Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North

At four in the afternoon, when the great rock bastion of Belle Isle loomed across our bows, we gave up for the night: and next morning, between seven and eight, no fewer than eight enormous icebergs crossed our bows in a glittering processional.

But to-day, mid-stream, there was no fog, and despite the roughness of the water the cool air and clear sunlight were cause for rejoicing. "Isn't it fun to live?" exclaimed the Doctor, as he swung the wheel; and the Strathcona, feeling her master's hand, trembled and obeyed.

Fritz, out yonder on the prow, was staring toward the bleak Labrador coast. Was he thinking of dogs to fight, and fish to eat, and a snooze on the beach, after the run was over and the anchor was down? No—he was looking at something near at hand—and his ears were even quicker than ours to catch over the voice of waves or wind the cry of men in a power-boat off the starboard bow.

There were three of them. Two of them held up the third man, whose bare head flopped over on his chest. The collar of his overcoat was turned up to shelter that agonizing throat. Yes, it was Captain Coté, the man we came so far to seek.

"Doctor!" they called. "He couldn't wait! We've brought him out to ye!"

A moment more and hands as tender as they were willing were lifting him over the rail. A wee baby would have had no gentler handling.

Captain Coté's face was the greenish white of a boiled potato. It was seamed with deep lines of pain and sleepless nights. He was carried to the brass rungs of the ladder and lowered.

"Easy! easy!" those who let him down were saying to each other. They seemed to fear he would break if they dropped him.

By the light of a battered tin lamp Grenfell ran a needle into his throat with the novocaine that would destroy the pain of the operation.

Then he took his thin scissors a foot long and thrust them into the abscess under the tonsils.

Five minutes later, Captain Coté had found the use of his tongue again, and, waving both hands round his ears as he talked, he was thanking God and Dr. Grenfell, and giving us the full history of the dreadful months he spent before help came.

Next day we landed on his island—Greenley Island. From the small wharf where women were cleaning fish there were two lines of planking laid, on cinders, for perhaps a thousand feet through the long green grass to the red brick lighthouse tower. On these wooden rails was the chassis of a Ford car, and we rode in state. But you had to stick closely to the track, or you came to grief on the rough, shelly soil alongside.

"It's the first automobile ride I ever had in Labrador!" the Doctor gleefully exclaimed.

In the lighthouse was a living-room with a talking-machine, a violin, a typewriter and other things to add to the comfort of a home and make a family happy.

The patient was brought into the room by his beaming wife and two of his children.

"How are you this morning, Captain?" asked Grenfell.

"Feeling fine, Doctor."

"Did you sleep?"

"Slept like a baby. First time in three months."

"And can you eat?"

"I can eat rocks, Doctor."

Then the Captain brought out a pocketbook stuffed with greenbacks. Twelve hundred dollars a year, with nothing to spend it for, since he gets his living, seems a fortune to a man in that part of the world.

"How much do I owe you?" He pulled out three ten-dollar bills.

"One of those will do," said the Doctor, quietly.

It was right for him to take the money. Self-respect on Captain Coté's part demanded that he should pay. Grenfell lets his patients pay in wood or fish or whatever they have, a value merely nominal compared with what they receive. But he wants them to feel—and they, too, wish to feel—that they are not beggars, living on the dole of his charity.

"Now then, Doctor, how about the coal you burned getting here? How much does that come to? The Canadian Government'll give it back to you. We've got some down on the wharf. We can take it out now and put it on your boat."

The emergency run of the Strathcona had used five tons and a quarter. At twenty-four dollars a ton, this would be worth one hundred and twenty-six dollars.

We went down to the wharf, and tried to put the coal, which was soft coal, like dust, on a skiff, to take it two hundred yards in a half-gale to the Strathcona.

But the mighty wind blew the coal out of the boat as fast as it was shoveled aboard.

Then Captain Coté said, "We'll send it, when calm weather comes, to Sister Bailey at Forteau." She was a wonderful trained nurse,—a friend of Edith Cavell,—who lived in the near-by village, and had a cow that fought off the dogs and gave milk to the sick babies.

So Captain Coté's life was saved and the great boats from Montreal and Quebec with their hundreds of passengers could enter and traverse the Straits in any weather, because the keeper of the light was at his post once more.

XVI

THROUGH THE BLIZZARD

Another trip was to the north, in January, over the thirty miles from St. Anthony to Cape Norman, to save a woman's life. It all looks so easy when you get out the map and measure it across white space.

But when that white space is snow instead of paper, and there are thirty miles of it to flog through, instead of three inches under your hand—that, as Kipling would say, is another story.

Over the telegraph line from Cape Norman to St. Anthony came a piteous message from a young fisherman. It said his wife was dying. Grenfell telegraphed back, the message running something like this: "My assistant has gone off with the dogs to answer another call. Cannot leave my patients at the hospital and cannot get any dogs till he comes back."

Then another message came from the distracted husband: "Doctor, my wife is dying. For God's sake find another team somewhere and come."

The night, as the island saying is, was as dark as the inside of a cow. Grenfell stumbled out into the blackness to hunt for dogs. The trail to Cape Norman is very rough, and the January snow was deep. The wind blowing over it threw the snow, biting and blinding, in the face of anyone who attempted the trail.

But Grenfell did not hesitate. From house to house he went, to rouse the occupants like another Paul Revere, and beg for dogs that he might use on the desperate journey.

One man let him take four. Another, for pay, gave him a fifth animal. A boy named Walter said he would get four more dogs and would drive the ill-assorted team. By that time it was midnight.

"We'll start at 4:30," said the Doctor. At 4:30 it would still be pitch-black.

Grenfell went back to the hospital, roused the head nurse, and went to every patient to make sure that while he was gone no accident would happen that he could possibly prevent.

At 4:30 he was ready to start. Few men are his match for staying up all night and looking as fresh as a mountain daisy after the vigil.

He opened the door and a blizzard swept in and tried to rush him off his feet. Through the whirling drift staggered Walter, dogless.

"Where are those dogs?" asked the Doctor. He expects men to keep agreements made with him. He couldn't get through the length and breadth of his big day's work if they didn't.

Walter shook his snow-covered head. "I ain't brought 'em, sir. It's too bad a night to be startin' before sun-up. The dogs don't know each other: they comes from here, there an' all over. They'll be fightin' in the traces an' eatin' each other up in the dark. Us must be able to see 'em in order to drive 'em. You know what dogs is like, sir."

"Yes, I do," said Grenfell. "But you're the driver, and I leave it to you. We must get off as soon as we can."

Dr. Grenfell went to his room to snatch a catnap before the start. Another telegram woke him as he was drowsing off.

"Come along soon. Wife worse."

The storm instead of going down was more violent than ever when the grey day came. The sun was not seen at all. On the contrary, the air was filled with a mad whirl of pelting, stinging flakes almost as hard as Indian arrow-heads. The dogs would be no good in the teeth of such a storm—for the team-mates who work with a will are those that are best acquainted, and with an unknown driver this team suddenly thrown together would have pulled as many different ways as there were fierce and headstrong dogs. They would be at each other's throats before they were out of sight of the houses.

As he waited, walking restlessly up and down, in his brown sweater and thick leggins, Grenfell was plagued with the picture of the woman fighting for her life till help should come from the one man who could give it.

Still another of those telegrams! This time the message read: "Come immediately if you can. Wife still holding out."

Just as he read the words, there were voices, and battering hands at the door.

Two men, white as Santa Claus from head to foot, staggered into the room, with the wind whooping at their backs as if in a wild anger that they escaped its clutches.

Grenfell, accustomed as he was to the brave men of a hard country, fairly gasped when he saw them.

"Where did you come from?"

"We comes to fetch you, sir, for the sick woman at Cape Norman."

"Do you think dogs can get me there now?" the Doctor asked, anxiously.

"No, sir. We was blown here most o' the way, wi' the wind at our backs. The wind drove us. The dogs can't make head against it, not till the wind shifts clean round the other way, sir."

Ten miles of their journey had been in the fairly sheltered lee of the land. Twenty miles had been before the pitiless sweep of the wind over the unprotected sea-ice. If the snow had not drifted so heavily, they would have been borne along at a pace so rapid that their sled would have been wrecked.

"When was it you left Cape Norman?" was the Doctor's next question.

"Eight o'clock last night, sir."

So they had been coming on all through the night, without rest or food. Yet the first thing they had done when the sled stopped at last before Grenfell's door was to get something for their dogs to eat. Already, the animals lay snug and tranquil in a drift, as if it were a feather-bed—sleeping the sleep of good dogs who have done their work and earned their daily fish-heads and know of nothing more to want in this life or the next.

The Doctor patted the broad shoulders of the gaunt, shy spokesman. "Go into the hospital and get a good, big, hot dinner," he said. "Then go to bed. We'll wake you when it's time to start."

But after dark—and the darkness came on very early—the two troubled men were at Grenfell's door again. "Us couldn't sleep, sir, for thinkin' of the woman. Us have got another telegram sayin' please to hurry. The storm is not so bad as it was, sir. If you think fitten to start, we're ready."

"Call Walter," said the Doctor.

"Us has called he, sir. He's gettin' the dogs. He'll be here in a minute."

Grenfell and his comrades knew that the lull in the storm did not mean the end of it. It was gathering strength, and might at any moment break loose again with redoubled fury. But he—and they—couldn't stand waiting any longer. They must go. It was as if out of the black distances they heard the thin, far, pleading voice of the sufferer calling to them, to come and save her.

Their first task was to get across the harbor of St. Anthony in the dark and the eddying snow. They had their snowshoes, but in spite of these they sank to their knees in slush, and the two dog-teams floundered and half-swam. The team from Cape Norman went first, to encourage the others. A man stumbled ahead of them all, to break out a footway. Walter trudged in advance of the rear team, with Grenfell driving an assortment of beasts he had never handled before. Only a dog-driver knows what that means.

Ascending the flank of the hill across the harbor, they found themselves almost overwhelmed by the deep snow, with more piling down from above, as they fought their way foot by foot up the hill. They had to take hold of the sleds and lift them to help the dogs, and the sweat rolled off them in spite of the keen bite of the cold. When they topped the rise at last, the wind struck them full force, so that their loudest shouts could not be heard in the roaring onrush of the wind. The slope was a steep glaze of ice, and down it they coasted, running into tree-trunks and rocks that threatened to wrench the sleds and injure the dogs and men. It was hardly better when they reached the bottom. Here the Bartlett River became their necessary roadway, and twice Grenfell and others broke through into the swirling current and were almost carried away to be drowned under the ice.

Down-stream they battled their course—no wonder "Battle Harbor" is the name of the Labrador inlet not far away. It is a battle to get anywhere in winter on this coast. At half-past one in the morning they came to where the twenty-mile stretch of sea-ice began.

After that experience of a few years before on the ice-pan, Grenfell would not have been to blame if he had called a halt and said, "No, not out there! Let us take the longest way round, by the shore, and be safe."

But that has never been his way. When duty calls, he takes the air line to the scene of action. So it was on this awful night. 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.

But the rugged pair from Cape Norman said that in the preceding fall someone had put up a "tilt"—a log refuge—in the woods near by. They roved about until to their exceeding joy they found it.

There was not merely a shack of spruce-logs. In the shelter there was a stove, and beside the stove was a pile of wood. It is the habit of the men of the North to think of those who come after them. They who have been through a winter understand what it means to depend on others and have others depend on them. Those who do not play the game that generous, open-handed, far-sighted way have no friends and are despised by their neighbors.

The dogs fell asleep in the snow. One of the Cape Norman men "bust open" the river with his axe and filled the kettle for tea. But even while Grenfell was fussing with the knots of the dunnage bag to get out the tea and the sugar, he heard his comrade's pipe fall to the floor.

Grenfell looked up. The good soul, standing erect, was fast asleep. It had been sixty hours since he had slept, and forty-eight of these had been spent on that terrible trail where there was no trail. Flesh and blood rebelled at last. Even the records of ambulance-drivers in the war have seldom equalled such endurance. The sleeper was roused and put on the bench. He tried again to stuff his pipe with his frightful rubbish called tobacco. But the pipe clattered to the floor again: he was dead to the world: his snoring shook the peace of dreamland, and would have broken the glass in the tilt if there had been any glass to break.

What might be called dawn came at last, but with it the snow returned fast and thick as the flies and mosquitoes of a Labrador spring.

The snow cut off their view of the sea, but they heard it roaring as though possessed of all the devils.

Over that roaring there seemed to come to their ears again the still small voice of the woman in misery—hopeful, waiting for them, trusting the Doctor who had never failed her yet.

They were not the sort who would say sea-ice was impassable, if humans and dogs could traverse it.

But examination showed that there was no way over the partly frozen sea.

Greatly against their will, they must take the roundabout route overland. By two in the afternoon the ice held sufficiently to let them cross to Crow Island, and there they tried to boil water and make tea. The blizzard defeated them. In the blinding snow, they set their course by the compass, and the dogs plunged on. They said nothing to the dogs after that, but let them follow their own cold noses. The wonderful beasts took them straight to a tiny shore village. A short dash from the village, and the long run was over. In a jiffy, Grenfell had out the surgical instruments and put the patient under ether. To-day the woman is not merely alive but in the best of health, and she thinks of Dr. Grenfell as the Greeks used to think of a god.

XVII

WHY THE DOCTOR WAS LATE

We have seen by this time that Grenfell does not rush slam-bang into danger for the mere sake of "the tumult and the shouting," like a soldier of fortune.

Once he said to me: "I'm like these dogs. Every time they hear a fight going on at the other end of the village they feel that they have to get into it, and off they go, pell-mell. Whenever I hear of a good scrap in progress anywhere in the world, my first impulse is to drop everything else and get into the struggle. Then I realize that I'm serving my fellow-man as truly by staying just where I am, and trying to do my duty in my place."

He is fearlessly willing to spend his life in heroic deeds: but he always has a definite purpose in view: he is not posing for the motion-pictures. So when he harnesses his dogs to go on a journey we may be pretty sure that at the other end of the run there is some man, woman or child who needs the Doctor, and who takes the medicine of hope just from seeing him at the bedside, before he has done anything with a knife or a needle.

In the spring of 1919 the Doctor had to go to New York. It wasn't a sick person this time: it was a board of directors that wanted to hear his report on his work, and was to discuss with him big plans to raise $1,500,000 for an endowment fund to carry it on. A Seamen's Institute, a string of hospitals, several mission steamers, an industrial school and a number of dispensaries take a lot of money to run, even with many volunteer helpers.

Most of us, if we find it inconvenient to attend a meeting, telephone or write politely to say we have the laryngitis or the shingles or some other good excuse, and are very, very sorry that we cannot come.

But Grenfell, having said he would be in New York at the end of May, was bound to be there in spite of fog and bog, sea and snow and berg, if it was humanly possible. I remember his story of what happened as vividly as though it were yesterday, for I also had an appointment with him at that time—and he was only a month late in keeping it.

He had written me:

"I am in a terrible state about my boat: she is still in the blockade of ice, after two months fighting it. It is harder to beat than the Huns, but I am very anxious you should come with me, even if we have to canoe down the coast."

The story behind his finally successful attempt to reach New York on that occasion is as follows:

He set apart a month to make the journey, which in open summer weather would require only a week. He meant to go round the northern tip of Newfoundland, from his headquarters on the east coast at St. Anthony.

He planned, therefore, to go by dog-team northward to the Straits of Belle Isle, and then alongshore rounding Cape Bauld and Cape Norman, and on down the west coast to the railroad at Curling which would take him to Port aux Basques. At the latter place, the southwestern corner of Newfoundland, an ice-breaking steamer would carry him over Cabot Straits to North Sydney, and there he could get a train which would make connections for New York.

There is what dogs would consider a fair route alongshore on the western coast. And the dogs' opinion is worth considering.

But there sprang up a continuing gale, with a blizzard in its teeth. It rocked and hammered and broke the ice with the fury of great guns round about the headlands. As the trail for much of the way lay along the sea-ice, it would have been as impossible for the dogs to go by it as it was to make that short-cut across the bay when Doctor and dogs had that terrible experience on the ice-pan.

"Very well then," said Grenfell, "we'll try a motor-boat."

Motor-boating is fun enough in summer on the placid reaches of the Delaware or the Hudson, but it is a very different matter on the coast of Newfoundland, in a narrow lane between great chunks that have broken off a Greenland glacier and lean brown crags with the sea crashing white and high upon them. If he went in a motor-boat, Grenfell would have to be on the lookout day and night for ice-pans and bergs, lest they close in and crush his boat as an elephant's tread would squash a peanut.

When the blizzard that had spoiled the ice eased off, Grenfell had his boat ready. After two or three days of creeping in the lee of the rocks and trying to keep out of the clutch of the breakers, he would find himself at a point where he could begin a lonely trek overland, a hundred miles to the railroad, with his pack of food and clothing on his stalwart shoulders.

Just such a lonely walk as that many a sealer, fisherman or clergyman has made. 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.

The start was made auspiciously. The ice kept well out of the way till Grenfell, who had one man with him, cleared the harbor. As they went on, however, the east wind spied the bold little craft, and came on like an evil thing, to play cat-and-mouse with it.

It brought in the ice, and the ice was constantly pushing the boat toward the shore, toward which the current was pulling like a remorseless unseen hand.

"Keep her off the rocks, Bill!" warned the Doctor, poling vigorously at the stern.

"I'm tryin' to, sir. But the wind is wonderful strong, and I'm thinkin'–"

Whatever Bill was thinking, he was rudely interrupted by a rock that did not show above the surface. They were in a most perilous position. The boat, caught on the tidal reef, tossed to and fro, and the propeller, lifted high out of water, whirled like an electric fan. Through a hole in the prow the water rushed in. The two men sprang to the leak and stuffed it with their hats and coats and anything on which they could lay their hands.

Fortunately the hole was not large, and as they had hammer and nails and pieces of board for such an emergency they managed to shut out the water with rude patchwork. They bailed the boat and shoved it off again, and crept onward. But the thermometer dropped fast, and in the intense cold the circulating pipes froze and burst. That damage, too, was laboriously repaired, and they went ashore and spent the night under the glittering starlight with no coverlid but juniper boughs, beside a roaring fire. The next day they saw that the ice had so closed in to the southward that their little boat could not possibly go forward.

They must, therefore, retreat to St. Anthony, and try to get round the Cape and into the Straits of Belle Isle.

But they found they were now shut off even from their home port of St. Anthony!

Leaving the motor-boat at a tiny fishing-hamlet, they borrowed a small rowboat, and went out to "buck the ice."

The ice "made mock of their mad little craft." While they were hunting to and fro for crevices through which they might work their way, their old enemy the east wind was narrowing the channels till they saw that the tiny cockle-shell must soon be caught in the grip of the ice-pack and crushed to flinders.

"Jump out, Bill!" commanded the Doctor, setting the example. "We've got to lift her onto the pan!"

They seized the prow and hauled with might and main.

But the boat was doomed. They could not pull the stern free in time. The ice came on, ramming and jamming—and in an instant the stern was cut off, and was crushed to kindling-wood. The ice chewed the splinters savagely, as a husky gnaws a bone.

This time there was no question of repairs. They had half a boat, and the gaunt cliffs of the shore were far away, with bits of ice dotting the black water between.