With Grenfell on the LabradorWaldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
History
With Grenfell on the Labrador
Waldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940
Some folk may try to tell us that Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, C.M.G.,
gets more credit than is due him: but while they cavil and insinuate the
Recording Angel smiles and writes down more golden deeds for this
descendant of an Elizabethan sea-dog. Sir Richard Grenville, of the
_Revenge_, as Tennyson tells us—stood off sixty-three ships of Spain’s
Armada, and was mortally wounded in the fight, crying out as he fell
upon the deck: “I have only done my duty, as a man is bound to do.” That
tradition of heroic devotion to duty, and of service to mankind, is
ineradicable from the Grenfell blood.
“We’ve had a hideous winter,” the Doctor said, as I clasped hands with
him in June at the office of the Grenfell Association in New York. His
hair was whiter and his bronzed face more serious than when I last had
seen him; but the unforgettable look in his eyes of resolution and of
self-command was there as of old, intensified by the added years of
warfare with belligerent nature and sometimes recalcitrant mankind. For
a few moments when he talks sentence may link itself to sentence very
gravely, but nobody ever knew the Doctor to go long without that keen,
bright flash of a smile, provoked by a ready and a constant sense of
fun, that illumines his face like a pulsation of the Northern Lights,
and—unless you are hard as steel at heart—must make you love him, and
do what he wants you to do.
The Doctor on this occasion was a month late for his appointment with
the board of directors of the Grenfell Association. His little steamer,
the _Strathcona_, had been frozen in off his base of operations and
inspirations at St. Anthony. So he started afoot for Conch to catch a
launch that would take him to the railroad. He was three days covering a
distance which in summer would have required but a few hours, in the
direction of White Bay on the East Coast. He slept on the beach in wet
clothes. Then he was caught on pans of ice and fired guns to attract the
notice of any chance vessel. Once more ashore, he vainly started five
times more from St. Anthony harbour. Finally he went north and walked
along the coast, cutting across when he could, eighty miles to Flower’s
Cove. In the meantime the _Strathcona_, with Mrs. Grenfell aboard, was
imprisoned in the ice on the way to Seal Harbour; and it was three weeks
before Mrs. Grenfell, with the aid of two motor-boats, reached the
railroad by way of Shoe Cove.
At Flower’s Cove the Doctor rapped at the door of Parson Richards. That
good man fairly broke into an alleluia to behold him. With beaming face
he started to prepare his hero a cup of tea. But there came a cry at the
door: “Abe Gould has shot himself in the leg!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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