Read CHAPTER XX - MARRIAGE of A Labrador Doctor, free online book, by Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, on ReadCentral.com.

It was now the fall of 1908, and the time had come for me to visit England again and try and arouse fresh interest in our work; and this motive was combined with the desire to see my old mother, who was now nearing her fourscore years. I decided to leave in November and return via America in the spring to receive the honorary degree of LL.D. from Williams College and of M.A. from Harvard, which I had been generously offered.

My lecture tour this winter was entrusted to an agency. Propaganda is a recognized necessity in human life, though it has little attraction for most men. To me having to ask personally for money even for other people was always a difficulty. Scores of times I have been blamed for not even stating in a lecture that we needed help. The distaste for beating the big drum, which lecturing for your own work always appears to be, makes me quite unable to see any virtue in not doing it, but just asking the Lord to do it. If I really were convinced that He would meet the expenses whether I worked or not, I should believe that neither would He let people suffer and die untended out here or anywhere else. Indeed, it would seem a work of supererogation to have to remind Him of the necessity that existed.

The fact that we have to show pictures of the work which we are doing is tiresome and takes time, but it encourages us to have pictures worth taking and to do deeds which we are not ashamed to narrate. It also stimulates others to give themselves as well as their money to similar kinds of work at their own doorsteps, to see how much like themselves their almoners are. Only to-day my volunteer secretary told me that he honestly expected to meet “a bearded old fogey in spectacles,” not a man who can shoot his own dinner from the wing or who enjoys the justifiable pleasures of life.

The religion of Christ never permitted me to accept the idea that there is “nothing to do, only believe.” Every man ought to earn his own bread and the means to support his family. Why, then, should you have only to ask the Lord to give unasked the wherewithal to feed other people’s families?

Lecturing for philanthropies, only another word for the means to help along the Kingdom of God on earth, is in England usually carried on through the ordinary missionary meetings; and in my previous experience they were not generally much credit to the splendid objects in view. The lectures were often patronized by small audiences largely composed of women and children.

That particular winter in England I had the privilege of addressing all sorts of workmen’s clubs and city lecture-course audiences, people who would have “the shivers” almost if one had asked them to attend a “missionary” lecture. The collection, or even the final monetary outcome, is far from being the test of the value of the address. To commend Christ’s religion by minimizing in any way the prerogative He gave men of carrying on the work of His kingdom in their human efforts is to sap the very appeal that attracts manhood to Him. I never wanted to sing, “Oh! to be nothing, nothing.” I always wished to sing, “Oh! make me something, something” that shall leave some footprints on the sands of time, and have some record of talents gained to offer a Master whom we believe to be righteous.

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 fiancee. 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 fiancee 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 fiancee 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 coordination, 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.

The journey from Lake Forest to Labrador would have been a tedious one, but by good fortune a friend from New York had arranged to come and visit the coast in his steam yacht, the Enchantress, and was good enough to pick me up at Bras d’Or. Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, who had previously shown me much kindness, permitted us to rendezvous at his house, and for a second time I enjoyed seeing some of the experiments of his most versatile brain. His aeroplanes, telephones, and other inventions were all intensely interesting, but among his other lines of work the effort to develop a race of sheep, which had litters just as pigs do, interested me most.

Francis Sayre, whom I had heard win the prize at Williams with his valedictory speech, was again to be my summer secretary. On our arrival at St. Anthony we found a great deal going on. The fame as a surgeon of my colleague, Dr. John Mason Little, had spread so widely that St. Anthony Hospital would no longer hold the patients who sought assistance at it. Fifty would arrive on a single mail boat. They were dumped down on the little wharf, having been landed in small punts from the steamer, as in those days we had no proper dock to which the boats could come. The little waiting-room in the hospital at night resembled nothing so much as a newly opened sardine tin; and to cater for the waiting patients was a Sisyphean task without the Hercules. Through the instrumentality of Dr. Little’s sister a fund of ten thousand dollars was raised to double the size of the hospital, and the work of building was begun on my return. Although the capacity was greatly increased thereby we have really been unable ever to make our building what it ought to be to meet the problem. The first part, constructed of green lumber hauled from the woods, and other wings added at different periods of growth, the endeavour to blast out suitable heating-plant accommodations all this has left the hospital building more or less a thing of rags and patches, and most uneconomical to run. We are urgently in need of having it rebuilt entirely of either brick or stone, in order to resist the winter cold, to give more efficiency and comfort to patients and staff and to conserve our fuel, which is the most serious item of expense we have to meet.

But at that time with all its capacity for service the new addition was rising, sounding yet one more note of praise in better ability to meet the demands upon us.

And pari passu came the beautiful offer of my friend, Mr. Sayre, to double the size of our orphanage, putting up the new wing in memory of his father. This meant that instead of twenty we might now accommodate forty children at a pinch. Life is so short that it is the depths of pathos to be hampered in doing one’s work for the lack of a few dollars. Of great interest to my fiancee and myself was the selection of a piece of ground adjoining the Mission land, and the erection for ourselves of the home which we had planned and designed together before I had left Lake Forest. We chose some land up on the hillside and overlooking the sea and the harbour, where the view should be as comprehensive as possible. But we feared that even though our new house was very literally “founded upon a rock,” the winds might some day remove it bodily from its abiding-place, and therefore we riveted the structure with heavy iron bolts to the solid bedrock.

One excitement of that season was Admiral Peary’s return from the North Pole. We were cruising near Indian Harbour when some visitors came aboard to make use of our wireless telegraph, which at that time we had installed on board. It proved to be Mr. Harry Whitney. It was the first intimation that we had had that Peary was returning that year. Whitney had met Cook coming back from the polar sea on the west side of the Gulf, where he had disappeared about eighteen months previously. I had met Dr. Cook several times myself, and indeed I had slept at his house in Brooklyn. He had visited Battle Harbour Hospital in 1893 when he was wrecked in the steamer in which he was conducting a party to visit Greenland. We had again seen him as he went North with Mr. Bradley in the yacht, and he had sent us back some Greenland dogs to mix their blood with our dogs, and so perhaps improve their breed and endurance. These, however, I had later felt it necessary to kill, for the Greenland dogs carry the dangerous tapeworm which is such a menace to man, and of which our Labrador dogs are entirely free so far.

The picture of this meeting on the ice between Cook and Whitney gave us the impression of another Nansen and Jackson at Spitzbergen. Whitney had welcomed Cook warmly, had witnessed his troubles at Etah, and his departure by komatik, and had taken charge of his instruments and records to carry South with him when he came home. But his ship was delayed and delayed, and when Peary in the Roosevelt passed on his way South, fearing to be left another winter Whitney had accepted a passage on her at the cost of leaving Cook’s material behind. He had met his own boat farther south and had transferred to her. He left the impression very firmly on all our minds that both he and Dr. Cook really believed that the latter had found the long-sought Pole.

A little later, while cruising in thick weather in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, my wireless operator came in and said: “There can be no harm telling you, Doctor, that Peary is at Battle Harbour. He is wiring to Washington that he has found the Pole, and also he is asking his committee if he may present the Mission with his superfluous supplies, or whether he is to sell them to you.” Seeing that it is not easy to know whence wireless messages come if the sender does not own up to his whereabouts, I at once ordered him to wireless to Peary at Battle the simple words: “Give it to them, of course,” and sign it “Washington.” I knew that the Commander would see the joke, and if the decision turned out later to be incorrect, it could easily be rectified by purchasing the goods. A tin of his brown bread now lies among my curios and one of his sledges is in my barn.

On our arrival at Battle Harbour we found the Roosevelt lying at the wharf repainting and refitting. A whole host of newspaper men and other friends had come North to welcome the explorer home. Battle was quite a gay place; but it was living up to its name, for Peary not only claimed that he had found the Pole, but also that Cook had not; and he was realizing what a hard thing it is to prove a negative. We had a very delightful time with the party, and greatly enjoyed meeting all the members of the expedition. Among them was the ill-fated Borup, destined shortly to be drowned on a simple canoe trip, and the indomitable and athletic Macmillan who subsequently led the Crocker Land expedition, our own schooner George B. Cluett carrying them to Etah.

My secretary, Mr. Sayre, was just about to leave for America, and at Peary’s request he transferred to the Roosevelt with his typewriter, to help the Commander with a few of his many notes and records. I dare say that he got an inside view of the question then agitating the world from Washington to Copenhagen; but if so, he has remained forever silent about it. For our part we were glad that some one had found the Pole, for it has been a costly quest in both fine men and valuable time, energy, and money. It has caused lots of trouble and sorrow, and so far at least its practical issues have been few.

Our wedding had been scheduled for November, and for the first time I had found a Labrador summer long. In the late fall I left for Chicago on a mission that had no flavour of the North Pole about it. We were married in Grace Episcopal Church, Chicago, on November 18, 1909. Our wedding was followed by a visit to the Hot Springs of Virginia; and then “heigho,” and a flight for the North. We sailed from St. John’s, Newfoundland, in January. I had assured my wife, who is an excellent sailor, that she would scarcely notice the motion of the ship on the coastal trip of three hundred miles. Instead of five days, it took nine; and we steamed straight out of the Narrows at St. John’s into a head gale and a blizzard of snow. The driving spray froze onto every thing till the ship was sugared like a vast Christmas cake. It made the home which we had built at St. Anthony appear perfectly delightful. My wife had had her furniture sent North during the summer, so that now the “Lares and Penates” with which she had been familiar from childhood seemed to extend a mute but hearty welcome to us from their new setting.

We have three children, all born at St. Anthony. Our elder son, Wilfred Thomason, was born in the fall of 1910; Kinloch Pascoe in the fall of 1912, two years almost to a day behind his brother; and lastly a daughter, Rosamond Loveday, who followed her brothers in 1917. In the case of the two latter children the honours of the name were divided between both sides of the family, Kinloch and Rosamond being old family names on my wife’s side, while, on the other hand, there have been Pascoe and Loveday Grenfells from time immemorial.

Nearly ten years have now rolled away since our marriage. The puzzle to me is how I ever got along before; and these last nine years have been so crowded with the activities and worries of the increasing cares of a growing work, that without the love and inspiration and intellectual help of a true comrade, I could never have stood up under them. Every side of life is developed and broadened by companionship. I admit of no separation of life into “secular” and “religious.” Religion, if it means anything, means the life and activities of our divine spirit on earth in relation to our Father in heaven. I am convinced from experience of the supreme value to that of a happy marriage, and that “team work” is God’s plan for us on this earth.