With Grenfell on the Labrador

by Fullerton L. Waldo

“Some of the soldiers of the war returning to this country are not acting as soldiers should. They are importing foreign vices. I have seen lately horrible examples of the suffering of the innocents as a result of their misdeeds. There are more communicable diseases in the present year than we have ever had before on this coast. A man has no right to the title of a soldier who does not walk in Christ’s steps—he has no right to the name, when he pleases self and damns his country and his fellow-men and fellow-women.

“We have among us the deplorable spectacle of many weak sectarian schools—and it is a wicked thing that we do not combine them in strong undenominational ones. So many things cry out for changing. Today I visited a family and found the father had tuberculosis. The mother?—tuberculosis. The children?—tuberculosis. Then I saw a baby whose head was not filled up, whose arms were puny, whose shoulders were constricted. From what? From rickets. The rickets came from bad feeding due to ignorance. I saw another child with the same complaint from the same cause.

“American bank-notes are made of paper that comes from Dalton, Massachusetts. The finest quality of paper is made of rags. They can use old rags and dirty rags—but they cannot use red ones. In explaining the manufacture to children I heard the manager speak of the rags as being ‘willing’ or ‘unwilling.’ The red ones were the ‘unwilling’ ones, and one of the children afterward said she’d rather be a willing rag. We may be poor and sorry objects—we may be rags—but there is something to be made of us if only we are willing rags.

“I came to a paralyzed boy. He said, ‘What can I do, Dr. Grenfell?’ I said, ‘You can smile upon all those who minister to you or come where you are. You can spread the spirit of good cheer even from your bedside.’ ”

“I was present at Pilley’s Island when a soldier came home who had won the V. C. What a welcome he received! There was a triumphal arch and the town turned out to do honour to its hero. He was the right sort of soldier.”

Norman Duncan wrote a delightful book called “Doctor Luke of the Labrador” which very faithfully mirrors the atmosphere of Dr. Grenfell’s days and doings. But the book is not to be taken as faithful biography verbatim et literatim, in the passages relating to the titular hero.

The Doctor has nothing in the open book of his past life for which he needs to make amends; but the hero of “Doctor Luke” has something mysterious to live down, the precise nature of which is not divulged. In many admirable qualities the portrait of “Doctor Luke” is a faithful likeness of Dr. Grenfell, and that is why there is a danger that the reader will think that in all particulars the book man and the real man correspond. “Doctor Luke” goes to the Labrador to flee from his own shadow—a man pursued by bitter memories of what he has done, and by mocking wraiths of sin, their fingers pointed at him. Dr. Grenfell went to the Labrador because the spirit moved him to go to the help of men whose lives were as cold as the ice and as hard as the rock that hemmed them in. He went not as one who sorrows over misspent years but as one who rejoices in the belief that his work has the smile of God upon it. Dr. Grenfell has the spirit of any first-rate missionary—he will not admit that he has elected a life of brain-fag, bodily travail and spiritual torment. His joy in doing and giving is unaffected. When he invites the rest of us to find life beautiful and bountiful he does not pose nor prate. He walks in the steps and in the name of Christ with a child’s humility, a man’s strength, an almost feminine tenderness and never a breath of that maudlin, unctuous sanctimoniousness which always must repel the virile and vertebrate fibre of the Thomas Hughes brand of “muscular Christianity.” Dr. Grenfell likes gospel hymns where some prefer sonatas and concertos, but he likes them when they carry a plain and pointed message from the heart to the heart, and build up a consciousness of our human interdependence: he would not care for them if they merely blew into flame the emotional fire-in-straw that burns itself out uselessly because of the want of substantial fuel.

To the humble millionaire or the haughty workingman his manner is the same. He knows what it means “to walk with kings nor lose the common touch.” Nor is he easily fooled. “Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”

“I talked with Mr. A.,” he told me, referring to his visit with a Croesus of New York who to certain ends has given largely, “and I felt somehow that, with all his giving, he had not given himself!”

That is the secret, it seems to me, of Dr. Grenfell’s own cogent power upon other lives—that he goes and does in his own energetic person. He does not stand at a distance issuing commands. He is entirely willing to help anybody, anywhere. He holds back nothing that he can bestow, and he never despairs. His ruddy optimism is a matter of actual daily practice and not of a cloistered philosophy. You never could persuade him that with all the heavy burden that he bears, the myriad interruptions and vexations that occur, he is not having a grand good time. He would be entirely ready to say with Stevenson: