Читать книгу Forty Years for Labrador - Wilfred T. Grenfell - Страница 3

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A biologist, watching one animal in his vivarium to see how an experiment turns out, expects to arrive nearer the truth as time elapses and the end draws near. Just so, spectators watching a runner in a race get more and more interested as the last lap approaches and the goal looms in sight. Then the runner's achievement is easier to appraise. Life's struggle, moreover, becomes increasingly interesting now that philosophers again permit us to regard results as dependent upon causes which are under the control of the individual runner to a very large extent.

The title of this new record has been changed, to suggest that this is the last lap, and that deductions from the facts may be expected to be more mature and therefore more worth while, provided they are honest. The consciousness of having to live alongside the first venture into autobiography involved a kind of vivisection; for to have to tell the truth about one's real self carries with it the inescapable reproach of nudism, however salutary that may be for one's spiritual welfare, or however interesting to others. This effort is more like a 'last testament'; and it is easier for a doctor to see the reasonableness of offering to a school of anatomy that which he cannot take with him, and which should be more useful for dissecting than for any other purpose.

The purpose of this book is the same as that of its predecessor, A Labrador Doctor, written many years ago in response to the persuasion of friends, as a record of a humble competitor in the race of life who was pledged to the utmost of his ability to carry the colours of the Christian theory into practice. To endeavour to foist the story of any one competitor on to the attention of a busy world would be unpardonable were it not for the generous insistence of a still larger circle of friends that the record be brought as closely up to date as the writer of any autobiography can expect to bring it—though the picture, of course, cannot be completed this side the Great Divide.

Naturally, the records of childhood and youth must stand unchanged. Otherwise the entire book has been rewritten, with the better perspective and, one hopes, the generally accorded riper wisdom of age. The last chapter, on my religious life, has been this time entitled 'Salaam,' in order to carry all the old English meaning which the word 'farewell' bore—'God be with you till we meet.'

Many new activities have been undertaken since the old book, A Labrador Doctor, appeared. Many new ventures have been entered upon and new methods devised to carry to the down-and-out brother, in ways he cannot mistake as being messages of love, that reflection of Divine love which, wherever it has been intelligently exhibited, has remade man, and through him is remaking this world. The years have left such ineffaceable convictions of the truth of this that I have at last accumulated the conceit which encourages me not merely to send a new edition to the press, but a new book.

As for this effort in the North, what is it? Is it dead or alive? If growth is a sign of life, I venture to believe that this record of the past nearly fifteen years since my pen was laid down will show that the work has more than its pristine vitality, and is just now entering upon a new era of enlarged service.

But for the hundreds of colleagues who have so self-effacingly 'lent more power to my elbow,' the work would never have been possible at all. They are far too numerous for me to record their names or their service individually here; but their imprint is indelible, both in our hearts and on the lives of the fishermen.

To my wife, who was willing to leave all the best which the civilized world can offer to share my life, both on this lonely shore and in the infinitely more difficult and prosaic task of working for the Coast in the world outside, I want to dedicate this book. Like its predecessor, it would never have come into being but for her.

W. G.