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.
IX
THE MAN OF GOD
In his formal addresses Dr. Grenfell exemplifies the homely, pithy eloquence that comes from speaking directly “to men’s business and bosoms” out of the fulness of the heart: but those who have heard him in the little, informal, offhand talks he gives among his own people in his own bailiwick appreciate them even more than what he has to say to a congregation of strangers in a great city far from the Labrador.
It must be understood that the quotations that follow are merely extemporaneous, unrevised sentences taken down without the Doctor’s knowledge, and of a nature wholly casual and unpremeditated.
At a service held in the tiny saloon of the Strathcona for the crew and the patients who happened to be with us, the Doctor said:
“We so often think that religion is bound to be dull and solemn and monotonous: we don’t follow the example of Christ who spread light and joy wherever he went. None of us is perfect, but God doesn’t denounce Dr. Grenfell and Will Sims and Albert Ash (naming members of the crew) for their shortcomings. That isn’t his way. He knows us as we are, with all our weaknesses. He loved David—he said that David was a man after his own heart. Yet David was a bad man—he was an adulterer and incidentally a murderer, and he got his people into trouble that lost thousands of their lives. But God loved him in spite of his human frailties, because he did such a lot of good in the world.
“It doesn’t do to take a single text. For instance—we read ‘The world is established so that it cannot be moved,’ but we know that it is all movement: we know that it moves at a pace six times as fast as the fastest aeroplane. But the Church looked at that verse and said that he who denied it was denying the truth. I was reading this morning about Copernicus, who insisted that this world is round. Up to his time men had insisted that it was flat and that you might fall off the edge. Then there was Galileo, who said that it moved: and they put him under the thumbscrews, and when he came out he said, ‘and still it does move.’