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
“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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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