Chapter X: Some of His Helpers

I should like to write a whole book about his helpers. He is not a man who seeks to shine by surrounding himself with mediocrities. He would be ready to say with Charles M. Schwab: “I want you to work not for me but with me.” His presence is quickening and engenders loyalty. It is fun to be wherever Dr. Grenfell is because something is always going on.

His helpers never are given to feel that they are ciphers while he is the integer. Some of the ablest surgeons of America and of Europe have ministered to the patients at Battle Harbour, Indian Harbour and St. Anthony and on the _Strathcona_. There is an utter absence of “side” and “swank” in this the good physician, and he never decks himself out in the borrowed plumage of another’s virtue. He delights to see a thing well done, and is the first to bestow the word of earned praise on the doer. Conversely, he is not happy if a job is put through in a bungling, half-hearted, messy fashion; but he keeps his breath to cool his porridge, and never wastes it by mere “blowing off” when the mischief is done and palaver will not mend matters.

Human beings are not angels, and even those who are upheld by a sense of righteous endeavour may get tired and short-tempered and disheartened and lonely. Those who attach themselves to this enterprise for the weeks of summer sunlight only do not have much time to develop nostalgia. But “there ain’t no busses runnin’ from the bank to Mandalay,” and the Labrador has no theatres, no picnics, no ball games and few dances. Think of the large-hearted Moravian Brethren of the Labrador whose missions are linked with London by one visit a year from their mission ship the _Harmony_. Think of the man (Mr. Stewart) who sticks it out by himself at Ungava round the chill promontory of Cape Chidley in Ungava Bay. Think of the agents of the Hudson Bay and other companies dealing with the “silent, smoky Indian” in the vast reaches of the North. Whoever essays to serve God and man in this country must haul his own weight and bear others’ burdens too. He must lay aside hindrances—he must forfeit love of home and kindred—he must learn to keep normal and cheerful in the aching solitudes.

Many are with the Doctor for a season or so. Some like Dr. Little, Dr. Paddon and Dr. Andrews and certain others who deserve to be named _honoris causa_—have stood by him year after year. But by this time there is a small army of short-term or long-term Grenfell graduates—men and women—who had “their souls in the work of their hands” and whose precious memories are of the days they spent in assuaging the torment, physical or spiritual, of plain fisher-folk. It is not possible to separate in this case the care of bodies from the cure of souls. The “wops” who brought the schooner _George B. Cluett_ from Boston year after year, laden with lumber and supplies, and then went ashore to be plumbers and carpenters and jacks-of-all-trades for love and not for hire have their own stories to tell of “simple service simply given to their own kind in their human need.” Most of them knew just what they would be up against; they knew it would not be a glorified house-party; but they accepted the isolation and the crudeness and the cold and the unremitting toil, and in the spirit of good sportsmanship which is the ruling spirit of the Grenfell undertaking they played the game, and what they did is graven deep in the Doctor’s grateful memory.

The Doctor wins and keeps the enthusiastic loyalty of his colleagues because he is so ready with the word of emphatic praise for what they do when it is the right thing to do. He is fearless to condemn, but he would rather commend, and the flush of pleasure in the face of the one praised tells how much his approval has meant to the recipient. He knows how many persons in this human, fallible world of ours travel faster for a pat than for a kick or a blow.

A halt was called at Forteau for a few hours’ conference with one of the remarkable women who have put their shoulders under the load of the Labrador—Sister Bailey, once a co-worker with Edith Cavell. At Forteau she has a house that holds an immaculate hospital-ward and an up-to-date dispensary. For twelve years—except for two visits in England—she has held the fort here without the company of her peers, except at long intervals. She has kept herself surrounded with books and flowers, and her geraniums are exquisite. Sister Bailey’s cow, bought for $40 in a bargain at Bonne Esperance (“Bony,”) is a wonder, and I took pains to stroke the nose of this “friendly cow” and praise her life-giving endeavours. For each day at the crack of dawn there is a line-up of people with all sorts of containers to get the milk. The dogs, of course, would cheerfully kill the animal if they could pull her down, but she fights them off with her horns, and they have learned a wholesome fear. She is not like the cow at Bonne Esperance today, which has suffered the loss of part of its hind quarters because it was too gentle.

Under Sister Bailey’s roof three maids, aged 12, 13 and 22, are being educated in household management. She has a garden with the dogs fenced out, and there is a skirmish with the weeds all through the summer into which winter breaks so suddenly. There is no spring; there is no fall; flowers, vegetables and weeds appear almost explosively together.

Artificial flowers are beautifully made—with dyes from Paris—by the girls of Forteau Cove, under Sister Bailey’s supervision. The hues are remarkably close to the original and the imitation of petal and leaf is so close as to be startling.

No description of Dr. Grenfell’s “parish,” as Norman Duncan aptly styled it, could be complete without mention—that would be much more extended did she permit—of the part Mrs. Grenfell fills in all that the Doctor does. Mrs. Grenfell was Miss Anna MacClanahan, of Chicago, and she is a graduate of Bryn Mawr. The Doctor went to the Labrador years before his marriage, but since she took her place at his side with her tact, her humour, her common sense, her sound judgment and her broad sympathies, she has been a tower of strength, a well-spring of solace and of healing, and altogether an indispensable factor in her husband’s enterprise.

She is his secretary, and the number of letters to be written, of patients’ records to be kept, of manuscripts to be prepared for the press is enormous. The Doctor pencils a memorandum when and where he can—perhaps sitting atop of a woodpile on the reeling deck of the _Strathcona_; and then Mrs. Grenfell tames the rebellious punctuation or supplies the missing links of predicates or prepositions and evolves a manuscript that need not fear to face the printer.

The letters of appeal are almost innumerable, of protest occasional, of sympathy and friendship—with or without subscriptions—very numerous, and Mrs. Grenfell has the happy gift of saying “thank you” in such warm and gracious, individualizing terms that the donor is enlisted in a lifelong friendship for the Grenfell idea.

Mrs. Grenfell is “the life of the party” wherever she goes. Like the Doctor, she refuses to grow tired of the great game of living, and it is a game they play together in a completely understanding and sympathetic copartnership.

General “Chinese” Gordon once gave as the reason for not marrying the fact that he had never found the woman who would follow him anywhere. Dr. Grenfell has been more fortunate. A friend of theirs tells me that Dr. Grenfell proposed on shipboard, almost the minute he met his wife. Astounded by his precipitancy, she said: “But, Doctor, you don’t even know my name!” “That doesn’t make any difference; I know what it’s going to be,” is said to have been his characteristic answer.

Mrs. Grenfell was translated from a life that might have been one of ease and pleasure and social preoccupation into a life of unremitting toil and no small measure of actual hardship, and she meets the day and whatever it brings in the same high-hearted mood that her husband carries to the various phases of his crowded existence. She is his mentor—without being a tormentor; she is his business memory and a deal of his common sense and social conscience: but she never lets her fine, keen mind, her quick wit and her readily divining intuition become absorbed in the mechanic phases of the regulation of household or boatload business. She has the happy faculty of instant transplantation from the practical task to the ideal atmosphere. She is the Doctor’s workmate, playmate and helpmate: the complete and inspiring counterpart. She knows better than anybody else that she has a great man for a husband, but she never lets that consciousness become oppressive, and she knows that it is good for them both to yield to the playful spirit of rollicking nonsense and absurd horseplay now and then. So you needn’t be surprised if you should find the pair chasing each other about the deck pretending a mortal combat with billets of birch-wood, while the distracted Fritz the dog cannot make up his mind whether he is in duty bound to bite his mistress or his master. You needn’t be surprised if the Doctor goes through a mighty pantomime of barricading his chart-room as though his better half had no business in it, or hides some one of her cherished Lares and Penates and assumes an innocent ignorance of its whereabouts. When he is at play Dr. Grenfell is not a bit older than the youngest of his three delightful children whose combined ages cannot be much more than fifteen years. He is the same sort of amusing and devoted father as the mourned and beloved head of the household at Sagamore Hill, who to Dr. Grenfell—of course—is the pattern of all that the head of a family and the soul of a nation should be.

The family life of the Grenfells and the perfect mutuality of thought and feeling between Dr. Grenfell and his wife stand out in clear-cut lines as an example to those who never have known the meaning of the complete community of ideals in the family life and in the relationship of wife and husband. It stands in rebuke to the sorrowful travesty the modern marriage so often exhibits. It shows how the strength of either partner in the marriage of true minds is multiplied tenfold and how the yoke is easy and the burden is light when love has entered in—

“The love you long to give to one
Made great enough to hold the world.”