Chapter VIII: The Man of Law

In his capacity as magistrate, the Doctor never sidesteps trouble. Law in his part of the world is a matter not merely of the letter but of the spirit—not of the statute alone but of shrewd common sense. His decisions are luminous with a Lincolnian light of acumen and sympathy at once. He lets the jot and tittle—the mint, anise-seed and cummin—take care of themselves, and considers the real significance of the situation and the essential nature of the offence. Red tape is not the important thing, and the imaginary dignity of an invisible judicial ermine is not besmirched because Magistrate Grenfell discusses the case with a culprit as a father might talk things over with a son, and makes it plain why wrong was done—if it was done—and why there must henceforth be a different course on the part of the offender. He “lays down the law” not as if it were a Mosaic dispensation from a beclouded mountain top, but as if it were the simple and discreet way to walk for God-fearing and reasonable mankind. To him, forever, a man’s own soul is a matter more important than an ordinance, and he spares no pains to make his meaning so plain that the dullest apprehension cannot fail to grasp it. You will see Grenfell at his best when—in a whipping wind, bareheaded, sweatered, rubber-booted—he stands in the clear glitter of a bracing sunny day on the beach with the dogs aprowl around him, painstakingly explaining to a fisherman why it is right to do thus and reprehensible to do otherwise. And now and then a hearty laugh or a timely anecdote—Lincoln’s trait again—clears the atmosphere. Sometimes there are more formidable leets and law courts held among the whalemeat barrels and the firewood on the _Strathcona_: but more often it is a plain matter of a tête-à-tête while Grenfell is on his rambling rounds of a hamlet with his dilapidated leather bag of instruments and medicines.

Forteau offered its own problems to Dr. Grenfell, the Magistrate. There is an isle not far away where that sometimes toothsome bird the puffin makes his home. Fishermen from Forteau, hard put to it to secure anti-scorbutic fresh meat, might now and then shoot one of the birds, and the duty of the faithful lighthouse-keeper, Captain Coté, an appointed game-warden, was to see that the law’s majesty made itself respected. One day Coté caught a hunter red-handed. “By what warrant do you arrest me?” said the man behind the gun. “By this!” said Coté, flourishing a revolver. Is a magistrate to blame if he believes that common sense should differentiate between a poor fisherman desperate with hunger, and a pot-hunter who commits wholesale murder among the eider-ducks sitting on their nests? Usually it is the poor fisherman who is fined and made to give up his gun, because he pleads “guilty,” while the pot-hunter who unblushingly pleads “not guilty” goes scot-free. A fisherman at Flower’s Cove told me that a late lamented coast magistrate—who got half of the fines he imposed—was making “big money” from his calling. He fined one man $100 for importing a second-hand stove without paying customs duties. When the _Strathcona_ hove in sight, bearing Dr. Grenfell, this profiteering magistrate weighed anchor in haste, and in a heavy beam sea and shallow water made his “get-away.”

There are always disputes between traders and fishermen to be adjudicated. Two men within an hour of each other clambered over the rail of the _Strathcona_ to display dire written threats of wrath to come from the same West Coast merchant, in a court summons served by a constable. This document, accompanying a bill of particulars, says that if they don’t pay at once the balance due they’ll have to go to St. John’s at a cost of fifty dollars in addition to whatever the amount may be which the law assesses against them. It isn’t just the amount of the ticket to St. John’s, or the board while they are there: it’s the loss of time from the traps that is exacerbating.

The trader isn’t in the wrong just because he is a trader. The fisherman hasn’t all the right on his side by the fact of being a fisherman, but the bookkeeping of these traders seemed to be at very loose ends indeed. Long after the debtor thought he had paid all his debt, in cash or in kind, the trader unearthed on the books items of 1915, 1916 or 1917 which he forgot to charge for. Here they bob up like a bay seal, to the consternation of the man who thought the slate had been sponged off clean “far away and long ago.”

One of the two who brought their present perplexity to the Doctor had had the misfortune to lose his house by fire, and all the trader’s receipts therein, so that he had no written line to show against the trader’s bill.

I found out later that the trader’s daughters kept the books—in fact, I saw them behind the counter at their father’s store—and they were said to be indifferent and slovenly misses indeed, who used their thumbs for erasures and made as many mistakes in a day’s work as there are blueberries on Blomidon. Perhaps they were in love—but their hit-or-miss accountancy meant a terrible worriment for sea-faring men two hundred miles distant, and a pother of trouble for Dr. Grenfell and a St. John’s lawyer—a friend of the Doctor’s who befriends those who cannot afford or do not know how to obtain legal advice.