Chapter VI: The Sportsman

As we were coming off to the _Strathcona_ one evening, the Doctor, bareheaded, pulling at the oars with the zest of a schoolboy on a holiday, and every oar-dip making a running flame of phosphorescence, said: “At college we worshipped at the shrine of athletics. Of course that wasn’t right, but it did establish a standard—it did teach a man that he must keep his body under if he would be physically fit. I realized that if I wanted to win I couldn’t afford to lose an ounce, and so I was a rigid Spartan with myself. The others sometimes laughed at me as a goody-goody, but they saw that I could do things that couldn’t be done by those who indulged in wild flings of dissipation.

“My schooling before Oxford I now feel was wretched. They didn’t teach me how to learn. The teachers themselves were mediocre. They may have had a smattering of the classics—but that doesn’t constitute fitness to teach. Have you read the chapter on education in H. G. Well’s ‘Joan and Peter’? That strikes me as true.

“I’m glad my orphan children at St. Anthony are getting the right kind of training from those who understand their business.”

The Doctor still cherishes the insignia of rowing and athletic clubs to which he was attached while at Oxford. One of his pet coats wears the initials “O. U. R. F. C.” for the Oxford University Rugby Football Club. He also stroked the _Torpid_ crew, and the crew of the London Hospital.

He hates—in fact, he refuses, like Peter Pan—to grow up or to grow old. “Isn’t it too bad that just when our minds have struck their stride and are doing their best work we should have to end it all?” Not that he has the least fear of Death. In the country of his loving labour, the fisher-folk face Death so often in their lawful occasions, for the sake of you and me who enjoy the savour of the codfish and the lobster, that when Death finally comes he comes not as a dark and awful figure but as a familiar and a friend.

The conflict of elemental forces in nature finds at once an echo in the breast of him who has met “with a frolic heart” every mood and tense of sky and sea “down north.” At Pleasure Harbour the sunset amid dark purple clouds edged with a rosy fleece brought “vital feelings of delight”: and when we came nearest the Dominion’s northern tip the Doctor said: “I wish you could see the strait ice and the Atlantic ice fight at Cape Bauld. They go at each other hammer and tongs, with a roaring and rending like huge wild animals, rampant and foaming and clashing their tusks.”

On a foggy, super-saturated day, the sails and the deck beaded and dripping, he will fairly rub his hands in ecstasy and exclaim: “Oh, what a fine day!” Or he will thrust his ruddy countenance out of his chart-room door to call: “Isn’t it great to be alive?”

Off Cape Norman, when the foghorn was blaspheming and the sea ran high, I tried to get the Doctor to concede that it was half a gale, but he would only admit that it was a “nice breeze.” The new topsail stubbornly declined to blossom out as it should, though the five other sails were in full bloom. “We’ll burst it out,” said the Doctor. The offending sail was forthwith hauled down and stretched like a sick man on the deck; then it was tied in three places with tarry cords, the Doctor scurried up the mast, the sail was raised into place by means of the clanking winch, and then, with violent tugs of the fierce wind like a fish plucking at a tempting bait the three confining strings snapped in explosive succession and like a flag unfurling the sail sprang out to the breeze. We raised a cheer as the perceptible lift of the additional sail-cloth thrilled the timbers underfoot.

You’d hear him trotting about the deck in the cool dawn inquiring about steam or tide and humming softly (or lifting with the fervour of a sailor’s chantey), that favourite Newfoundland hymn, written by a Newfoundlander, “We love the place, O God, wherein thine honour dwells.”

In the wheelhouse as he looks out over the sea and guides the prow, as if it were a sculptor’s chisel, through calm or storm, there comes into his eyes a look as of communing with a far country: his soul has gone to a secret, distant coast where no man and but one woman can follow.

Sometimes of an evening the Doctor brought out the chessboard and I saw another phase of his versatile entity—his fondness for an indoor game that is of science and not blind chance. The red and white ivory chessmen, in deference to the staggering ship, had sea-legs in the shape of pegs attaching them to the board. Two missing pawns—“prawns,” the Doctor humorously styled them—had as substitutes bits of a red birthday candle, and two of the rooks were made of green modelling-wax (plasticine).

“I love to attack,” said the Doctor, and his tactics proved that he meant what he said. He has what Lord Northcliffe once named to me as the capital secret of success—concentration.

When he has once moved a piece forward he almost never moves it back again. He likes to go ahead. He seeks to get his pieces out and into action, and a defensive, waiting game—the strategy of Fabius the Cunctator—is not for him.

Once in a while he defers sufficiently to the conventions to move out the King’s pawn at the start, but often his initial move is that of a pawn at the side of the board. He works the pawns hard and gives them a new significance. His delight is to march a little platoon of them against the enemy—preferably against the bishops. Somehow the bishops seem to lose their heads when confronted by these minor adversaries.

If you get him into a tight corner, the opposition stiffens—the greater the odds the more vertebral his attitude.

“I make it a rule to go ahead if I possibly can, and not to be driven back.” This remark of his over the board of the mimic fray applies just as well to his constant strife with the sea to get where he is wanted—as on the present occasion when we were threading the needle’s eye of the rocky outlet at Carpoon.

The Doctor has the real chess mind—the mind that surveys and weighs and analyzes—with the uncanny faculty of looking many moves ahead, of balancing all the alternatives, of remembering the disposal of the forces at a previous stage of the game. He becomes so completely immersed in the playing—though he rarely finds an antagonist—that it is a real rest to him after the teeming day, where many a man would only find it a culminant exhaustion. “Isn’t it queer,” he observed, “that most men who are good at this game aren’t good for much else?”

His use of the pawns in chess is like his use of the weaker reeds among men in his day’s work. Since he cannot always get the best (though his hand-picked helpers at St. Anthony, Battle Harbour and elsewhere are as a rule exceptionally able), he learns to use the inferior and the lesser, and with exemplary gentleness and patience he keeps his temper and lets them think they are assisting though they may be all but hindering. He gives you to feel that if you hold a basin or sharpen a knife or fetch a bottle or bring him a chair you are of real value in the performance of an operation—even if the basin was upset and the knife was dull and the bottle wasn’t the one and the chair had a broken leg.

“Christ used ordinary men,” he remarked. “He was a carpenter, and I try to teach people that he was a good sportsman.”

All through his chess games, too, runs the Oxford principle of sport for its own sake: he wins, but the strife is more than the victory. He is never vainglorious when the checkmate comes; he is neither unduly elated by success nor depressed by adversity—indeed, his enjoyment is keenest when he is beset. He shows then the same strain that comes out when the ship is anchored and Mate Albert Ash pokes his head in and says: “If she drags, we’ve got but one chain out!” Then he will say nothing, or with a humorous twinkle he will cry in mock despair: “All is lost!” or “if you knew how little water there was under her you would be scared!”—and then he will go on with what he is doing. Whether it is the chessboard or life’s battlefield, he plays the game.

On the end of a hackmatack (juniper) log lying on the deck for firewood I pencilled for fun: “The Log of the _Strathcona_.” The Doctor saw it, laughed, and got a buck-saw. Two fishermen clambered over the rail between him and the woodpile, to get zinc ointment and advice. When he had “fixed them up” he sawed off the log-end, and drew a picture of the _Strathcona_—an entirely correct picture, of course, as far as it went—and then put his signature (à la Whistler butterfly) in the form of a roly-poly elf, as rotund as a dollar. “I like to draw myself stout and round,” he laughed. The strange gnome he drew was the very antithesis of his own lithe, spare, close-knit figure.

So good a playmate and so firm a master—so rare a combination of gentleness and strength, of self-respect and rollicking fun is difficult to match in real life or in biographic literature.

Were one to seek a historic parallel for Grenfell one might not go far wrong in picking Xenophon. Xenophon was a leader who pointed the way not from the rear but from the head of the column, and asked of his men nothing that he would not do himself. The reader of the “Anabasis” will remember that Xenophon awoke in the night and asked himself “Why do I lie here? For the night goes forward. And with the morn it is probable that the enemy will come.” Even so, Grenfell feels that he must do the works of the Master while it is yet day, for all too soon the night cometh when no man can work.

Xenophon had sedition on his hands, and his men would not go out into the snows of the mountains of Armenia and cut the wood. So he left his tent and seized an ax and hewed so valorously that they were shamed into following suit. That is just what Wilfred Grenfell would have done: it is what his forbear Sir Richard Grenville would have done. In such ways as this when the hour strikes the born leader of men asserts himself and takes command.