A Labrador Doctor Part 20

However, with the help of friends we were able to purchase a hot-head vertical engine to generate our current; for our near-by streams freeze solid in winter. That engine has now been running for over ten years, and has given us electricity in St. Anthony Hospital for operating and X-ray work as well as all our lighting. Until he died, it was run the greater part of the time by an Eskimo boy whom we had brought down from the North Labrador, and who was convalescing from empyema. The installation was efficiently done by a volunteer student from the Pratt Inst.i.tute, Mr. Hause.

On my lecture trip the previous winter a gentleman at whose house I was a guest told me that when quite a youth he had fought in the Civil War, been invalided home, and advised to take a sea voyage for his health. He therefore took pa.s.sage with some Gloucester fishermen and set sail for the Labrador. The crew proved to be Southern sympathizers, and one day, while my friend was ash.o.r.e taking a walk, the skipper slipped out and left him marooned. He had with him neither money, spare clothing, nor anything else; and as British sympathies were also with the South, he had many doubts as to how the settlers would receive a penniless stranger and Northerner. So seeing his schooner bound in an easterly direction, he started literally to run along the sh.o.r.e, hoping that he might find where she went and catch her again. Mile after mile he went, tearing through the "tuckamore" or dense undergrowth of gnarled trees, climbing over high cliffs, swimming or wading the innumerable rivers, skirting bays, and now and again finding a short beach along which he could hurry. At night, wet, dirty, tired, hungry, penniless, he came to a fisherman's cottage and asked shelter and food. He explained that he was an American gentleman taking a holiday, but hadn't a penny of money. It spoke well for the people that they accepted his story. He told me that they both fed and clothed him, and one kind-hearted man actually the next day gave him some oilskin clothing and a sou'wester hat--costly articles "on Labrador" in those days. So on and on and on he went, till at last arriving at Red Bay he found his schooner at anchor calmly fishing. He went aboard at once as if nothing had happened, and stayed there (having enjoyed enough pedestrian exercise for the time being) and no one ever referred to his having been left behind. He was now, however, forty years later, anxious to do something for the people of that section of the sh.o.r.e, and he gave me a thousand dollars toward building a small cottage for a district nurse. Forteau was the village chosen, and Dennison Cottage erected as a nursing station and dispensary. The people at first each gave a week toward its upkeep; and even now every man gives three days annually. The house has a good garden, little wards for in-patients, and is the centre of much useful industrial work, especially the making of artificial flowers. For twelve years now, Miss Florence Bailey, a nurse from the Mildmay Inst.i.tute in London, has presided over its destinies, endeared herself to the people, and done most unselfish and heroic work in that lonely station, which she has greatly enlarged and improved by her untiring efforts. It forms an admirable halfway house between Battle and Harrington Hospitals, each being about a hundred miles distant. A local trader once wrote me: "Sister Bailey did good work last year.

That cottage hospital is a blessing to the people of this part of the sh.o.r.e. Who would think that by a little act of kindness done forty-odd years ago to an old soldier, we would now be reaping the benefit of such an act."

Only one longer journey on foot on the Labrador coast is on record.

The traveller started from Quebec and walked to Battle Harbour. There he turned north and walked to Nakvak Bay. The distance as the crow flies is about fourteen hundred miles. But the man had no boat of his own and only in one or two places accepted a pa.s.sage. One bay on the east coast runs in for some hundred and fifty miles. Over this he got a boat fifty miles from the mouth. Round Kipokak and Makkovik, and the bays south of Hopedale, he walked most of the way, and these run in for forty miles. He carried practically nothing with him, and depended on what boots and clothing the people gave him, eating berries and whatever else he could find while he was in the country. Those who housed him told me that they did not see any signs of madness about him, except his avoidance of men and refusal to go in boats or mix with others if he could in any way avoid it. He carried no gun. No one knew who he was nor why he went on such a "cruise." Long before he reached the North the theory that he was a murderer fleeing from justice got started, and at some places a very careful watch was kept over him. Arrived at Nakvak, he went to the house of everyone's friend, George Ford. That is one of the most inaccessible places in the world. No mail steamer ever goes there, and no schooner ever anchors nearer than a few miles. It is at the bottom of a fjord twenty-five miles long, with very precipitous cliffs two thousand feet high on each side and bottomless water below. It was then thirty miles from the nearest house, with ranges of mountains between, and was the most northerly house on the Labrador. Here this phenomenon celebrated his arrival by climbing up onto the ridge of the house, when lo! most prosaic of accidents, he fell off and broke his neck. The puzzle has always been why he elected to carry an unbroken neck at such cost all that long distance.

Many inexplicable things happen "on Labrador." Thus, one year while visiting at the head of Hamilton Inlet, a Scotch settler came aboard to ask my advice about a large animal that had appeared round his house. Though he had sat up night after night with his gun, he had never seen it. His children had seen it several times disappearing into the trees. The French agent of Revillon Freres, twenty miles away, had come over, and together they had tracked it, measured the footmarks in the mud, and even fenced some of them round. The stride was about eight feet, the marks as of the cloven hoofs of an ox. The children described the creature as looking like a huge hairy man; and several nights the dogs had been driven growling from the house into the water. Twice the whole family had heard the creature prowling around the cottage, and tapping at the doors and windows. The now grown-up children persist in saying that they saw this wild thing.

Their house is twenty miles up the large Grand River, and a hundred and fifty miles from the coast.

An old fellow called Harry Howell was one winter night missing from his home. He had been hunting, and only too late, after a blizzard set in, was it discovered that he was absent. In the morning the men gathered to make a search, but at that moment in walked "old Harry"!

He told me later that he was coming home in the afternoon when the blizzard began. It was dirty, thick of snow, and cold. Suddenly he heard bells ringing, and knew that it was fairies bidding him follow them--because he had followed them before. So off he went, pushing his way through the driving snow. When at last he reached the foot of a gnarled old tree in the forest, the bells stopped, and he knew that was the place where he must stay for the night. So he laid some of the partridges which he had killed into a hole in the snow close to the trunk, crawled down and used them for a seat, and placed the rest of the frozen birds at his feet. Then he pulled up his d.i.c.key, or kossak, over his head, and with his back to the tree, went to sleep while the snow was still driving. There was no persuading that man that the ringing bells were in his own imagination.

Many years ago a Norwegian captain on the Labrador told me the following story. One day the carpenter of his schooner, a man whom he had known for three voyages, and trusted thoroughly, was steering on the course which the mate had given him. All at once the mate came and found the man steering four points out. When he upbraided him, he answered, "He came and told me to." "n.o.body did," replied the mate.

"Go northwest."

Three times the experience was repeated, and at last the mate reported the matter to the skipper. He immediately suggested, "Well, let us go on running in the direction he insists on taking for a while and see if anything happens." At the end of two hours they came upon a square-rigger with her decks just awash, and six men clinging to her rigging. As they came alongside the sinking vessel the carpenter pointed aghast to one of the rescued crew and cried out, "There's the man who came and told me the skipper said to change the course."

In medicine, too, things happen which we professional men are just as unable to explain. A big-bodied, successful fisherman came aboard my steamer one day, saying that he had toothache. This was probable, for his jaw was swollen, his mouth hard to open, and the offending molar easily visible within. When I produced the forceps he protested most loudly that he would not have it touched for worlds.

"Why, then, did you come to me?" I asked. "You are wasting my time."

"I wanted you to charm her, Doctor," he answered, quite naturally.

"But, my dear friend, I do not know how to charm, and don't think it would do the slightest good. Doctors are not allowed to do such things."

He was evidently very much put out, and turning round to go, said, "I knows why you'se won't charm her. It's because I'm a Roman Catholic."

"Nonsense. If you really think that it would do any good, come along.

You'll have to pay twenty-five cents exactly as if you had it pulled out."

"Gladly enough, Doctor. Please go ahead."

He sat on the rail, a burly carca.s.s, the incarnation of materialism, while the doctor, feeling the size of a sandflea, put one finger into his mouth and touched the molar, while he repeated the most mystic nonsense he could think of, "Abracadabra Tiddlywink.u.m Umslopoga"--and then jumped the finger out lest the patient might close his ponderous jaw. The fisherman took a turn around the deck, pulled out the quarter, and solemnly handed it to me, saying, "All the pain has gone.

Many thanks, Doctor." I found myself standing alone in amazement, twiddling a miserable shilling, and wondering how I came to make such a fool of myself.

A month later the patient again came to see me when we happened to be in his harbour. The swelling had gone, the molar was there. "Ne'er an ache out of her since," the patient laughed. I have not reported this end result to the committee of the American College of Surgeons, though much attention is now devoted to the follow-up and end-result department of surgery and medicine.

CHAPTER XX

MARRIAGE

It was now the fall of 1908, and the time had come for me to visit England again and try and arouse fresh interest in our work; and this motive was combined with the desire to see my old mother, who was now nearing her fourscore years. I decided to leave in November and return _via_ America in the spring to receive the honorary degree of LL.D.

from Williams College and of M.A. from Harvard, which I had been generously offered.

My lecture tour this winter was entrusted to an agency. Propaganda is a recognized necessity in human life, though it has little attraction for most men. To me having to ask personally for money even for other people was always a difficulty. Scores of times I have been blamed for not even stating in a lecture that we needed help. The distaste for beating the big drum, which lecturing for your own work always appears to be, makes me quite unable to see any virtue in not doing it, but just asking the Lord to do it. If I really were convinced that He would meet the expenses whether I worked or not, I should believe that neither would He let people suffer and die untended out here or anywhere else. Indeed, it would seem a work of supererogation to have to remind Him of the necessity that existed.

The fact that we have to show pictures of the work which we are doing is tiresome and takes time, but it encourages us to have pictures worth taking and to do deeds which we are not ashamed to narrate. It also stimulates others to give themselves as well as their money to similar kinds of work at their own doorsteps, to see how much like themselves their almoners are. Only to-day my volunteer secretary told me that he honestly expected to meet "a bearded old fogey in spectacles," not a man who can shoot his own dinner from the wing or who enjoys the justifiable pleasures of life.

The religion of Christ never permitted me to accept the idea that there is "nothing to do, only believe." Every man ought to earn his own bread and the means to support his family. Why, then, should you have only to ask the Lord to give unasked the wherewithal to feed other people's families?

Lecturing for philanthropies, only another word for the means to help along the Kingdom of G.o.d on earth, is in England usually carried on through the ordinary missionary meetings; and in my previous experience they were not generally much credit to the splendid objects in view. The lectures were often patronized by small audiences largely composed of women and children.

That particular winter in England I had the privilege of addressing all sorts of workmen's clubs and city lecture-course audiences, people who would have "the shivers" almost if one had asked them to attend a "missionary" lecture. The collection, or even the final monetary outcome, is far from being the test of the value of the address. To commend Christ's religion by minimizing in any way the prerogative He gave men of carrying on the work of His kingdom in their human efforts is to sap the very appeal that attracts manhood to Him. I never wanted to sing, "Oh! to be nothing, nothing." I always wished to sing, "Oh!

make me something, something"--that shall leave some footprints on the sands of time, and have some record of talents gained to offer a Master whom we believe to be righteous.

When spring came and the lectures were over, a new idea suddenly dawned upon me. If I were going to America to festive gatherings and to have some honours conferred, why leave the mother behind?

Seventy-eight years is not old. She was born in India, had lived in England, and suppose anything did happen, why not sleep in America?--she would be just as near G.o.d there. The splendid Mauretania not only took us safely over, but gave me also that gift which I firmly believe G.o.d designed for me--a real partner to share in my joys and sorrows, to encourage and support in trouble and failures, to inspire and advise in a thousand ways, and in addition to bring into my distant field of work a personal comrade with the culture, wisdom, and enthusiasm of the American life and the training of one of the very best of its Universities.

We met on board the second day out. She was travelling with a Scotch banker of Chicago and his wife, Mr. W.R. Stirling, whose daughter was her best friend. They were returning from a motor tour through Europe and Algeria. The Mauretania takes only four and a half days in crossing, and never before did I realize the drawbacks of "hustle,"

and yet the extreme need of it on my part. The degrees of longitude slipped by so quickly that I felt personally aggrieved when one day we made over six hundred miles, and the captain told us in triumph that it was a new record. The ship seemed to be paying off some spite against me. My mother kept mostly to her cabin. Though constantly in to see her, I am afraid I did not unduly worry her to join me on the deck. When just on landing I told her that I had asked a fellow pa.s.senger to become my wife, I am sure had the opportunity arisen she would have tumbled down the Mauretania's staircase. When she had the joy of meeting the girl, her equanimity was so far upset as to let an unaccustomed tear roll down her cheek. That, at least, is one of the tears which I have cost her which brings no regrets. For she confesses that it often puzzles her to which of our lives the event has meant most.

The constant little activities of my life had so filled every hour of time, and so engrossed my thoughts, that I had never thought to philosophize on the advisability of marriage, nor stopped to compare my life with those of my neighbors. There is no virtue in keeping the Ninth Commandment and not envying your neighbour's condition or goods when it never enters your head or heart to worry about them; and when you are getting what you care about no halo is due you for not falling victim to envy or jealousy of others. I have not been in the habit of praying for special personal providences like fine weather in my section of the earth, or for head wind for the schooners so as to give me a fair wind for my steamer, except so far as one prays for the recognition of G.o.d's good hand in everything.

I can honestly protest that nothing in my life ever came more "out of the blue" than my marriage; and beyond that I am increasingly certain each day that it did come out of that blue where G.o.d dwells.

I knew neither whence she came nor whither she was going. Indeed, I only found out when the proposition was really put that I did not even know her name--for it was down on the pa.s.senger list as one of the daughters of the friends with whom she was travelling. Fortunately it never entered my head that it mattered. For I doubt if I should have had the courage to question the chaperon, whose daughter she presumably was. It certainly was a "poser" to be told, "But you don't even know my name." Had I not been a bit of a seaman, and often compelled on the spur of the moment to act first and think afterwards, what the consequences might have been I cannot say.

Fortunately, I remembered that it was not the matter at issue, and explained, without admitting the impeachment, that the only question that interested me in the least was what I hoped that it might become.

Incidentally she mentioned that she had only once heard of me. It was the year previous when I had been speaking at Bryn Mawr and she had refused in no measured terms an invitation to attend, as sounding entirely too dull for her predilections. I have wondered whether this was not another "small providence."

A pathological condition of one's internal workings is not unusual even in Britons who "go down to the sea in ships," but such genius as our family has displayed has, so history a.s.sures us, shone best on a quarter-deck; and on this occasion it pleased G.o.d ultimately to add another naval victory to our credit. It is generally admitted that an abnormal mentality accompanies this not uncommon experience of human life, and I found my lack of appreciation of the rapid voyage paralleled by a wicked satisfaction that my mother preferred the bra.s.s four-poster, so thoughtfully provided for her by the Cunard Company, to the risks of the unsteady promenade deck.

When the girl's way and mine parted in that last word in material jostlings, the custom-house shed in Manhattan, after the liner arrived, I realized that it was rather an armistice than a permanent settlement which I had achieved. Though there was no father in the case, I learned that there was a mother and a home in Chicago. These were formidable strongholds for a homeless wanderer to a.s.sault, but rendered doubly so by the fact that there was neither brother nor sister to leave behind to mitigate the possible vacancy. The "everlasting yea" not having been forthcoming, under the circ.u.mstances it was no easy task for me to keep faith with the many appointments to lecture on Labrador which had been made for me. The inexorable schedule kept me week after week in the East. Fortunately the generous hospitality of many old friends who wanted the pleasure of meeting my mother kept my mind somewhat occupied. But I confess at the back of it the forthcoming venture loomed up more and more momentous as the fateful day drew near for me to start for Chicago.

This visit to my wife's beautiful country home among the trees on the bluff of Lake Michigan in Lake Forest was one long dream. My mother and I were now made acquainted with the family and friends of my fiancee. Her father, Colonel MacClanahan, a man of six feet five inches in height, had been Judge Advocate General on the Staff of Braxton Bragg and had fought under General Robert E. Lee. He was a Southerner of Scotch extraction, having been born and brought up in Tennessee. A lawyer by training, after the war, when everything that belonged to him was destroyed in the "reconstruction period," and being still a very young man, he had gone North to Chicago and begun life again at his profession. There he met and married, in 1884, Miss Rosamond Hill, who was born in Burlington, Vermont, but who, since childhood and the death of her parents, had lived with her married sister, Mrs. Charles Durand, of Chicago. The MacClanahans had two children--the boy, Kinloch, dying at an early age as the result of an accident. Colonel MacClanahan himself died a few months later, leaving a widow and one child, Anna Elizabeth Caldwell MacClanahan. She and her mother had lived the greater part of the time with Mrs. Durand, who died something more than a year before our engagement.

The friends with whom my fiancee had been travelling were almost next-door neighbours in Lake Forest. They made my short stay doubly happy by endless kindnesses; and all through the years, till his death in 1918, Mr. Stirling gave me not only a friendship which meant more to me than I can express, but his loving and invaluable aid and counsel in our work.

In spite of my many years of sailor life, I found that I was expected among other things to ride a horse, my fiancee being devoted to that means of progression. The days when I had ridden to hounds in England as a boy in Cheshire stood me in some little stead, for like swimming, tennis, and other pastimes calling for coordination, riding is never quite forgotten. But remembering Mr. Winkle's experiences, it was not without some misgivings that I found a sh.e.l.lback like myself galloping behind my lady's charger. My last essay at horseback riding had been just eleven years previously in Iceland. Having to wait a few days at Reikkavik, I had hired a whole bevy of ponies with a guide to take myself and the young skipper of our vessel for a three days' ride to see the geysers. He had never been on the back of any animal before, and was nevertheless not surprised or daunted at falling off frequently, though an interlude of being dragged along with one foot in the stirrup over lava beds made no little impression upon him.

Fodder of all kinds is very scarce in the volcanic tufa of which all that land consists, and any moment that one stopped was always devoted by our ponies to grubbing for blades of gra.s.s in the holes. On our return to the ship the crew could not help noticing that the skipper for many days ceased to patronize the lockers or any other seat, and soon they were rejoicing that for some reason he was unable to sit down at all. He explained it by saying that his ponies ate so much lava that it stuck out under their skins, and I myself recall feeling inclined to agree with him.

The journey from Lake Forest to Labrador would have been a tedious one, but by good fortune a friend from New York had arranged to come and visit the coast in his steam yacht, the Enchantress, and was good enough to pick me up at Bras d'Or. Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, who had previously shown me much kindness, permitted us to rendezvous at his house, and for a second time I enjoyed seeing some of the experiments of his most versatile brain. His aeroplanes, telephones, and other inventions were all intensely interesting, but among his other lines of work the effort to develop a race of sheep, which had litters just as pigs do, interested me most.

Francis Sayre, whom I had heard win the prize at Williams with his valedictory speech, was again to be my summer secretary. On our arrival at St. Anthony we found a great deal going on. The fame as a surgeon of my colleague, Dr. John Mason Little, had spread so widely that St. Anthony Hospital would no longer hold the patients who sought a.s.sistance at it. Fifty would arrive on a single mail boat. They were dumped down on the little wharf, having been landed in small punts from the steamer, as in those days we had no proper dock to which the boats could come. The little waiting-room in the hospital at night resembled nothing so much as a newly opened sardine tin; and to cater for the waiting patients was a Sisyphean task without the Hercules.

Through the instrumentality of Dr. Little's sister a fund of ten thousand dollars was raised to double the size of the hospital, and the work of building was begun on my return. Although the capacity was greatly increased thereby we have really been unable ever to make our building what it ought to be to meet the problem. The first part, constructed of green lumber hauled from the woods, and other wings added at different periods of growth, the endeavour to blast out suitable heating-plant accommodations--all this has left the hospital building more or less a thing of rags and patches, and most uneconomical to run. We are urgently in need of having it rebuilt entirely of either brick or stone, in order to resist the winter cold, to give more efficiency and comfort to patients and staff and to conserve our fuel, which is the most serious item of expense we have to meet.

But at that time with all its capacity for service the new addition was rising, sounding yet one more note of praise in better ability to meet the demands upon us.

And _pari pa.s.su_ came the beautiful offer of my friend, Mr. Sayre, to double the size of our orphanage, putting up the new wing in memory of his father. This meant that instead of twenty we might now accommodate forty children at a pinch. Life is so short that it is the depths of pathos to be hampered in doing one's work for the lack of a few dollars. Of great interest to my fiancee and myself was the selection of a piece of ground adjoining the Mission land, and the erection for ourselves of the home which we had planned and designed together before I had left Lake Forest. We chose some land up on the hillside and overlooking the sea and the harbour, where the view should be as comprehensive as possible. But we feared that even though our new house was very literally "founded upon a rock," the winds might some day remove it bodily from its abiding-place, and therefore we riveted the structure with heavy iron bolts to the solid bedrock.

One excitement of that season was Admiral Peary's return from the North Pole. We were cruising near Indian Harbour when some visitors came aboard to make use of our wireless telegraph, which at that time we had installed on board. It proved to be Mr. Harry Whitney. It was the first intimation that we had had that Peary was returning that year. Whitney had met Cook coming back from the polar sea on the west side of the Gulf, where he had disappeared about eighteen months previously. I had met Dr. Cook several times myself, and indeed I had slept at his house in Brooklyn. He had visited Battle Harbour Hospital in 1893 when he was wrecked in the steamer in which he was conducting a party to visit Greenland. We had again seen him as he went North with Mr. Bradley in the yacht, and he had sent us back some Greenland dogs to mix their blood with our dogs, and so perhaps improve their breed and endurance. These, however, I had later felt it necessary to kill, for the Greenland dogs carry the dangerous tapeworm which is such a menace to man, and of which our Labrador dogs are entirely free so far.

The picture of this meeting on the ice between Cook and Whitney gave us the impression of another Nansen and Jackson at Spitzbergen.

Whitney had welcomed Cook warmly, had witnessed his troubles at Etah, and his departure by komatik, and had taken charge of his instruments and records to carry South with him when he came home. But his ship was delayed and delayed, and when Peary in the Roosevelt pa.s.sed on his way South, fearing to be left another winter Whitney had accepted a pa.s.sage on her at the cost of leaving Cook's material behind. He had met his own boat farther south and had transferred to her. He left the impression very firmly on all our minds that both he and Dr. Cook really believed that the latter had found the long-sought Pole.