"Sure, zur," said the man, trying to smile, "'tis wonderful queer, but
I _sure_ thought you was a doctor, when I seed you comin' ashore."
"But you isn't?" the woman pursued, still hopefully. "Is you sure you
couldn't do nothin'? Is you noa kind of a doctor, at all? We
doan't--we doan't--want she t' die!"
In the silence--so long and deep a silence--melancholy shadows crept
in from the desolation without.
"I wisht you _was_ a doctor," said the man. "I--_wisht--you--was_!"
He was crying.
"They need," thought I, "a mission-doctor in these parts."
And the next day--in the harbour beyond--I first heard of Grenfell. In
that place they said they would send _him_ to the little maid who lay
dying; they assured me, indeed, that he would make haste, when he came
that way: which would be, perhaps, they thought, in "'long about a
month." Whether or not the doctor succoured the child I do not know;
but I have never forgotten this first impression of his work--the
conviction that it was a good work for a man to be about.
* * * * *
Subsequently I learned that Dr. Grenfell was the superintendent of the
Newfoundland and Labrador activities of the Royal National Mission to
Deep Sea Fishermen, an English organization, with a religious and
medical work already well-established on the North Sea, and a medical
mission then in process of development on the North Atlantic coast.
Two years later he discovered himself to be a robust, hearty Saxon,
strong, indefatigable, devoted, jolly; a doctor, a parson by times,
something of a sportsman when occasion permitted, a master-mariner, a
magistrate, the director of certain commercial enterprises designed to
"help the folk help themselves"--the prophet and champion, indeed, of
a people: and a man very much in love with life.