Grenfell

“ It was a terrible moment for Grenfell when he saw his friend disappear beneath the icy waves. Would the cold so paralyze him as to render him helpless? Would he be caught under an ice pan? A hundred such thoughts flashed through Grenfell's mind as he stood, impotent to help because of the distance between them. Then to his great joy he saw Taylor rise to the surface and scramble out upon a pan in safety.
The ice was too far separated now for Taylor either to advance or retreat, and the pan upon which he had taken refuge began a rapid drift seaward. ”

“ The Sands of Dee, the estuary and the hills of Wales made a fine school of this sort for Grenfell.
The out-of-doors clears the brain, and there a man learns to think straight and to the point. When he is on intimate terms with the woods and mountains, and can laugh at howling gales and the wind beating in his face, and can take care of himself and be happy without the effeminating comforts of steam heat and luxurious beds, a man will prove himself no coward when he comes some day face to face with grave danger. He has been trained in a school of courage. He has learned to depend upon himself. ”

“ The pan was too small to admit of sufficient exercise to keep up the circulation of blood, and though he slapped his arms around his shoulders and stamped his feet, a deadening numbness was crawling over him as the sun began to sink in the west and cold increased.
Though, in the end he might drown, Grenfell determined to live as long as he could. Perhaps this was a test of courage that God had given him! It is a man's duty, whatever befalls him, to fight for life to the last ditch, and live as long as he can. ”

“ It was often said of a gale on the Labrador coast, “That’s a wind that’ll bring Grenfell.” The doctor, impatient of delays, and feeling the same exhilaration in a good stiff breeze that a lover of horses feels in managing a spirited thoroughbred, never failed to make use of a wind that might help send him on his way.
What sort of people are these to whom Dr. Grenfell ministers? They are, as you might think, simple, hardy men, in whom ceaseless struggle against bleak conditions of life has developed strength of character and capacity to endure. ”

“ Like all youngsters running over with the joy of youth and life, he got into his full share of scrapes. If there was anything on foot, mischievous or otherwise, Grenfell was on hand, though his mischief and escapades were all innocent pranks or evasion of rules, such as going out of bounds at prohibited hours to secure goodies. The greater the element of adventure the keener he was for an enterprise. ”

“ The slender hope of being seen from the shore diminished as Grenfell thought of how inconspicuous he was, nearly naked, his dogs about him. Crusoe alone on his isle of solid ground was a king of space by comparison. Should he escape it would be the first time that a man adrift on the offshore ice had come ashore to tell the tale. Nearly anybody gazing seaward—even if anybody saw—would say: "Oh, that's just a piece of kelp or a bush!" The wiseacres refuse to be fooled by such sights. They are like the Arabs of the desert, who refuse to get excited over a mirage. ”

“ Doctor Grenfell had heard all this before, but now as he looked at the dreary desolation of the rocks it seemed almost incredible that children could be born and grow to manhood and womanhood and live their lives here, forever fighting for mere existence, and die at last without ever once knowing the comforts that we who live in kindlier warmer lands enjoy. ”

“ It was an ingenious idea to make a flagstaff from the bones of dogs' legs. Hardly one man in a thousand would have thought of it. It was an exemplification of Grenfell's resourcefulness, and in the end it saved his life.
As he had hoped, men were out upon the rocky bluffs scanning the sea for seals. The keen eyes of one of them discovered, far away, something dark and unusual. The men of this land never take anything for granted. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hardship, peril and prejudice have fallen to his lot, but he has met them with a courage and determination that never faltered, and he is still "up and at it."
Grenfell's life has been a life of service to others. Freely and joyfully he has given himself and all that was in him to the work of making others happier, and the people of the coast love and trust him. With pathetic confidence they lean upon him and call him in their need, as children lean upon their father, and he has never failed to respond. ”

“ From the beginning this thought troubled Doctor Grenfell. And in winter when the ice shuts the whole coast off from the rest of the world, he turned his attention to efforts to secure the help of good people the world over in his work. Making others happy is the greatest happiness that any one can experience, and Grenfell wished others to share his happiness with him. ”

“ Grenfell says, "how it is possible for any hot-blooded creature to enjoy so immensely this terribly cold water as do these old seals. They paddle about, throw [71] themselves on their backs, float and puff out their breasts, flapping their flippers like paws over their chests."
While they lay off Fogo Island, watching the seals, the great pans of ice, rising and falling with the heaving of the sea, beat on the stout sides of the Neptune as on a drum-head. ”

“ Just out yonder, not sixty feet away, was a cake of ice much bigger than his own. It would have made a fine raft for them all: and if only they could have reached it, Grenfell was sure he could have held out for two or three days. He could have killed off the dogs one by one, eaten the flesh, and drunk the warm blood. The Eskimo would think such a meal luxury. On his little pan, the effort to kill each dog would mean the risk of drowning every time.
At daybreak, Grenfell remembered, men would be starting from Goose Cove with their sleds to go twenty miles to a parade of Orangemen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then it would be, as Grenfell knew full well, his life or theirs.
The dogs wore good warm coats of fur, and if he had a coat made of dog skins it would keep him warm enough to protect his life, at least, from the cold. Now the animals were docile enough. Clustered about his feet, they were looking up into his face expectantly and confidently. He loved them as a good man always loves the beasts that serve him. They had hauled him over many a weary mile of snow and ice, and had been his companions and shared with him the hardships of many a winter's storm. ”

“ This is the team that hauls Doctor Grenfell in long winter journeys, when he visits the coast settlements of northern Newfoundland, in every one of which he finds no end of eager folk welcoming him and calling him to their homes to heal their sick.
In the scattered hamlets and sparsely settled coast of northern Newfoundland the folk have no doctor to call upon at a moment's notice when they are sick, as we have. They live apart and isolated from many of the conveniences of life that we look upon as necessities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When Grenfell had covered the library table with papers and parchments innumerable, title-deeds of centuries old, and grants from the Crown to Vyner’s ancestors in different reigns, he could not restrain a passionate invective against the man who had, out of mere levity, forfeited a noble fortune.
Contemptible as young Ladarelle was—mean, low-lived, and vulgar—the fellow’s ambition to be rich, the desire to have the power that wealth confers, raised him in Grenfell’s esteem above “that weak-minded enthusiast “—so he called him—who must needs beggar himself, because he had nothing to do. ”

“ You look greatly disgusted, are you horrified at my wickedness, Grenfell?”
“No,” said he, slowly. “I have met a fair number of young fellows like you, and who fancied, that to know life they must begin at the lowest of it; the great misfortune was, that they never emerged from it after.”
“That’s severe, I take it,” said Ladarelle, as he lighted a cigarette and began to smoke.
“Feigning virtue will never make a saint,” said Grenfell, rising from the table; “but mock wickedness will always end by making a man a rascal!” ”

“ Grenfell saw that his shell had not exploded, and began to talk at random about how much pleasanter it was to have one’s post of a morning—that letters should always come in with the eggs at breakfast—that people exchanged their gossip more genially then than at any other time; and, at last, arrived at what he sought to portray, the tableau of a charming party in a delightful country-house, “The best thing we have in England; and, indeed, the best thing the world has anywhere.” ”

“ Sometimes to avoid an awful drubbing the Neptune would steam a little ahead, very much as a swimmer dives into a breaker to cleave it before it combs over and carries him off his feet. Grenfell himself, loving a bout with "the bright eyes of danger," left the ship and went out on the ice and tried to climb one of the bergs, stranded in the midst of the ice-pack. It was like a living thing striving to fight its way out—something like a polar bear surrounded by "husky" dogs worrying him and trying to pull him down. ”

“ During 1923 the fog was so dense that the sealing-season was almost a failure.
On his first voyage to the sealing grounds Grenfell saw the seals like black dots by the thousands, all over the floes as far as the horizon. The ships butted and rammed their way into the thick of the herd, the men overjoyed at the prospect of plenty. As soon as the engines stopped they were over the side, booted and sweatered, in a jiffy.
[66] There was plenty of work for Dr. Grenfell. Many a man twisted his leg or his ankle as he slipped between the blocks of ice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As well as having done everything, he had been everywhere: up the Mediterranean, up the Baltic, into the Black Sea, up the St. Lawrence—everywhere but to Ireland—and now, in a dull autumn, when too late for a distant tour, he had induced his friend Grenfell to accompany him in a short cruise, with the distinct pledge that they were not to visit Dublin, or any other of those cognate cities of which Irishmen are vain, but which to Mr. George Grenfell represented all that was an outrage on good taste, and an insult to civilisation. ”

“ They were far more excited than he was: for it now seemed as natural to Grenfell to be saved as, a little while before, it had seemed to perish where so many good men had been swallowed up before him as they went to their business in great waters. Nearer and nearer they came, plying the oars valiantly, till the snub nose of the boat was thrust into the soft edge of the pan, as a dog's muzzle is thrust into a man's hand.
The man in the bow jumped from the boat and took both of the Doctor's hands. Neither said a word. At such moments men do not care [196] much to speak. ”

“ 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 ”