A Labrador Doctor / The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

by Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

When spring came and the lectures were over, a new idea suddenly dawned upon me. If I were going to America to festive gatherings and to have some honours conferred, why leave the mother behind? Seventy-eight years is not old. She was born in India, had lived in England, and suppose anything did happen, why not sleep in America?—she would be just as near God there. The splendid Mauretania not only took us safely over, but gave me also that gift which I firmly believe God designed for me—a real partner to share in my joys and sorrows, to encourage and support in trouble and failures, to inspire and advise in a thousand ways, and in addition to bring into my distant field of work a personal comrade with the culture, wisdom, and enthusiasm of the American life and the training of one of the very best of its Universities.

We met on board the second day out. She was travelling with a Scotch banker of Chicago and his wife, Mr. W.R. Stirling, whose daughter was her best friend. They were returning from a motor tour through Europe and Algeria. The Mauretania takes only four and a half days in crossing, and never before did I realize the drawbacks of "hustle," and yet the extreme need of it on my part. The degrees of longitude slipped by so quickly that I felt personally aggrieved when one day we made over six hundred miles, and the captain told us in triumph that it was a new record. The ship seemed to be paying off some spite against me. My mother kept mostly to her cabin. Though constantly in to see her, I am afraid I did not unduly worry her to join me on the deck. When just on landing I told her that I had asked a fellow passenger to become my wife, I am sure had the opportunity arisen she would have tumbled down the Mauretania's staircase. When she had the joy of meeting the girl, her equanimity was so far upset as to let an unaccustomed tear roll down her cheek. That, at least, is one of the tears which I have cost her which brings no regrets. For she confesses that it often puzzles her to which of our lives the event has meant most.

The constant little activities of my life had so filled every hour of time, and so engrossed my thoughts, that I had never thought to philosophize on the advisability of marriage, nor stopped to compare my life with those of my neighbors. There is no virtue in keeping the Ninth Commandment and not envying your neighbour's condition or goods when it never enters your head or heart to worry about them; and when you are getting what you care about no halo is due you for not falling victim to envy or jealousy of others. I have not been in the habit of praying for special personal providences like fine weather in my section of the earth, or for head wind for the schooners so as to give me a fair wind for my steamer, except so far as one prays for the recognition of God's good hand in everything.

I can honestly protest that nothing in my life ever came more "out of the blue" than my marriage; and beyond that I am increasingly certain each day that it did come out of that blue where God dwells.

I knew neither whence she came nor whither she was going. Indeed, I only found out when the proposition was really put that I did not even know her name—for it was down on the passenger list as one of the daughters of the friends with whom she was travelling. Fortunately it never entered my head that it mattered. For I doubt if I should have had the courage to question the chaperon, whose daughter she presumably was. It certainly was a "poser" to be told, "But you don't even know my name." Had I not been a bit of a seaman, and often compelled on the spur of the moment to act first and think afterwards, what the consequences might have been I cannot say. Fortunately, I remembered that it was not the matter at issue, and explained, without admitting the impeachment, that the only question that interested me in the least was what I hoped that it might become. Incidentally she mentioned that she had only once heard of me. It was the year previous when I had been speaking at Bryn Mawr and she had refused in no measured terms an invitation to attend, as sounding entirely too dull for her predilections. I have wondered whether this was not another "small providence."

A pathological condition of one's internal workings is not unusual even in Britons who "go down to the sea in ships," but such genius as our family has displayed has, so history assures us, shone best on a quarter-deck; and on this occasion it pleased God ultimately to add another naval victory to our credit. It is generally admitted that an abnormal mentality accompanies this not uncommon experience of human life, and I found my lack of appreciation of the rapid voyage paralleled by a wicked satisfaction that my mother preferred the brass four-poster, so thoughtfully provided for her by the Cunard Company, to the risks of the unsteady promenade deck.

When the girl's way and mine parted in that last word in material jostlings, the custom-house shed in Manhattan, after the liner arrived, I realized that it was rather an armistice than a permanent settlement which I had achieved. Though there was no father in the case, I learned that there was a mother and a home in Chicago. These were formidable strongholds for a homeless wanderer to assault, but rendered doubly so by the fact that there was neither brother nor sister to leave behind to mitigate the possible vacancy. The "everlasting yea" not having been forthcoming, under the circumstances it was no easy task for me to keep faith with the many appointments to lecture on Labrador which had been made for me. The inexorable schedule kept me week after week in the East. Fortunately the generous hospitality of many old friends who wanted the pleasure of meeting my mother kept my mind somewhat occupied. But I confess at the back of it the forthcoming venture loomed up more and more momentous as the fateful day drew near for me to start for Chicago.

This visit to my wife's beautiful country home among the trees on the bluff of Lake Michigan in Lake Forest was one long dream. My mother and I were now made acquainted with the family and friends of my fiancée. Her father, Colonel MacClanahan, a man of six feet five inches in height, had been Judge Advocate General on the Staff of Braxton Bragg and had fought under General Robert E. Lee. He was a Southerner of Scotch extraction, having been born and brought up in Tennessee. A lawyer by training, after the war, when everything that belonged to him was destroyed in the "reconstruction period," and being still a very young man, he had gone North to Chicago and begun life again at his profession. There he met and married, in 1884, Miss Rosamond Hill, who was born in Burlington, Vermont, but who, since childhood and the death of her parents, had lived with her married sister, Mrs. Charles Durand, of Chicago. The MacClanahans had two children—the boy, Kinloch, dying at an early age as the result of an accident. Colonel MacClanahan himself died a few months later, leaving a widow and one child, Anna Elizabeth Caldwell MacClanahan. She and her mother had lived the greater part of the time with Mrs. Durand, who died something more than a year before our engagement.

The friends with whom my fiancée had been travelling were almost next-door neighbours in Lake Forest. They made my short stay doubly happy by endless kindnesses; and all through the years, till his death in 1918, Mr. Stirling gave me not only a friendship which meant more to me than I can express, but his loving and invaluable aid and counsel in our work.

In spite of my many years of sailor life, I found that I was expected among other things to ride a horse, my fiancée being devoted to that means of progression. The days when I had ridden to hounds in England as a boy in Cheshire stood me in some little stead, for like swimming, tennis, and other pastimes calling for coördination, riding is never quite forgotten. But remembering Mr. Winkle's experiences, it was not without some misgivings that I found a shellback like myself galloping behind my lady's charger. My last essay at horseback riding had been just eleven years previously in Iceland. Having to wait a few days at Reikkavik, I had hired a whole bevy of ponies with a guide to take myself and the young skipper of our vessel for a three days' ride to see the geysers. He had never been on the back of any animal before, and was nevertheless not surprised or daunted at falling off frequently, though an interlude of being dragged along with one foot in the stirrup over lava beds made no little impression upon him. Fodder of all kinds is very scarce in the volcanic tufa of which all that land consists, and any moment that one stopped was always devoted by our ponies to grubbing for blades of grass in the holes. On our return to the ship the crew could not help noticing that the skipper for many days ceased to patronize the lockers or any other seat, and soon they were rejoicing that for some reason he was unable to sit down at all. He explained it by saying that his ponies ate so much lava that it stuck out under their skins, and I myself recall feeling inclined to agree with him.