Safe in his living-room, with wife and children, two violins, a talking-machine, an ancient Underwood typewriter and even a telephone that connected him with the wharf, Captain Coté pulled out his wallet, selected three ten-dollar bills and offered them to the Doctor, saying: “I will pay you as much more as you like.”
Dr. Grenfell took one of the bills, saying, “That will be enough.”
The Captain, mindful of his promise about the coal, said, “How much coal do you want?”
“On the understanding that the Canadian Government supplies it,” answered the Doctor, “I will let you put aboard the Strathcona just the amount we used in coming here—5½ tons.”
The Captain went to the telephone and talked with a man at the wharf. Then he turned away from the transmitter and said: “He tells me that he can’t put the coal on board today, because it would blow away while they were taking it out to the Strathcona on the skiff. We have no sacks to put it in.”
“Very well,” returned the Doctor, “when it’s convenient you might store it at Forteau. They will need it there this winter at Sister Bailey’s nursing station.” Then he dismissed the subject of the fee and the fuel-supply to tell us how pleased he was to find that Mackenzie King, author of “Industry and Humanity,” had become the Liberal leader in Canada. King is a Harvard Doctor of Philosophy, a man of thought and action of the type by nature and training in sympathy with Grenfell’s work. It is a great thing for Canada that a man of his calibre and scholarly distinction has been raised to the place he holds.
From the site of the lighthouse there are observed most singular wide shelves of smooth brown rock presenting their edges to the fury of the surf, and over the broad brown expanse are scattered huge boulders that look as though the Druids who left the memorials at Stonehenge might have put them there. Captain Coté said the winter ice-pack tossed these great stones about as if it were a child’s game with marbles.
A happy man he thought himself to have his children with him. The lighthouse-keeper at Belle Isle lost six of his family on their way to join him; another at Flower’s Cove lost five. As a remorseless graveyard of the deep the region is a rival of the dreaded Sable Island off Newfoundland’s south shore.
A wire rope indicates the pathway of two hundred yards between the light and the foghorn: and in winter the way could not be found without it. The foghorn gave a solo performance for our benefit, at the instigation of either member of a pair of Fairbanks-Morse 15 horse-power gasoline engines. We were ten feet from it, but it can be heard ten miles and more.
A “keeper of the light” like Captain Coté, or Peter Bourque, who tended the Bird Rock beacon for twenty-eight years, is a man after Grenfell’s own heart. For Grenfell himself lets his light shine before men, and knows the need of keeping the flame lambent and bright, through thick and thin.