“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.