by Paul Butler
“Let go,” she said, brandishing her captured arm as though for the benefit of passersby. “Let go,” she repeated, eyes like needle points. He had to release her, of course. An elderly nun had already turned her head in his direction. A middle-aged couple close behind them ceased their genial chatter and became silent. Where had they come from? The place had been empty a moment before. Grenfell sensed the man behind him might be planning a rescue.
His face burned and he felt himself shrink. He was ashamed of his embarrassment, ashamed that he needed anything from her, and ashamed that to any witness he must seem exactly like the spurned lover of Bleaker’s mistaken narrative, a man unable to accept defeat. He would like to put all of them right on the matter—the nun, the middle-aged couple, and Florence herself—and shout out the truth, that he grabbed Florence’s wrist not though thwarted passion but in pure and righteous fury. She could be as haughty as she liked, but he was above her, not below her, and up until last evening she had been at least as much pursuer as he. She had in fact been one speck in that swirl of particles that orbit a man of growing stature. Ultimately she was the one who would have ended up discarded. No matter how charming a pastime Nurse Mills had been for him over the last few days, she was quite inappropriate for consideration as a wife. He would like to have said this, too. Nurses are merely a training ground for the amorous doctor—everyone knew that—the soft bedding beneath his early mistakes.
***
Injustice digs inside him as he hears her “Let go” again. It was all she would say, delivered first calmly but with determined eyes, repeated with voice rising and wrist waving like a tethered flag. He relives it over and over, and each time there is a subtle difference, a shadow on her face he hadn’t seen before, a lengthier pause as he meets her defiance.
She moved away from him, no backwards turn, no discernible sorrow or penitence in her step, callous as an insect as she disappeared with clattering heels into the residency entrance. The middle-aged couple had passed him, the man making a satisfied noise, both of them breathing pale funnels into the cooling autumn air.
How profoundly unsettling it is, he thinks, to be rejected by someone you planned to reject yourself. It is like a pauper spurning a prince, a reversal of all perceived order and deserving. Yet it happened before, and the deep shadows of that summer two years ago hover over him ominously: the shaded spot on the riverbank, the swallows darting overhead like missiles, his breath heavy, pulse racing with agitation. He’d been barely fifteen then, and the village girl had come with him willingly. Willingly, like Florence Mills.
His comeuppance at the river had long turned into a mere ripple, a distant warning of the dangers of not achieving all he needed to achieve. But now, with her “Let go” and her callous, insect disappearance into the rock wall of the mews that houses her own rooms, Nurse Mills has made him question it all again.
He thinks of his rival, hardly a man, really, more a poor Tom O’Bedlam stuffed uncomfortably into a doctor’s garb. Is this what the world wants? A man stripped of dignity, unable to work, inadequate in every respect? Clearly the wretches under Moody’s tent demanded it. Submission and collapse, the weepier the better, were a vital part of their redemption. He has read about women and love, how it is the mother in them that is drawn into romance. He has always hoped it wasn’t true. It seems so unfair that a man should be penalized for being able to look after himself.
The mews has become quiet now, the middle-aged couple mysteriously gone, the nun somewhere inside the high wall and burning orange lights.
He feels calmer suddenly. Another light comes alive in the residence, perhaps Florence’s, maybe the aged nun’s. It’s all part of the plan, he thinks, a rounding-up of education. Moody and the tent still burns within him, and he wishes he still had his notes. The man had hit upon something. Abject though the appeal was, there was a fire in it, an antidote to the utter greyness of his father’s religion. It possessed a taste of the future. And it is true, after all; he has his calling, too, as real as Moody’s. He has a fire within him, a hunger that won’t let him be, half of it ambition, half of it a fury at the sheer waste of it—those diseases that eat away at women and men because nobody prevents them; the bodies that destroy themselves through alcohol because the world is too apathetic to limit its use. The whole population of the earth, it seems, is riddled with disease, poverty, ignorance, and want, and no one is taking charge. Who better than a doctor to address this need? Who better than a man like himself, who can see the scale of it and who can act while the authorities dither?
There can be no lasting surprise, no permanent disappointment in tonight. He always knew he must forge through life, that there would be confusion, bumps, and grazes along the way. Florence is nothing but a dog scrap, discarded by herself rather than by him. Either way, it hardly matters. The particles still swirl around him, sensing his mission and drive. Like a planet gathering matter as it turns, his gravity will increase and more will be drawn into orbit around him. He will soldier on and he will succeed.
Only one suspicion rises from the settling unrest, the same feeling that came on the heels of that earlier humiliation. It made sense in Parkgate, but here, in the centre of this neat courtyard with its fortress walls, enclosed, in turn, by walls and spires ancient and modern for many miles around, its logic seems inverted. But the words form clearly enough: London is the place from which he must escape.
Grenfell listens for a moment to the distant rumble of hooves and omnibus wheels. There is a common enough saying to cover the feeling. A prophet is not recognized in his own country. The whole of England—not merely Parkgate—is his own country. How can a man truly distinguish himself when he’s surrounded by so many who to all outward appearances are just like himself? He’d thought briefly of India when his mind was bruised by the Parkgate girl and the brothers, but India was crowded these days.
He breathes in the night slowly, and knows, with that infallible instinct of a man in the midst of a life change, that this taste of London is one of a diminishing number. An elsewhere awaits.
— Chapter Twenty-Two —
April 1908: St. Anthony, Northern Newfoundland
***
Dead as it is, the house is not silent. Brittle coughs from the grandfather clock parcel out time. Boards creak and windows rattle as though he were in a ship’s cabin. Again Grenfell looks down at the soaked cabbage and thick gravy, the round pools of grease which elongate to ovals when a hint of breeze creeps through the walls. He finds he can’t move his fingers toward the cutlery.
It’s been burning him up all day, this sense of being lost upon some vast, indefinable plain. On one horizon is triumph, on the other calamity. His life is snailing toward the former, but so slowly he fears he will wither and die long before he reaches the Promised Land.
But then, he tells himself, he has his new bride now. Surely Anne Elizabeth will change everything. He tries to recall the promise of their first meeting two years ago, the excitement in her smile as he described the work. Encouraged by the warmth largely absent from her father—his real fundraising target for that evening—he let his defences down and even became passionate.
“I was prepared for many depressing sights among the half-breeds of the north,” he told her, “but you cannot imagine the shock of seeing one’s own race living in such poverty and ignorance.”
Light shifted through the crystal decanter on the table, sparkling upon her earrings as she leaned earnestly toward the table and toward him.
“It must be such a very great challenge to one’s faith, Dr. Grenfell.”
Her fingers reached and held onto the stem of her glass, but when the waiter filled it she drew them away as though wine was not the purpose of the gesture.
Grenfell remembers weighing the moment, feeling possibilities. Everything about the young woman’s manner was full of expectation and involvement. But more than this
, there were two quite specific clues. The first was in her language. She had echoed his use of “one’s” as a pronoun. She’d made the subject as much her concern as his. The second clue was in the way she had gripped her glass stem. It was an action which suggested acceptance of responsibility; she would not decline this cup.
Grenfell’s mind moved very quickly from his original aim—a donation to the mission from the MacClanahan family—to a far greater prize, the acquiring of which would lead to a rich stream of revenue in perpetuity.
“A challenge but a tonic, too, Miss MacClanahan,” he said softly. “It strengthens one’s faith immeasurably. One sees oneself as one would have been if one’s line had been disconnected for several generations from civilization. Their disadvantages, when we compare ourselves, are so enormous. But when one is over the shock, one finds these are as nothing to our similarities.”
“I’m sure, Dr. Grenfell,” she said, the moisture of sentiment in her eyes.
***
He listens to the wind moaning and tries to transform the sound. In a few months now, he tells himself, Anne herself will be here, and her arrival will haul the collective imagination of friends and relatives, worthies and admirers throughout the state of Michigan. Bells jingle faintly, but the wind is still mournful; his mood refuses to lift. Grenfell can’t help shaking the feeling that it’s all too late, that the stars are refusing to align the way they should.
The gloom came in part with the large yet plain Easter meal Mrs. Evans, his housekeeper, put before him a few minutes ago. The smell of over-boiled cabbage, powdered gravy, and slightly burned meat combines with the discontented yaps and howls of the sled dogs outside, yielding a flavour of the terminally commonplace. This, and the recent memory of the church organ’s awful wheezing and the droning of the minister, gives him the feeling that the pall of the mundane will hang around him to the grave no matter where he travels.
He could not be farther from the landscape of inspiration, certainly—that exotic “frozen north,” of quaint and kindly natives, steely trappers, and calloused-handed migrant sailors he describes in his lectures. And just lately, the oddest feeling has been creeping upon him in the dark, especially when he hears the trickle and dollop of melting ice on a warm day. He feels that the waters, rivers, and streams that surround the tundra here in St. Anthony are indistinguishable from the dead waters circling in upon themselves around the barrens of Parkgate, that the two places are mysteriously joined by the same spirit of stagnation.
But this is the price, the nature of the dull purgatory through which he must earn his fame. And it’s true, if he weighs the thing up dispassionately, he’s closer to success than ever before. The lectures were more crowded this year than the year before. His name is spreading by newsprint and cable. And yes, he reminds himself, he’s soon to marry the daughter of one of Chicago’s most prosperous and respected families. His three hundred reindeer have created a stir of newspaper interest. He felt like Noah when, the animals’ bells jingling in his ear, he first tasted the milk. Close by, a huge-eyed fawn licked its lips and stood rear end first after its nap. Milk was sweet and the cheese promising, and already the beasts were multiplying. A reindeer a fortnight could be slaughtered without endangering the herd.
But in this strange begrudging land, even this success has created opposition. Reindeer hooves make potholes in the snow, and there have been murmurings among the trappers about dogs breaking their legs. The Lapp herders also are sullen and brooding. Snow and wind aside, he has found himself thinking, he could bring paradise here easily enough were it not for the people.
At the service today, he glanced back from the front pew, and then had to look again as something caught his eye. In the shadowy rear of the building, close to the door, stood two sullen young men. When he glanced again just before the final hymn, he saw them shuffling out of the church. He recalled a riverbank near Parkgate, and the feel of rough hands against his collar. They weren’t the same people, of course, had little in common, no doubt. But there was a similarity in their posture, something both defiant and morose. The people from the past, it seemed, as well as the water, were collecting in pools, stagnating, refusing to drain from the present.
Things have changed for the better in his grand plan, but the increments are so agonizingly slow. And there are other dangers. The impossible glamour of the north makes headlines while no other news exists to claim attention. But there was always talk of expeditions north or south to claim the very Poles. Another Discovery expedition, or perhaps a war in which Great Britain becomes involved, would submerge him entirely, and make him seem what he is, just another middle-aged doctor in a barren outpost of a foreign land, working under the auspices of a home-based mission. How is this so very different from the provincial vicar and schoolmaster who fathered him? His dream of breaking away, of creating a society in his own name, with subscribers brought on board by his wife and himself, would merely fade into the winter snow.
He stares at the steam curling up from his plate, picks up his fork, and lets it rest on the cabbage. Water rises like tiny moats around the prongs. And then there is Anne, gentle, trusting Anne. Last fall he saw the sparkle of excitement in her eyes tinged by another quality—something quivering and confused. He realized even at the time the new emotion was trepidation. Fear of the cold, fear of isolation. Never has she been far from the theatre, from lively, educated conversation. He can’t quite imagine her here listening to the dogs and the house creaking in the wind, talking to Mrs. Evans about the salt beef and the window fastenings when winter begins to rage.
And were this not enough, something else has infected his optimism, something he scarcely dares to name. Brin, his lead dog, gives a long, sustained howl, and the noise seems like the very essence of an almost desperate gloom. Florence, the nurse, and her dipsomaniac husband are on his trail.
Pride, like a shell, hard but fragile, has caused him to make a game of his fear. He’s taken to calling his crafty-eyed black and white dog Spy, after Florence’s husband. There’s something in his sideways look, a furtive quality that truly reminds him of the man, and the name he secretly gave to him long ago when he realized he had been followed from the Music Hall, to the law courts, to the house of Dr. Johnson. Moody, the stoic of the group—reliable and plodding—was named two years ago; some instinct told him to litter the trivia of his life with clues as to his vocation. Someday someone would write his biography. He would be studied as D. L. Moody is studied. One has to provide nuggets, and what better, more touching tribute to his own spiritual mentor, Moody, than to name a much-loved animal after him? This would especially please Americans; they loved to elevate nature to the testing ground through which one can prove one’s own spirituality. He would be seen as the man who encounters God in all living things.
Since his return from New York, he has noticed a penetrating quality in the brute’s eyes, not exactly sly, but challenging, almost insolent. It made him think of Florence Mills. He’d found comfort in the devotion of the youngest of the pack, the handsome, daring, athletic one with the reddish coat and christened him Watch, remembering a long-ago riposte to his rival.
“If you followed me,” the young inebriate said quietly under Moody’s tent, “then you’re the spy now.”
“I don’t spy,” Grenfell replied. “I watch.”
There seemed a world of difference at the time, and still does. Grenfell was sober and strategic. He didn’t collapse in an abject heap and beg for some other, Moody the evangelist, Florence Mills, or the bottle, to save him. Still, there was one moment in time. The courtyard outside the nurses’ residence, a wrist grabbed, witnesses—that middle-aged couple and aged nun—present; to them Grenfell must have seemed the spy, and the memory still smarts.
He liked to combat confusion head-on. Naming the dogs this way helped build delineating walls between himself and his antagonists. He had already soared far beyond the sp
ectres which had descended upon him in New York. Like opposing poles of a magnet, Moody and Spy would continue to propel Watch, keep him going onwards and upwards.
But now, as he listens, he realizes his bravado has tricked him. The yowls are bringing the past much closer to him than he would like. The young doctor, Florence, and his own unhappy self have crept stealthily into his northern hideout because he allowed the dogs, like mummers in a play, to take on symbolic form. They have become more than themselves.
Foulness lurks in the memory of London. So much of himself given away, so much revealed, and in the end spilled into Florence’s ears. Her stoicism and her pristine idealism convinced him she was safe for a dalliance. He had imagined that, when he left her, she would mourn him as a casualty of memory, would continue to honour him as greatness claimed him. Many nurses act in such a manner, staring off at some faraway beacon of virtue, but not Nurse Mills. She shared his secrets with his rival, and ridiculed him in his own workplace. She looked into his face with contempt.
A growl dies away into silence. Now the threat has returned in a real and tangible form. When first he glimpsed the thin, hollow-cheeked woman in the hotel lobby in New York, he thought of Florence Mills, but not because he believed there was any serious chance the woman might be her. Only when she returned his gaze, causing him to look at her shuffling companion, did he realize the truth. Here they were, the two of them, as unlikely a couple of tormentors as one could imagine. Still, he had shrugged off the sighting as a man might laugh too heartily at a black cat scampering across his path.
But then she turned up at his lecture. Her white hand emerged from the darkness at the back of the theatre, and he heard her strained but familiar voice, its upright, calm, yet rather insistent tone weaving into perceived untruths. Perhaps she expected him to crumble, but he was long past any such danger. He had told the story of Moody’s tent so many times it was no longer a borrowed tale. He had made it his own, and legitimately. There had been inspiration, though he had scoffed at the time. Moody, the showman, the zealot, was an example to follow. All around England, in the town and country, ministers crawled out of their churches on Sunday, dutifully shook the hands of the local gentry after reading from the tracks they suggested. Moody was a fire to the damp cloth of his father’s tribe of priests. His religion was real, an entity of portent and danger. Florence turning up had proved that again. She was not merely an unwelcome coincidence as he had believed in the hotel lobby, but an invasion, malignant and planned.