Mrs. Grenfell is “the life of the party” wherever she goes. Like the Doctor, she refuses to grow tired of the great game of living, and it is a game they play together in a completely understanding and sympathetic copartnership.
General “Chinese” Gordon once gave as the reason for not marrying the fact that he had never found the woman who would follow him anywhere. Dr. Grenfell has been more fortunate. A friend of theirs tells me that Dr. Grenfell proposed on shipboard, almost the minute he met his wife. Astounded by his precipitancy, she said: “But, Doctor, you don’t even know my name!” “That doesn’t make any difference; I know what it’s going to be,” is said to have been his characteristic answer.
Mrs. Grenfell was translated from a life that might have been one of ease and pleasure and social preoccupation into a life of unremitting toil and no small measure of actual hardship, and she meets the day and whatever it brings in the same high-hearted mood that her husband carries to the various phases of his crowded existence. She is his mentor—without being a tormentor; she is his business memory and a deal of his common sense and social conscience: but she never lets her fine, keen mind, her quick wit and her readily divining intuition become absorbed in the mechanic phases of the regulation of household or boatload business. She has the happy faculty of instant transplantation from the practical task to the ideal atmosphere. She is the Doctor’s workmate, playmate and helpmate: the complete and inspiring counterpart. She knows better than anybody else that she has a great man for a husband, but she never lets that consciousness become oppressive, and she knows that it is good for them both to yield to the playful spirit of rollicking nonsense and absurd horseplay now and then. So you needn’t be surprised if you should find the pair chasing each other about the deck pretending a mortal combat with billets of birch-wood, while the distracted Fritz the dog cannot make up his mind whether he is in duty bound to bite his mistress or his master. You needn’t be surprised if the Doctor goes through a mighty pantomime of barricading his chart-room as though his better half had no business in it, or hides some one of her cherished Lares and Penates and assumes an innocent ignorance of its whereabouts. When he is at play Dr. Grenfell is not a bit older than the youngest of his three delightful children whose combined ages cannot be much more than fifteen years. He is the same sort of amusing and devoted father as the mourned and beloved head of the household at Sagamore Hill, who to Dr. Grenfell—of course—is the pattern of all that the head of a family and the soul of a nation should be.
The family life of the Grenfells and the perfect mutuality of thought and feeling between Dr. Grenfell and his wife stand out in clear-cut lines as an example to those who never have known the meaning of the complete community of ideals in the family life and in the relationship of wife and husband. It stands in rebuke to the sorrowful travesty the modern marriage so often exhibits. It shows how the strength of either partner in the marriage of true minds is multiplied tenfold and how the yoke is easy and the burden is light when love has entered in—
“The love you long to give to one
Made great enough to hold the world.”
XI
FOUR-FOOTED AIDES: DOGS AND REINDEER
In few places are the dogs so numerous and so noisy as at Forteau, and Sister Bailey’s team held the primacy for speed and condition and obedience to command—yet she ruled them by moral suasion and not by kicks and curses. That does not mean they were dog angels. Every “husky” is in part a wolf, and the gentlest and most amiable that fawns upon you will in a twinkling go from the Dr. Jekyll to the Mr. Hyde in his make-up when the breaking-point is passed. The leaders of the pack were two monsters named Scotty and Carlo, and they were rivals to the end of the tether. Carlo was a sentimentalist of a hue between fawn and grey: his greatest pleasaunce was to put his forepaws on your shoulders and lick your nose ere you could stave him off. Scotty’s nose—he was black and white—was embossed with the marks of many bitter duels. Probably the other dogs could read those marks, as a Bret Harte cowboy could read the notches on a gun, and he won respect commensurate with the length and breadth of the scratches. Scotty came with us on the Strathcona, as his mistress was leaving for a rest in England shortly. It was a job to persuade him aboard the boat, but once there he entered into a tacit agreement, as between gentlemen, that he should have the after deck while Fritz, our official dog, monopolized the prow. Scotty had the better of the bargain, for his bailiwick included the cook’s galley. But Fritz could sleep on the floor of my cabin, though whenever I looked for him on the floor he was snugly ensconced in a forbidden lower bunk, curled up like a jelly roll. He learned to vacate without even a word when I gazed at him reproachfully.
All Sister Bailey’s dogs, and a great many more, converged upon the beach when Fritz swam ashore and shook himself free from such marine algae as he might have collected on his course. We kept Fritz close at heel, but there were constant alarums and incursions. As we sauntered along the shore path by the fish-flakes where the women were turning over the fish under the threat of rain, Fritz was in a measure taken into the loosely cohesive plunderbund of Sister Bailey’s pack. They seemed to be saying to him after their fashion: “Oh, well, you are a foreigner from that ship out yonder in the cove, to be sure, but here we are passing one hostile tribe after another, and we may need you any time to help us out in a scrap, so you may as well travel along with our bushy tails—though yours points toward the ground, and you can’t be very much of a dog, after all.”
For dogs appeared in squads, platoons, companies, battalions, even as iron-filings cluster to a magnet. There was a most outrageous and unholy pow-wow when we had gone about five houses from the beach. All the dogs from near and far piled into it like hornets from a broken nest. There was no speech nor language known to dogdom in which their voices were not heard with howls and imprecations. Alas! even the gentle Sister Bailey had to abandon for the nonce her policy of moral suasion and get in among her protégés with thwackings of a bit of driftwood and a few well-directed pushes (not to say kicks) of the foot. Any moderate impact, when a scrap is in full swing, rebounds from the tough integuments like hailstones landing on a tin roof. Even an every-day argument of these beasts sounds like wholesale murder. It is a pathetic fact that with all the affectionate responsiveness of some of the animals to human notice there always lurks a danger. If you are a stranger, meeting a strange pack, it is well to keep your eyes upon them, and if you have not a stick in your hand, or a stone ready to throw, it is wholesome to stoop groundward and pretend you have a missile. Then, nine times out of ten, they will scatter. So often one would like to believe they are all dog, with all of the dog’s graces and goodnesses—but there reigns in the breast of each a vulpine jealousy that easily and instantly mounts to a blood-heat of maddened fury. Dogs of the same litter will fight as furiously and savagely as born enemies, though they may recognize in the traces intuitively the leadership of their mother at an age far beyond that at which civilized puppies become as contemptuous of their mother as she is of them.