Fullerton L. Waldo

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such observations as are here assembled are the raw material for the Doctor’s inimitable tales of life on the Labrador.
The great fact of life here is the sea, and much of existence is in giving battle to it. The little boys practice jumping across rain-barrels and mud-puddles, because some day they hope to get a “ticket” (a berth on a sealer) and go to the ice, and when it is “a good big copy from pan to pan”—that is to say, a considerable distance from one floating ice-cake to the next—their ability to jump like their own island sheep may save their lives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Anyone who sees even a little of Grenfell in action must realize how faithful his life is to the pattern of Christ’s life on earth. There are many passages of Christ’s experience—as when the crowd pressed in upon Him—or when learned men were supercilious—or when He perceived that virtue had gone out of Him—or when He was reproached because He let a man die in His absence—that remind one of Grenfell’s thronged and hustled life. Many believe that Grenfell can all but work a miracle of healing ”

“ For a few moments when he talks sentence may link itself to sentence very gravely, but nobody ever knew the Doctor to go long without that keen, bright flash of a smile, provoked by a ready and a constant sense of fun, that illumines his face like a pulsation of the Northern Lights, and—unless you are hard as steel at heart—must make you love him, and do what he wants you to do. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You may think that the dog Fritz out on the bowsprit is enjoying all the morning there is, but the Doctor is transformed.
“I love these early mornings,” he says—and he is innocent of pose when he says it: it is not a mere literary emotion. “It’s a beautiful sight in autumn with the ice when the banks are red with the little hills clear-cut against the sky and the sea a deep, deep blue. Isn’t it a beautiful world to live in? Isn’t it fun to live?”
You have to admit that it is.
“A man can’t think just of stomachs all the time. Sometimes I have to go away for a day or two. ”

“ Grenfell’s great work the broad, sure underpinning of a liberal endowment. It may be true that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man”; but the one-man power of Grenfell’s personality is not immortal, and the work is too important to be allowed to lapse or to languish when he no longer directs, inspires and energizes all. To endow the work now, when many concerns of lesser moment are claiming their millions of dollars and their thousands of devotees is to relieve the Doctor of the ordeal of stumping the United States, Canada and the British Isles to keep his great plant going. ”

“ The small amount of ready money on which people can live with a house, a vegetable garden, and a supply of firewood at their backs in the timbered hillsides is unbelievable. If a man was fortunate enough to possess any grassland, he might get as much as $65 a ton for his hay in 1919, if he could spare it from his own cows and sheep. It is too bad that for the sake of the sheep the noble Newfoundland dog that chased them has had to perish. It is almost impossible today to find a pure-breed example of the dog that spread the name of the island to the ends of the earth. ”

“ At the animated dinner-table of the nurses and the doctors in the Battle Harbour hospital, after asking a blessing, he was talking eagerly about the League of Nations, the industrial situation in England and America and the future for Russia while brandishing the knife above the meat pie and letting no plate but his own go neglected.
Dr. Grenfell is happy and his soul is free at the wheel of the Strathcona. That wheel bears the words, “Jesus saith, Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” At the peak of the mainmast is likely to be the blue pennant bearing the words, “God is Love.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Doctor has the real chess mind—the mind that surveys and weighs and 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Miss Dohme and the other nurses kept the rooms spotlessly clean, and gay bowls of buttercups were about.
“I don’t feel nice, Doctor,” said the next woman. “Some mornings a kind of dead, dreary feeling seems to come out of me stummick and go right down me laigs. Sometimes it flutters; sometimes it lies down. The wind’s wonderful strong today, and it’s rising.”
Usually the diagnosis is not greatly helped by the patient, who meekly answers the questions with “Yes, Doctor,” or “No, Doctor,” or describes the symptoms with such poetic vagueness that a great deal is left to the imagination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ His examiners scorn the knowledge of the book, very often, for they have the facts at the fingers’ ends from long and harsh experience of the treacherous waters, with the criss-cross currents, the hidden reefs, the sudden fogs, the contrary winds. So they delight to make life miserable for the young mariner by heckling him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She carried so many passengers, short-haul or long-distance, that every seat in the dining saloon was filled with weary folk at night and some paced the decks or sat on the piles of lathes or the oil-barrels. Lumber and barrels were stored everywhere, the hold was crammed, and cattle in the prow came and went mysteriously as the vessel moved into one cove or bight or tickle after another in the dead of the night or the silver cool of the early morning. ”

“ The soul of it is the living-room with a wide window at the end that opens out upon a prospect of the wild wooded hillside, with an ivy-vine growing across the middle, so that it seems as if there were no glass and one could step right out into the clear, pure air. ”

“ The word “copy” comes from the childish game of following the leader and doing as he does. A little piece of ice is called a knob, and a larger piece is a pan. A pan is the same thing as a floe, but the latter expression is not in common usage.
Every youth who aspires to qualify as a skipper must go before an examining board of old sea-wise and weather-wise pilots, and prove himself letter-perfect in the text of that big book, “The Newfoundland and Labrador Pilot and Guide.” ”

“ The hatchway over his head as he operates is always filled with the heads of so many spectators—including frequently the Doctor’s dog, Fritz—that the meagre light which comes from above is nearly shut off. Often a lamp is necessary, and as electric flash-lamps are notoriously faithless in a crisis, it is usually a kerosene lamp. Often an impatient patient starts to come down before his time, or an over-eager parent or husband thinks he must accompany the one that he has brought for the doctor’s lancet. ”

“ So that when she has her full fuel-saving complement of canvas spread, the Strathcona displays six sails at work. Could the Doctor always have his way, all the sails would be up whenever a breeze stirs. With a good wind the ship is capable of eight knots and even more an hour: five knots or so is her average speed under steam alone. In the bow, his paws on the rail, or out on the bowsprit sniffing the air and seeing things that only he can see, is the incomparable dog Fritz—Fritz of “57 varieties”—brown and black, like toast that was burned in the making. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Despite the volunteer assistants, despite the aid of good men and women banded in associations or toiling in groups or as individuals at points far from Battle Harbour and St. Anthony, despite the economy practised everywhere and always, there is ever a need, a haunting need, of funds; and a few insular politicians and traders may talk as elaborately as they please about Grenfell as an interloper, with a task that does not belong to him, but as long as Newfoundland does not provide a sufficient subsidy, most of the money must come from somewhere off the island. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”