“You must tell me when to change them,” said the blind boy.
He stretched out his joined hands farther in the direction indicated by his companion and repeated with the others, after the priest, his little voice lost in the great upward rush of the supplications of the thousands around him, “Lord! Lord! Our sole trust is in Thee!”
The priest’s voice soared into a glorious note of song, in which the multitude joined, their eyes on him, their faces solemn in expectation. The priest sang a line, the multitude chanted a response; the man’s voice ran out again, yearning, beseeching, the voice of the multitude rose thousand-fold in answer. The earth seemed to shake in unison, the low-hanging, heavy gray clouds to send back the sound. The chanting, imploring, impassioned voice of the throng seemed more alive than its multitudinous bodies, rapt into utter stillness.
“Is it thus that I should hold my hands?” whispered the blind boy after a time.
“No, now the procession has just come into the other end of the square,” said the crippled child. With an effort he leaned, took the little white fingers again, and pointed them another way.
“So?” asked the blind child humbly.
“Yes, so,” answered the other. He tried to put his own shapeless stumps together in the attitude of prayer and began to sing with the pilgrims now defiling before them in endless lines, “Praise! All praise to Thee! Praise, all praise to Thee, Lord God!” The pilgrims were passing by, now, in single file, each with his long white taper, burning yellow in the gray light of the gray day. Their voices were loud and personal, each one as he passed being heard for an instant alone. “Glory! Glory to Thee!” they all sang the propitiatory words together, over and over, a hundred times repeated—the old wrinkled peasants in their blouses; the elegant officers in their well-cut uniforms; the stout elderly merchants; the thin, weedy boys; the white-faced, shaven priests; the black men from Senegal with bushy, woolly hair; the tall, fair-haired man from England; the occasional soldier on leave in his shapeless, faded, blue-gray uniform. Above all their voices rose the silver bugle-like call of the priest, burning, devouring in its ardor, “Brothers! Brothers! with all your souls, now. GLORY BE TO THEE! Oh, Lord, save us, for we perish! Lord, our trust is in Thee. Praised be Thy name!”
With each clamorous exhortation, repeated clamorously by all those imploring voices, he lifted the multitude up another step toward the great moment of awe and faith. The tears were streaming down the faces of many of the women in the crowd. The little boy’s mother sobbed loudly, and prayed with all her might.
The march past of the innumerable men, the incessant flickering passage of their pale-yellow lights, the never-ending procession of their pale, anxious faces, became an obsession. It seemed that every one, everywhere in the world, was marching together, singing and praying, hoping against hope for a miracle.
“Isn’t it time to change my hands?” asked the little blind boy desperately. “I have heard so many people pass. I am very, very tired.”