Читать книгу Northern Neighbours: Stories of the Labrador People - Wilfred T. Grenfell - Страница 10

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“Mr. Cyril Martin wants to see you, Doctor,” said a young woman, who was bouncing a fat baby in her arms as I stepped out of the boat at a little fishing village on the East Labrador coast last fall.

“Who is Mr. Cyril Martin, and where does Mr. Martin live?”

“I’ll show you’se, Doctor,” and without further preliminaries I found myself hustling along a narrow rocky path to nowhere after the pattering young woman, as Alice pursued the White Rabbit down the famous hole, though the path apparently led into the wilderness. No house was to be seen at that end of the beautiful inlet that formed the harbor. Mr. Cyril Martin seemed to have successfully camouflaged his residence, and to have sought seclusion for some reason from the company of his neighbors.

Suddenly we brought up opposite a tiny studded hut, the roof of which so nearly resembled the ground that it had escaped notice. My guide disappeared through the tiny door without knocking, I following. As I entered I tripped up over an obstruction on the floor. It proved to be a heap of rags, and lying on it a gray-bearded, silver-headed old sailor, who was struggling to get up to greet me. A bright-eyed smiling old lady, clad in a triumph of patchwork, rose from a half-barrel stool, with a piece of sewing in her hand, and bade me welcome with the dignity of a Fifth Avenue hostess—there was a refreshing genuineness about her greeting.

“We was sorry to hear you was dead last winter, Doctor, and so we was after when they said it were only your mother”—which served to start the conversation, though it left me at first with the meretricious disadvantage of feeling I must have risen before my time.

In one corner of this hut, twelve by fourteen feet in all, a cubby-hole was boxed off and screened with rags, that had evidently served their last function in every other capacity. The birch-bark rinds of the roofing afforded a homely effect even to the tiny shack, but their condition suggested unseaworthy antiquity, especially under the shadow of a Labrador winter.

It has been my lot to visit many poor homes, but this one had something peculiar about it. Dire poverty was written only too patently over every inch of it. Indeed all the possessions of the owners, which were quite in keeping with the entourage, lay open to view and told their own story of hunger and want. And yet there seemed some refinement about it, which left one without the usual feeling of resentment. Here was poverty—dire poverty, but no squalor. The usual repulsive accumulation of a thousand remnants that have been saved only through the universal desire to own something was absent. It is common to all human grades of society, this sheet anchor to “things” which Margaret Deland satirizes so cleverly in her essay on their tyranny. It was the absence of this that made all the difference in one’s ability to sympathize with these two strangers. In some odd way one felt that though they were exactly as human as one’s self—that they possessed their souls. The old lady, catching my eye fixed on the cubby-hole, at once apologized.

“It’s my room, Doctor. Mr. Martin took me in, and give me that part of his house for myself.”

Six by six I was calculating. What a fortunate thing she is so short! Having no door to it saved some space, however.

“I took her in,” repeated the sailor from the floor. “You see, Doctor, her son took her house to use for his own family when her man died, and then she had nowhere to go.”

I thought I had known the meaning of “Given to hospitality”—but this old man of the sea had graduated from a more advanced school than I.

“Tell us about yourself, Mr. Martin. Why do you want to see me?”

The uncombed hair and unshaven beard, the sordid rags of the bedding, and the fact that there was not even a fire in the cracked stove couldn’t hide the fact that there was a man with like passions to myself in the poor half-paralyzed body that lay stretched before me.

“Well, Doctor, the Lord has put his hand down on me, and here I am, and I can’t do a thing, except what the old lady does for me—Mrs. George Green, she is—what spent one winter at hospital. I owns this house, and I gave her room, and now she bides by me when she could go to her sister what has a comfortable house, seeing she has her ‘bit o’ Government’ (twenty dollars per year). She’d take her too, but her won’t leave me to bide here and perish like a dog.”

The old lady had noticed me looking at the strange place for a sick man to be lying. “I keeps he out there, Doctor,” she apologized, “cos he can’t move hisself, and I can’t move he either, so he bides there between the stove and the door so when I be’s out he can tend both so long as there be’s any wood, that is.”

“You has to walk round he,” was her apology, a quick reply to the doubt she saw in my eyes as to the propriety of the arrangement.

“When did he get the stroke?”

“Last fall, twelve month, Doctor. He never wanted for nothing till then. Sister come to see him. She said she couldn’t cure he, and his leg be getting worse all the time. Firewood is the trouble, when t’ snow comes t’ik I can’t get it and there be no one to cut a junk off for we neither.”

“How do you get food?”

“I caught a barrel of fish myself and me and Mr. Martin together got a barrel before he was took.”

“I can catch ’em yet, I can,” came from the rag heap, “that be, so long as I can get into t’ boat.”

“The Government ’lows me twenty dollars a year, but I ain’t got it yet t’ year. I most wishes you might be able to say a word for me—but the trouble is t’ firing, we can’t get it, nohow.”

Then in a quieter tone he went on, “I ’lowed the Lord would take me last winter, Doctor. Charley from t’ Crick took care of we, and he were to have my t’ings. He had my gun, and he have my table and a few t’ings. I got part of a barrel o’ flour for myself for my fishing punt and one net, and Jim, he fished the other two for we on halves, and so us got flour enough, and t’ old lady had hers from her Government—but t’ molasses were two dollars and forty cents a gallon and sour at that, Doctor. Us only had one bit of meat t’ winter, ’cept a bit a neighbor sent over now and then, and there aren’t ne’er a one near by now to spare any. Thirty-two pounds of oleo us had and isn’t all out yet, t’ank God. That’s all us had—flour’n molasses and grease.”

“And a bit of sugar,” said the old lady, producing an old tin. “T’ merchant let us have it for ten cents.” She showed it me with a touch again of that pride that possession gives. But it was damp brown molasses sugar at that.

“How long does a barrel of flour last you two?” To be quite accurate, she led me over to “the bar’l.” There was about six inches left at the bottom.

“Us got he last October out of my Government’ and us had a bit left when he come. No, us don’t eat much, no more’n some birds, I’m thinking.”

I caught a merry twinkle in her eye. “You’ve got some left still?” I ventured. It seemed rather an unkind remark after it had slipped out, but she answered:

“Oh yes, bless the Lord, enough still for a time,” and she carefully covered up her most valuable possession.

Then the old man began, “You sees, Doctor, I’se been a sailor overseas. I’se been all over t’ world. I knows Plymouth Hoe as well as I know these rocks. A bad man—a bad man—used to swear powerful. And I didn’t care for nothing whiles I had my health. That’s why t’ Lord put His hand down on me. But I did have hopes He’d take me last winter. But maybe He forgot. The nurse, she come on dogs to see me, and she give me this blanket, and it be all right, t’ank the Lord, in t’ summer. But it’s getting cold o’ nights now, and no fire neither. Yes, I had another blanket. But she wore out, and I had to patch her. T’ school teacher from America send we a fine dickey for out hunting, so I split the fur off her, and sewed her into my blanket,” and he showed me his second and last covering, a shoddy border with a split open “kossak” or outside dickey, regularly crucified into the middle of the so-called “blanket.”

“She don’t hold much warmth,” he remarked, philosophically, holding up the covering in question in his well hand. “I did ’low some one might like to come here to stay t’ winter in return for finding t’ wood for we. You see I owns this house,” he added, with all the savour of sailors who have wandered much without any home or property of their own.

“But, my dear Mr. Martin, wherever would you put him if he did stay?” as I looked apprehensively around.

“Oh, there be’s room for two on the lofting,” he said, “though I has my two nets up there, and my cast net. I ’lows I could change them for a bar’l of flour,” he suddenly interjected as this thought of a second line of defence flashed across his mind. “Charley, he wanted them from me last winter, but I wouldn’t part with them. I’ve kept ’em for t’ old woman,” he said in a half whisper. “Maybe she’ll need ’em one of these days. No one can get them there” he broke in, in a defiant tone. And he looked fiercely up through the hole into the loft, as if, though he couldn’t get up to defend these nets, he kept continuous guard beneath. I hoped he might not think that I had any designs on them, and looked the other way, almost blushingly.

While we were talking it had begun to rain torrentially outside. The little guide lady moved for the first time to avoid a bad drip. Indeed I had forgotten her, and now she moved only to cover better the fat baby, for the rain was without partiality descending equally through the roof on the Just and Unjust alike.

The old lady also rose abruptly and improvised a temporary dam to keep the rising flood on the floor from overwhelming the old sailor.

“He can’t move, you see,” she apologized to me as she paused before me.

“Can’t swim, I suppose,” I hazarded. Again the merry twinkle of her black eyes in these most depressing circumstances suggested how the soul can rise above things material.

“Oh, I has a bit o’ felt to mend he with,” she added, referring to the roof, “but Mr. Martin, he can’t climb any longer” as if she thought of him still as he used to be lying out on a yardarm reefing a topsail in a gale of wind on the Atlantic. “He can’t climb now—and I am no good to get on a roof myself. Sixty-eight is getting on, you knows, Doctor.”

“Don’t apologize. Why doesn’t your neighbor come in and mend it for you?” I asked.

“Oh, he says he has no time.”

“Some folks think they won’t have time to come when Gabriel blows the trumpet for them,” I replied.

“ ’Deed they won’t, Doctor. But them aren’t the busy ones here,” and she looked at the broken man on the rag heap as much as to say, “that’s not his kind, Doctor.”

“You and Mr. Martin have had a lot of experience in this world,” I said. “Is it a kind world, or a cruel one?”

“The most folks is kind, Doctor, but them doesn’t all think.”

“Mrs. Green,” I asked, “why don’t you leave this house and go to your sister? I can send you down in a motor boat.”

“What’ll happen to he if I goes away now, Doctor? He were good to me, and took me in when I had no home.”

“And what’ll happen to him if you do stay here into November? You know you can’t get fire for kindling till Xmas. You’ll be warm and fed with your sister anyhow.”

“I would’t leave he now,” she said, and her bright eye again caught mine. I almost thought she winked. Anyhow her eyes just said, “Quit fooling.” And once again in these meanest of material surroundings I felt like a child learning some new truth.

It was obvious that Mr. Cyril Martin was on his beam ends, like a certain other sailor who said, “No sun appeared in many days, and no small tempest lay over us, and all hope that we should be saved was then taken away. Yet I believed the Lord.”

I had been nearly two hours in the house. Both the man and the woman had had a strange attraction for me. Their simple directness made me feel exactly as if I were myself in their position, with their problems to face. They did not ask for a thing. Only they put it as if it were some extraneous problem they wanted advice upon. It allowed one’s mind to forget the continuous demand for help that it is our lot in life to have to meet, and instead of resenting, however distantly, another possible attempt to get things, one felt all the joy of an adventure. Yet if his view was right that it was “the Lord putting his hand down on him,” what was the good of our struggling?

I put it to him plainly as such. He said nothing, evidently waiting for me to show my hand.

“I know I should struggle for all I was worth—that’s what God does it for; to wake us up to do things worth while,” I suggested.

To my surprise Mr. Martin began to cry. “You’se English,” he stammered. “My father was English. Come from Dorsetshire.” And his fierce black eyes looked up through his tears, and the smile of the sun chasing clouds away broke all over his face. “Of course the Lord will help all He can,” he began. This was his fixed intuition—though I’m not sure he saw the depth of it.

“Yes, I expect He always does better than we could. Now, would you like to pray before I go?”

“I was going to ask you,” he said. The burden of his petition was just “We thanks you, Lord, for all you has done for we.”

I went away almost ashamed of my water-tight boots and oilskins compared with his rags. I felt I had been given the best of any morning’s blessings, both a challenge and a stimulus to my faith in life. Have you ever been absolutely convinced that the Lord needed your help? It seems a pity sometimes these pleasures can’t be purchased. Life is such a joyous venture, but life’s tragedies seem so momentous. Horatius called for men to stand at his right hand and hold the Tiber bridge against ten thousand. Men jumped for the honor and joy of it. It was David who said, “Thou wilt show me the path of life. At thy right hand are pleasures, forevermore.” (Ps. 16:11.) There can be no other satisfactory explanation of our temporary stay on earth.

We left what we could to tide matters over for a time, and promised to get him removed to the “House of the Poor” at the capital—where at least he would be fed and warmed and sufficiently clad. In this we were eventually successful. But it seemed so poor at best—to remove this old seafarer from every one whom he knew and from his life environment to await death among strangers in a city. We have no home in the north for the deserving aged. All worn-out old folk suffer with the dread of this ending. But so far it has been all we can do, and the profound thanks of the old couple hurt like a knife—for we had not been able “to do unto the least of these” that which we should have liked them to do for us in their places.