Dr. Grenfell's Parish Part 4

[Ill.u.s.tration: "APPEARED WITH A LITTLE STEAM-LAUNCH, THE PRINCESS MAY"]

VI

_FAITH and DUTY_

When Dr. Grenfell first appeared on the coast, I am told, the folk thought him a madman of some benign description. He knew nothing of the reefs, the tides, the currents, cared nothing, apparently, for the winds; he sailed with the confidence and reckless courage of a Labrador skipper. Fearing at times to trust his schooner in unknown waters, he went about in a whale-boat, and so hard did he drive her that he wore her out in a single season. She was capsized with all hands, once driven out to sea, many times nearly swamped, once blown on the rocks; never before was a boat put to such tasks on that coast, and at the end of it she was wrecked beyond repair. Next season he appeared with a little steam-launch, the _Princess May_--her beam was eight feet!--in which he not only journeyed from St. Johns to Labrador, to the astonishment of the whole colony, but sailed the length of that bitter coast, pa.s.sing into the gulf and safely out again, and pushing to the very farthest settlements in the north. Late in the fall, upon, the return journey to St. Johns in stormy weather, she was reported lost, and many a skipper, I suppose, wondered that she had lived so long; but she weathered a gale that bothered the mail-boat, and triumphantly made St. Johns, after as adventurous a voyage, no doubt, as ever a boat of her measure survived.

"Sure," said a skipper, "I don't know how she done it. The Lord," he added, piously, "must kape an eye on that man."

There is a new proverb on the coast. The folk say, when a great wind blows, "This'll bring Grenfell!" Often it does. He is impatient of delay, fretted by inaction; a gale is the wind for him--a wind to take him swiftly towards the place ahead. Had he been a weakling, he would long ago have died on the coast; had he been a coward, a mult.i.tude of terrors would long ago have driven him to a life ash.o.r.e; had he been anything but a true man and tender, indeed, he would long ago have retreated under the suspicion and laughter of the folk. But he has outsailed the Labrador skippers--out-dared them--done deeds of courage under their very eyes that they would shiver to contemplate,--never in a foolhardy spirit; always with the object of kindly service. So he has the heart and willing hand of every honest man on the Labrador--and of none more than of the men of his crew, who take the chances with him; they are wholly devoted.

One of his engineers, for example, once developed the unhappy habit of knocking the cook down.

"You must keep your temper," said the doctor. "This won't do, you know."

But there came an unfortunate day when, being out of temper, the engineer again knocked the cook down.

"This is positively disgraceful!" said the doctor. "I can't keep a quarrelsome fellow aboard the mission-ship. Remember that, if you will, when next you feel tempted to strike the cook."

The engineer protested that he would never again lay hands on the cook, whatever the provocation. But again he lost his temper, and down went the poor cook, flat on his back.

"I'll discharge you," said the doctor, angrily, "at the end of the cruise!"

The engineer pleaded for another chance. He was denied. From day to day he renewed his plea, but to no purpose, and at last the crew came to the conclusion that something really ought to be done for the engineer, who was visibly fretting himself thin.

"Very well," said the doctor to the engineer; "I'll make this agreement with you. If ever again you knock down the cook, I'll put you ash.o.r.e at the first land we come to, and you may get back to St.

Johns as best you can."

It was a hard alternative. The doctor is not a man to give or take when the bargain has been struck; the engineer knew that he would surely go ash.o.r.e somewhere on that desolate coast, whether the land was a barren island or a frequented harbour, if ever again the cook tempted him beyond endurance.

"I'll stand by it, sir," he said, nevertheless; "for I don't want to leave you."

In the course of time the _Princess May_ was wrecked or worn out. Then came the _Julia Sheridan_, thirty-five feet long, which the mission doctor bought while she yet lay under water from her last wreck; he raised her, refitted her with what money he had, and pursued his venturesome and beneficent career, until she, too, got beyond so hard a service. Many a gale she weathered, off "the worst coast in the world"--often, indeed, in thick, wild weather, the doctor himself thought the little craft would go down; but she is now happily superannuated, carrying the mail in the quieter waters of Hamilton Inlet. Next came the _Sir Donald_--a stout ship, which in turn disappeared, crushed in the ice. The _Strathcona_, with a hospital amidships, is now doing duty; and she will continue to go up and down the coast, in and out of the inlets, until she in her turn finds the ice and the wind and the rocks too much for her.

"'Tis bound t' come, soon or late," said a cautious friend of the mission. "He drives her too hard. He've a right t' do what he likes with his own life, I s'pose, but he've a call t' remember that the crew has folks t' home."

But the mission doctor is not inconsiderate; he is in a hurry--the coast is long, the season short, the need such as to wring a man's heart. Every new day holds an opportunity for doing a good deed--not if he dawdles in the harbours when a gale is abroad, but only if he pa.s.ses swiftly from place to place, with a brave heart meeting the dangers as they come. He is the only doctor to visit the Labrador sh.o.r.e of the Gulf, the Strait sh.o.r.e of Newfoundland, the populous east coast of the northern peninsula of Newfoundland, the only doctor known to the Esquimaux and poor "liveyeres" of the northern coast of Labrador, the only doctor most of the "liveyeres" and green-fish catchers of the middle coast can reach, save the hospital physician at Indian Harbour. He has a round of three thousand miles to make. It is no wonder that he "drives" the little steamer--even at full steam, with all sail spread (as I have known him to do), when the fog is thick and the sea is spread with great bergs.

"I'm in a hurry," he said, with an impatient sigh. "The season's late.

We must get along."

We fell in with him at Red Ray in the Strait, in the thick of a heavy gale from the northeast. The wind had blown for two days; the sea was running high, and still fast rising; the schooners were huddled in the harbours, with all anchors out, many of them hanging on for dear life, though they lay in shelter. The st.u.r.dy little coastal boat, with four times the strength of the _Strathcona_, had made hard work of it that day--there was a time when she but held her own off a lee sh.o.r.e in the teeth of the big wind.

It was drawing on towards night when the doctor came aboard for a surgeon from Boston, a specialist, for whom he had been waiting.

"I see you've steam up," said the captain of the coastal boat. "I hope you're not going out in _this_, doctor!"

"I have some patients at the Battle Harbour Hospital, waiting for our good friend from Boston," said the doctor, briskly. "I'm in a hurry.

Oh, yes, I'm going out!"

"For G.o.d's sake, don't!" said the captain earnestly.

The doctor's eye chanced to fall on the gentleman from Boston, who was bending over his bag--a fine, fearless fellow, whom the prospect of putting out in that chip of a steamer would not have perturbed, though the doctor may then not have known it. At any rate, as though bethinking himself of something half forgotten, he changed his mind of a sudden.

"Oh, very well," he said. "I'll wait until the gale blows out."

He managed to wait a day--no longer; and the wind was still wild, the sea higher than ever; there was ice in the road, and the fog was dense. Then out he went into the thick of it. He b.u.mped an iceberg, sc.r.a.ped a rock, fairly smothered the steamer with broken water; and at midnight--the most marvellous feat of all--he crept into Battle Harbour through a narrow, difficult pa.s.sage, and dropped anchor off the mission wharf.

Doubtless he enjoyed the experience while it lasted--and promptly forgot it, as being commonplace. I have heard of him, caught in the night in a winter's gale of wind and snow, threading a tumultuous, reef-strewn sea, his skipper at the wheel, himself on the bowsprit, guiding the ship by the flash and roar of breakers, while the sea tumbled over him. If the chance pa.s.senger who told me the story is to be believed, upon that trying occasion the doctor had the "time of his life."

"All that man wanted," I told the doctor subsequently, "was, as he says, 'to bore a hole in the bottom of the ship and crawl out.'"

"Why!" exclaimed the doctor, with a laugh of surprise. "He wasn't _frightened_, was he?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE HOSPITAL SHIP, STRATHCONA"]

Fear of the sea is quite incomprehensible to this man. The pa.s.senger was very much frightened; he vowed never to sail with "that devil"

again. But the doctor is very far from being a dare-devil; though he is, to be sure, a man altogether unafraid; it seems to me that his heart can never have known the throb of fear. Perhaps that is in part because he has a blessed lack of imagination, in part, perhaps, because he has a body as sound as ever G.o.d gave to a man, and has used it as a man should; but it is chiefly because of his simple and splendid faith that he is an instrument in G.o.d's hands--G.o.d's to do with as He will, as he would say. His faith is exceptional, I am sure--childlike, steady, overmastering, and withal, if I may so characterize it, healthy. It takes something such as the faith he has to move a man to run a little steamer at full speed in the fog when there is ice on every hand. It is hardly credible, but quite true, and short of the truth: neither wind nor ice nor fog, nor all combined, can keep the _Strathcona_ in harbour when there comes a call for help from beyond. The doctor clambers cheerfully out on the bowsprit and keeps both eyes open. "As the Lord wills," says he, "whether for wreck or service. I am about His business."

It is a sublime expression of the old faith.

VII

_THE LIVEYERE_

Doctor Grenfell's patients are of three cla.s.ses. There is first the "liveyere"--the inhabitant of the Labrador coast--the most ignorant and wretched of them all. There is the Newfoundland "outporter"--the small fisherman of the remoter coast, who must depend wholly upon his hook and line for subsistence. There is the Labradorman--the Newfoundland fisherman of the better cla.s.s, who fishes the Labrador coast in the summer season and returns to his home port when the snow begins to fly in the fall. Some description of these three cla.s.ses is here offered, that the reader may understand the character and condition of the folk among whom Dr. Grenfell labours.

"As a permanent abode of civilized man," it is written in a very learned if somewhat old-fashioned work, "Labrador is, on the whole, one of the most uninviting spots on the face of the earth." That is putting it altogether too delicately; there should be no qualification; the place is a brutal desolation. The weather has scoured the coast--a thousand miles of it--as clean as an old bone: it is utterly sterile, save for a tuft or two of hardy gra.s.s and wide patches of crisp moss; bare gray rocks, low in the south, towering and craggy in the north, everywhere blasted by frost, lie in billowy hills between the froth and clammy mist of the sea and the starved forest at the edge of the inland wilderness. The interior is forbidding; few explorers have essayed adventure there; but the Indians--an expiring tribe--and trappers who have caught sight of the "height of land" say that it is for the most part a vast table-land, barren, strewn with enormous boulders, scarce in game, swarming with flies, with vegetation surviving only in the hollows and ravines--a sullen, forsaken waste.

Those who dwell on the coast are called "liveyeres" because they say, "Oh, ay, zur, I lives yere!" in answer to the question. These are not to be confounded with the Newfoundland fishermen who sail the Labrador seas in the fishing season--an adventurous, thrifty folk, bright-eyed, hearty in laughter--twenty-five thousand hale men and boys, with many a wife and maid, who come and return again. Less than four thousand poor folk have on the long coast the "permanent abode" of which the learned work speaks--much less, I should think, from the Strait of Belle Isle to Cape Chidley. It is an evil fate to be born there: the Newfoundlanders who went north from their better country, the Hudson Bay Company's servants who took wives from the natives, all the chance comers who procrastinated their escape, desperately wronged their posterity; the saving circ.u.mstance is the very isolation of the dwelling-place--no man knows, no man really _knows_, that elsewhere the earth is kinder to her children and fairer far than the wind-swept, barren coast to which he is used. They live content, bearing many children, in inclemency, in squalor, and, from time to time, in uttermost poverty--such poverty as clothes a child in a trouser leg and feeds babies and strong men alike on nothing but flour and water. They were born there: that is where they came from; that is why they live there.

"'Tis a short feast and a long famine," said a northern "liveyere,"

quite cheerfully; to him it was just a commonplace fact of life.