Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North Part 29

XV

THE KEEPER OF THE LIGHT

Once I asked Dr. Grenfell if he was tired. His blue eyes lit up as if I had thrown salt into a fire. He threw his head back and said: "Tired? I was never tired in my life!"

But I thought he was weary that September evening in 1919 when he sat with his legs unkinked to the cheerful blaze, in the big living-room of his comfortable house at St. Anthony.

The wind can go whooping around that house all it likes and it never will get in unless it is invited. That house was nailed and shingled, doored and windowed, to stand up against the stiffest blast that ever came howling across the rocks and bergs from the Humboldt Glacier or even the North Pole.

Part of the time a blind piano-tuner was at work groping for lost chords among the strings of Mrs. Grenfell's piano. The piano didn't seem to need tuning so much. But the man needed the work. You can imagine there is not much for a blind piano-tuner to do in Newfoundland. Most of the music is the canned variety of the Victrola.

Or, if there is a dance, someone may squat obligingly in a corner and hum very loudly what is called by its true name--"chin-music."

Mrs. Grenfell, happy to have her husband back from the gales and fogs for a little while, was sitting in the puffy armchair with her knitting-needles, and the boys, Pascoe and Wilfred, were up-stairs with their teacher, making out jig-saw puzzles in arithmetic or knocking the tar out of the French Grammar, with various loud sounds.

What the telephone is to busy men in America, giving them no peace even in the bathtub, the telegraph is to the Doctor in Newfoundland.

If it isn't a man on the doorstep with a bleeding cut or a hacking cough, then it is a boy with a message which comes from a point twenty to sixty miles off. Most of the time your doctor or mine has a few blocks to go: and we think it hard, and he thinks so too, if a patient clamors for him in the middle of the night. But the middle of the night is the heart of Grenfell's office hours. Once after conducting a late evening service in the church at Battle Harbor he had to doctor forty patients in the room off the chancel before he could get away.

So it was no surprise to him, in the midst of a tale of the old days at Oxford on the football-field, to have a rat-tat like Poe's raven at the door, and a respectful "young visitor" doffing his sou'wester.

"Please, sir, a telegram."

Grenfell tore it open.

It read: "Doctor would you please come. My throat is full up and I can't eat or sleep."

It was signed "J.N. Cote."

"That," said Grenfell, "is the lighthouse-keeper at Greenley Island, just west of the line that divides Canadian Labrador from Newfoundland Labrador. He has a big job on his hands. He has two fog-horns, each with a twelve horse-power Fairbanks gasoline engine, so that if one's put out of business he can use the other. He's had fog all summer--and a sub-tonsillar abscess, too. The big Canadian Pacific ships go by his place. It's a bad spot. The light-keeper at Forteau tried to bring out his wife and five children--and lost all but one child on the rocks.

Another keeper at Belle Isle tried to bring out a family of about the same size--and they all were lost. A doctor stopped in on Captain Cote on the down trip from Battle Harbor, on his way back to Baltimore.

Evidently whatever he did wasn't enough. Looks as if I must go and finish the job."

As if to settle the question, even while he spoke there came another messenger--like the first, a volunteer--bringing another telegram.

This time, as in those messages sent from Cape Norman about the woman, the tone was sharper, more imperative and anxious.

"Please come as fast as you can to operate me in the throat and save my life."

The shade of concern in the Doctor's grave face deepened.

"Cote doesn't cry out for nothing," he said. "He's a real man. We must go. Would you rather stay here and rest a few days, or will you go with me?" Who would care to toast his toes and dally with a book, while Grenfell was abroad on such a mission? I had a quick vision of the gallant run the _Strathcona_ would be called on to make--squirming through the rocks and bucking the headwinds and the heavy seas, to save that lighthouse-keeper and keep the big, proud ships from Montreal and Quebec from running blind in the dark. Not far from that spot a British man-of-war ran aground in 1922 and was a total loss, though happily her men were saved. I have been in the wireless cabin on the topmost crags of Belle Isle when the Straits all round about, fog-bound, were clamorous with the ships, anchor-down, calling to one another and whimpering like little lost children trying to clasp hands and afraid in the dark together.

It would be a run of a hundred miles from St. Anthony to Captain Cote's strangling throat--and what miles they were! Not until the middle of June had the mail-boat--that poor, doomed _Ethie_ of the dog's rescue--been able to pierce the ice. Where those ice-pans met at Cape Bauld the grinding, rending and heaving of their battle was worse to hear and see than all the polar bears or the tusked walruses that ever rose up and fought together.

Dr. Grenfell could be perfectly sure that he would have to run a gauntlet all the way--picking and choosing between crags on the one hand and bergs on the other: just such a risky, "chancy" course as he most relishes. While he crumpled the telegram in his hand I could see his eyes light up again with that flash they showed when I asked him if he was ever tired.

His pockets at that moment were full of pleading, piteous letters from White Bay, meant to pull him to the other side of the island. One of them, from a desperate woman, after saying her husband had caught but eleven dollars' worth of fish all season, wound up with an appeal for oddments of clothes to put on the children, for "We are all as naked as birds."

It was hard to say no to the heart-throbs of those begging letters in his pocket. But Captain Cote's life was not one life. It was the lives of thousands--men, women and children--going down to the sea in ships, faring through the St. Lawrence, and the Gulf, and then those terrible Straits of Belle Isle, to the Old Country.

So we started. But was Mrs. Grenfell going to stay home with the piano, and French verbs, and her fancy-work, while the _Strathcona_ nosed the seething waters? Not on your life! Wilfred and Pascoe had a perfectly good governess, and while it was hard on them to remain behind with their books, their turn with Father was coming.

The big black dog, named Fritz, had no French verbs to study, and no measly sums in arithmetic to do, so--at one running jump--he was added to the pa.s.senger-list. His berth was chiefly out on the end of the bowsprit--he was more ambitious than a figurehead. There he could sniff the breeze, and see the sh.o.r.e, even when there wasn't any, and bark defiance at all the dogs and the sea-p.u.s.s.es.

The _Strathcona_ used both steam and sail. She was ketch-rigged, with six sails--mainsail, foresail, two jibs, two topsails. One of those topsails was a fancy, oblong thing which Dr. Grenfell's crew mistrusted as though it were witchcraft. He had brought it from the North Sea; they had never seen the likes of it before, and their minds are likely to be sternly set against anything new. But the Doctor, who is restless on shipboard, climbed to the crow's nest now and then to adjust the strange contraption, and make sure that it was using the wind in such a way as to develop the last ounce of pulling power. This was no pleasure cruise. It was a run for life.

The sea was a vast blue smile as we swaggered out of St. Anthony Harbor. What a fickle creature is that northern ocean! This was the first clear day in ever so long--and now the sun and the water were in conspiracy to pretend it had always been this gay, fair weather.

The only blemish on the seascape was a troop of bergs, six in number, out yonder to starboard. But they were dim and distant as we bore in toward the headland at Quirpon Tickle. Quirpon is called "Carpoon" by the fishermen because that isn't the way to p.r.o.nounce it. And Tickle has nothing to do with making you laugh. Quite the contrary. It means a very serious business of creeping and twisting snakewise through a channel that winds among the rocks. You are perfectly sure you are about to ram the face of a wall--and then, lo and behold! there is a way out at the last minute, and it leads you to another wall and another rift that suddenly and impossibly opens to let you through.

You have to think of the pirates who used to run and hide in places like that, and give the slip to honest sailor men from France and England who were trying to run them down. If they didn't meet the pirates they met and fought each other, which was vastly diverting to the pirates and perhaps just as satisfying to themselves.

There were fishermen's dories bouncing about like happy children in the shallower waters near the sh.o.r.e. I happened to be at the wheel, and my one idea was not to hit those sharp and cruel rocks, not to strike a fisherman, and to give the widest berth I could to the distant menace of those icebergs.

Grenfell, red-booted and brown-sweatered, put his head in at the wheel-house door, and the wind ruffled his silver hair as he cried: "Run her so close to those rocks that you all but skin her!"

You see, his mind was only on Captain Cote, with the choke in his throat, strangling and struggling, but going on with his duty as the keeper of the light with the beams outflashing to the long, far bellow of his mighty horn.

In our race against time, we were burning coal, that precious commodity, then twenty-four dollars a ton,--and much more costly to-day. Spruce and fir and juniper were piled on deck--some of the wood across the barrels of whale-meat, in a vain attempt to shut off the rotten smell of the food so loved by the dogs. But, hasten as we might, the night closed down like a lid on a box as we sounded our gingerly way through the perilous twistings of the Tickle. The wind was rising, and as we looked back we saw the waves, running white and high at a mad dance in cold moonlight. If we went on, and came out into the Straits, the wind would hold us there without an inch of gain, though we had the full power of the engines going and all sails set. The _Strathcona_, a tiny steamer of less than fifty tons, was no match for the sea aroused in opposition. It is a miracle that this small boat, the _Strathcona_, lived so long, with so many attempts of ice and rock to punch the life out of her wherever she went.

Dr. Grenfell, as his habit is on shipboard, rose at two, at three and at four to study his charts and lay out his course, and at twenty minutes to five his strong hands were at the wheel, on which are the words "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

The dog Fritz had been sleeping all night on a thick blue woolen blanket in the bunk below mine. He had no business there, and he knew it, but as regularly as I turned him out into the nipping air and the frosty starlight he would return indignantly. "What's the matter with you?" his wrinkled face seemed to say. "You're just a visitor on this boat, and I belong here. What right have you to keep me out of a nice warm bed? You don't need this whole cabin, you selfish man." Finally my patience gave out and I let him have his way.

Under the red edges of the dawn, a fresh breeze blowing, we came within hail of that ugly rock named the Onion. "In that bay over there," laughed Grenfell, "we were blown across the ice--sled and dogs and all--when we were trying to round up the reindeer herd. We had the time of our lives!

"You see, we had brought a bunch of reindeer all the way from Lapland, and Lapp herders came with them, to keep off the dogs and prevent the natives from shooting them as if they were caribou. On one occasion we had a real 'Night before Christmas' celebration, and St. Nick delighted the children at the Orphanage where he came with his gifts on a big sled behind a real team of reindeer.

"But the reindeer spread all over the peninsula, and the Lapps couldn't keep track of their charges. The hunters and the dogs were hard on the trail of the herd. You couldn't blame hungry men and famished animals.

"I meant in time to persuade the people to give up their dogs and use reindeer instead. The reindeer could draw sleds, and would give milk, and meat too, if necessary, and their furs would be valuable. There wouldn't be any risk of their hurting children, or strangers, or sick people, and they wouldn't make night hideous with their howling.

"But at last, in order to save the remnant, it was necessary to move them, and I decided to load them on a fishing-vessel and take them across the Straits to the St. Augustine River country, where they could increase in peace, and the dogs would not bother them, and the Canadian Government could protect them from any Indian hunters who might come along.

"It was a fine plan, on paper. But it was like the old recipe for making a rabbit pie--'first catch your hare.' The reindeer having had the run of the open s.p.a.ces so long saw no reason why they should be caught and put on a boat and carried off.

"So they gave us a run for it, I can tell you! All over the place we rushed, shouting and trying to la.s.so or corner the terrified animals.

I never laughed so hard in my life. The wind was blowing great guns, and you simply couldn't stand up against it. We caught a great many of the reindeer. But a lot of them romped off into the woods and took to the hills and we never saw them again. Since they were moved to Canada they have done well--and some day, when the people are ready to have them, I want to move them back and see if we can't replace the dog-teams with them."

Meanwhile the little ship had turned her head away from the unsavory Onion, and was running on, over a long diagonal, to cross the straits in the bared teeth of the green and yeasty waves. That she was top-heavy was plainly to be seen, with her barrels of whale-meat and her high-piled fire-wood on deck, and almost no ballast or cargo below.

As we stood out into the middle of the channel, I thought of the great boats that must feel their way through the dense fog in evil weather.

They would have to be honking like wild geese, even though the straits at their narrowest between Flower's Cove and Greenley Island are ten miles wide. Fog is a terrible deceiver. I remember coming up the East Coast on the mail-steamer _Invermore_ in 1913. In a day after leaving Twillingate we were nearly wrecked three times. First, when we thought we were ten miles offsh.o.r.e, we found a tiny skiff, with two persons aboard, in our path--we nearly ran it down. Father and small son, fourteen, were fishing for cod, and had their meagre catch in a tin pail. Captain Kane had stopped our boat--we were going at quarter speed--and he had the man come up on the bridge to show us where the land lay. "Out yonder!" The ancient mariner pointed to the northwest.

A rowboat was manned: in a few minutes its crew came back and reported that the rocks were not more than two hundred yards away. So we backed off, and steamed hard in the opposite direction. But only an hour or so later,--pulled steadily on and on toward the sh.o.r.e, by the strong, insetting tide,--we saw the grey edge of the fog lifting like a table-cloth, and there were those cruel rocks again, dragons in a lair, waiting to receive us, crush our bones and drink our blood.

Again we backed away--and before long the fierce jangle of the bell in the engine room and the captain's sharp accent of command from the bridge once more halted us suddenly. There, directly before our prow, was a great white wall of ice, which had taken almost the color of the mist. It was an iceberg that barred our path, and if we had been speeding like the _t.i.tanic_ instead of creeping like a snail, it would doubtless have been the end of the _Invermore_. Only one more tragedy of a missing ship.