her life till help should come from the one man who could
give it.
Still another of those telegrams! This time the message read: "Come
immediately if you can. Wife still holding out."
Just as he read the words, there were voices, and battering hands at
the door.
Two men, white as Santa Claus from head to foot, staggered into the
room, with the wind whooping at their backs as if in a wild anger
that they escaped its clutches.
Grenfell, accustomed as he was to the brave men of a hard country,
fairly gasped when he saw them.
"Where did you come from?"
"We comes to fetch you, sir, for the sick woman at Cape Norman."
"Do you think dogs can get me there now?" the Doctor asked, anxiously.
"No, sir. We was blown here most o' the way, wi' the wind at our
backs. The wind drove us. The dogs can't make head against it, not
till the wind shifts clean round the other way, sir."
Ten miles of their journey had been in the fairly sheltered lee of the
land. Twenty miles had been before the pitiless sweep of the wind over
the unprotected sea-ice. If the snow had not drifted so heavily, they
would have been borne along at a pace so rapid that their sled would
have been wrecked.
"When was it you left Cape Norman?" was the Doctor's next question.
"Eight o'clock last night, sir."
So they had been coming on all through the night, without rest or
food. Yet the first thing they had done when the sled stopped at last
before Grenfell's door was to get something for their dogs to eat.
Already, the animals lay snug and tranquil in a drift, as if it were a
feather-bed--sleeping the sleep of good dogs who have done their work
and earned their daily fish-heads and know of nothing more to want in
this life or the next.
The Doctor patted the broad shoulders of the gaunt, shy spokesman. "Go
into the hospital and get a good, big, hot dinner," he said. "Then go
to bed. We'll wake you when it's time to start."
But after dark--and the darkness came on very early--the two troubled
men were at Grenfell's door again. "Us couldn't sleep, sir, for
thinkin' of the woman. Us have got another telegram sayin' please to
hurry. The storm is not so bad as it was, sir. If you think fitten to
start, we're ready."
"Call Walter," said the Doctor.
"Us has called he, sir. He's gettin' the dogs. He'll be here in a
minute."
Grenfell and his comrades knew that the lull in the storm did not mean
the end of it. It was gathering strength, and might at any moment
break loose again with redoubled fury. But he--and they--couldn't
stand waiting any longer. They must go. It was as if out of the black
distances they heard the thin, far, pleading voice of the sufferer
calling to them, to come and save her.
Their first task was to get across the harbor of St. Anthony in the
dark and the eddying snow. They had their snowshoes, but in spite of
these they sank to their knees in slush, and the two dog-teams
floundered and half-swam. The team from Cape Norman went first, to
encourage the others. A man stumbled ahead of them all, to break out a
footway. Walter trudged in advance of the rear team, with Grenfell
driving an assortment of beasts he had never handled before. Only a
dog-driver knows what that means.
Ascending the flank of the hill across the harbor, they found
themselves almost overwhelmed by the deep snow, with more piling down
from above, as they fought their way foot by foot up the hill. They
had to take hold of the sleds and lift them to help the dogs, and the
sweat rolled off them in spite of the keen bite of the cold. When they
topped the rise at last, the wind struck them full force, so that
their loudest shouts could not be heard in the roaring onrush of the
wind. The slope was a steep glaze of ice, and down it they coasted,
running into tree-trunks and rocks that threatened to wrench the sleds
and injure the dogs and men. It was hardly better when they reached
the bottom. Here the Bartlett River became their necessary roadway,
and twice Grenfell and others broke through into the swirling current
and were almost carried away to be drowned under the ice.
[Illustration: WHERE FOUR FEET ARE BETTER THAN TWO]
Down-stream they battled their course--no wonder "Battle Harbor" is
the name of the Labrador inlet not far away. It is a battle to get
anywhere in winter on this coast. At half-past one in the morning they
came to where the twenty-mile stretch of sea-ice began.
After that experience of a few years before on the ice-pan, Grenfell
would not have been to blame if he had called a halt and said, "No,
not out there! Let us take the longest way round, by the shore, and
be safe."
But that has never been his way. When duty calls, he takes the air
line to the scene of action. So it was on this awful night. It had
taken six hours to do ten miles. The sea was throwing the ice about
with a mighty booming and crashing like the firing of cannon. The
blizzard stung their faces and lashed their bodies. Grenfell was ready
to dare the passage. But the men who came for him would not have it
so. His life was precious in their sight: and they knew what its
preservation meant to all that helpless lonesomeness of the winter
coast.
It lacked six hours to daylight. If they waited, the dogs would not
freeze, but men might suffer, and perhaps lose their lives.
But the rugged pair from Cape Norman said that in the preceding fall
someone had put up a "tilt"--a log refuge--in the woods near by. They
roved about until to their exceeding joy they found it.
There was not merely a shack of spruce-logs. In the shelter there was
a stove, and beside the stove was a pile of wood. It is the habit of
the men of the North to think of those who come after them. They who
have been through a winter understand what it means to depend on
others and have others depend on them. Those who do not play the game
that generous, open-handed, far-sighted way have no friends and are
despised by their neighbors.
The dogs fell asleep in the snow. One of the Cape Norman men "bust
open" the river with his axe and filled the kettle for tea. But even
while Grenfell was fussing with the knots of the dunnage bag to get
out the tea and the sugar, he heard his comrade's pipe fall to the
floor.
Grenfell looked up. The good soul, standing erect, was fast asleep. It
had been sixty hours since he had slept, and forty-eight of these had
been spent on that terrible trail where there was no trail. Flesh and
blood rebelled at last. Even the records of ambulance-drivers in the
war have seldom equalled such endurance. The sleeper was roused and
put on the bench. He tried again to stuff his pipe with his frightful
rubbish called tobacco. But the pipe clattered to the floor again: he
was dead to the world: his snoring shook the peace of dreamland, and
would have broken the glass in the tilt if there had been any glass to
break.
What might be called dawn came at last, but with it the snow returned
fast and thick as the flies and mosquitoes of a Labrador spring.
The snow cut off their view of the sea, but they heard it roaring as
though possessed of all the devils.
Over that roaring there seemed to come to their ears again the still
small voice of the woman in misery--hopeful, waiting for them,
trusting the Doctor who had never failed her yet.
They were not the sort who would say sea-ice was impassable, if humans
and dogs could traverse it.
But examination showed that there was no way over the partly frozen
sea.
Greatly against their will, they must take the roundabout route
overland. By two in the afternoon the ice held sufficiently to let
them cross to Crow Island, and there they tried to boil water and make
tea. The blizzard defeated them. In the blinding snow, they set their
course by the compass, and the dogs plunged on. They said nothing to
the dogs after that, but let them follow their own cold noses. The
wonderful beasts took them straight to a tiny shore village. A short
dash from the village, and the long run was over. In a jiffy, Grenfell
had out the surgical instruments and put the patient under ether.
To-day the woman is not merely alive but in the best of health, and
she thinks of Dr. Grenfell as the Greeks used to think of a god.
XVII
WHY THE DOCTOR WAS LATE
We have seen by this time that Grenfell does not rush slam-bang into
danger for the mere sake of "the tumult and the shouting," like a
soldier of fortune.
Once he said to me: "I'm like these dogs. Every time they hear a fight
going on at the other end of the village they feel that they have to
get into it, and off they go, pell-mell. Whenever I hear of a good
scrap in progress anywhere in the world, my first impulse is to drop
everything else and get into the struggle. Then I realize that I'm
serving my fellow-man as truly by staying just where I am, and trying
to do my duty in my place."
He is fearlessly willing to spend his life in heroic deeds: but he
always has a definite purpose in view: he is not posing for the
motion-pictures. So when he harnesses his dogs to go on a journey we
may be pretty sure that at the other end of the run there is some man,
woman or child who needs the Doctor, and who takes the medicine of
hope just from seeing him at the bedside, before he has done anything
with a knife or a needle.
In the spring of 1919 the Doctor had to go to New York. It wasn't a
sick person this time: it was a board of directors that wanted to hear
his report on his work, and was to discuss with him big plans to raise
$1,500,000 for an endowment fund to carry it on. A Seamen's Institute,
a string of hospitals, several mission steamers, an industrial school
and a number of dispensaries take a lot of money to run, even with
many volunteer helpers.
Most of us, if we find it inconvenient to attend a meeting, telephone
or write politely to say we have the laryngitis or the shingles or
some other good excuse, and are very, very sorry that we cannot come.
But Grenfell, having said he would be in New York at the end of May,
was bound to be there in spite of fog and bog, sea and snow and berg,
if it was humanly possible. I remember his story of what happened as
vividly as though it were yesterday, for I also had an appointment
with him at that time--and he was only a month late in keeping it.
He had written me:
"I am in a terrible state about my boat: she is still in the blockade
of ice, after two months fighting it. It is harder to beat than the
Huns, but I am very anxious you should come with me, even if we have
to canoe down the coast."
The story behind his finally successful attempt to reach New York on
that occasion is as follows:
He set apart a month to make the journey, which in open summer weather
would require only a week. He meant to go round the northern tip of
Newfoundland, from his headquarters on the east coast at St. Anthony.
He planned, therefore, to go by dog-team northward to the Straits of
Belle Isle, and then alongshore rounding Cape Bauld and Cape Norman,
and on down the west coast to the railroad at Curling which would take
him to Port aux Basques. At the latter place, the southwestern corner
of Newfoundland, an ice-breaking steamer would carry him over Cabot
Straits to North Sydney, and there he could get a train which would
make connections for New York.
There is what dogs would consider a fair route alongshore on the
western coast. And the dogs' opinion is worth considering.
But there sprang up a continuing gale, with a blizzard in its teeth.
It rocked and hammered and broke the ice with the fury of great guns
round about the headlands. As the trail for much of the way lay along
the sea-ice, it would have been as impossible for the dogs to go by it
as it was to make that short-cut across the bay when Doctor and dogs
had that terrible experience on the ice-pan.
"Very well then," said Grenfell, "we'll try a motor-boat."
Motor-boating is fun enough in summer on the placid reaches of the
Delaware or the Hudson, but it is a very different matter on the coast
of Newfoundland, in a narrow lane between great chunks that have
broken off a Greenland glacier and lean brown crags with the sea
crashing white and high upon them. If he went in a motor-boat,
Grenfell would have to be on the lookout day and night for ice-pans
and bergs, lest they close in and crush his boat as an elephant's
tread would squash a peanut.
When the blizzard that had spoiled the ice eased off, Grenfell had his
boat ready. After two or three days of creeping in the lee of the
rocks and trying to keep out of the clutch of the breakers, he would
find himself at a point where he could begin a lonely trek overland, a
hundred miles to the railroad, with his pack of food and clothing on
his stalwart shoulders.
Just such a lonely walk as that many a sealer, fisherman or clergyman
has made. If night overtakes a man, and he is far from a hut, he kicks
a hole in a drift, lines it with fir boughs, makes his fire and crawls
in snugly. He finds snow-water will not hurt him if he mixes it with
tea or sugar. Grenfell, accustomed to hiking with the dog-team, felt
no dread of a night with a snow-bank for his feather-bed.
The start was made auspiciously. The ice kept well out of the way till
Grenfell, who had one man with him, cleared the harbor. As they went
on, however, the east wind spied the bold little craft, and came on
like an evil thing, to play cat-and-mouse with it.
It brought in the ice, and the ice was constantly pushing the boat
toward the shore, toward which the current was pulling like a
remorseless unseen hand.
"Keep her off the rocks, Bill!" warned the Doctor, poling vigorously
at the stern.
"I'm tryin' to, sir. But the wind is wonderful strong, and I'm
thinkin'----"
Whatever Bill was thinking, he was rudely interrupted by a rock that
did not show above the surface. They were in a most perilous position.
The boat, caught on the tidal reef, tossed to and fro, and the
propeller, lifted high out of water, whirled like an electric fan.
Through a hole in the prow the water rushed in. The two men sprang to
the leak and stuffed it with their hats and coats and anything on
which they could lay their hands.