We arrived at Lourdes at about four o'clock on Saturday afternoon, after just thirty hours' travelling, and landed into a seething tumult of departing pilgrims, bullock-wagons, carriages, and electric trams. Losing sight of Bettany, I found myself looking vaguely round for some kind of conveyance, in company with the Bishop and his chaplain; and between us we managed to secure also a seat for our poor fellow-traveller from Essex, for whom we afterwards discovered a moderately quiet bedroom in our hotel.
After tea, the Bishop asked me to accompany him in a stroll round the town and shrine, during which I learned a little about Lourdes, and a good deal about my companion. Half-way between the plains and the higher ranges of the Pyrenees, Lourdes itself lies in a valley, bisected by the Gave, a tumbling mountain stream that supplies the holy water to the grotto and the piscines, or invalid baths. The town itself, with its narrow, winding streets, strung, as it were, between the fourteenth-century château on the one side and the nineteenth-century church that surmounts the shrine, on the other, is quite the most remarkable combination of mediævalism and modernity that I have seen; while its crowded, ever-changing population must be, I suppose, the saddest, oddest, and perhaps the most unique in both the hemispheres. As we walked down towards the shrine, we met returning most of those who had gathered round the great square for the daily blessing of the sick; and passing through them we must have heard, I should think, almost every dialect of Europe, Flemish perhaps predominant, since this was the last day of a great Belgian pilgrimage, but German, Italian, English, Spanish, and of course French, at nearly every step.
Every now and again, too, some ardent man or woman, seeing the big amethyst ring on my friend's finger, would kneel down to kiss it and receive his blessing, caring nothing for his difference of language and nationality, and everything for his holy office in their common church. Once or twice he smiled gently when they had gone their fervent way, clasping their votive candles or little bottles of sacred mountain water, and once I ventured to press him a trifle as to his personal faith in the Lourdes miracles. But he was a statesman, as I discovered, no less than a saint, and would confess to no more than a belief that these dear people obtained perhaps a score of spiritual to each merely temporal favour. And surely these were after all the better?
The actual grotto, where fifty-two years ago the little Bernadette saw her visions of the Blessed Mary, lies now about a hundred yards from the river's edge, along which a palisaded embankment has been built, that is apt however, after sudden storms, to be pretty often under water. It is really a cave set in a large rock around which, one above the other, have since been built three churches, the topmost, with its tall and slender spire, being perhaps the most prominent landmark for a good many miles around. With its walls polished by the elbows and fingers of countless thousands of pilgrims, this little cavern contains an altar before which, in the open air, are ranged several rows of seats for worshippers at the shrine, and where, as I afterwards learned from a disappointed Irish priest, it is considered a very special privilege to say Mass.
Next to the grotto are the baths, where the sick are immersed, and from which bottles of the holy water can be carried away to all parts of the world; and to the left and above this is the great church, the lowest and largest of the three that now surmount the rock. The entrance to this church stands upon a broad terrace above the immense open amphitheatre, about which, in a circle some half a mile in circumference, gather the sick people and their helpers and relations for the afternoon passing of the Host. It is at this ceremony that the majority of the miracles take place, of which, I suppose, the crutches, splints, spinal jackets, and other surgical appliances that hang rusting among the wild geraniums over the entrance to the grotto are to be taken as partial evidences.
There were still some poor sufferers waiting outside the piscines, and a few others praying before the grotto; and pausing for a moment to watch them and the various passers-by, one could not help being very forcibly struck with the all-pervading atmosphere of pity. Sights that elsewhere would have been veiled from the daylight are here frankly exposed, not to a kind of shuddering, if sympathetic horror, but as pitiful, broken flowers to be gathered up, and laid with prayers upon the altar of mercy. We concluded our little tour with a visit to the Bureau des Contestations, the offices where the doctors attached to the grotto—one of them an Englishman—receive and classify the histories of the cures, examine the alleged miraculés, deprecating the excited allegations of some, postponing their verdicts upon others, and recording what seem to them, among a host of claims, to be genuine cases of Divine interposition. Both the doctors present when we arrived, and to whom Bettany, who had joined us, now introduced me, were extremely courteous and only too anxious to lay before me all the material at their command. Both, as I could see at once, were men accustomed to deal with human nature of the type and under the conditions that Lourdes presents, and it was therefore with very great diffidence that I found myself even mentally criticising their results. Nevertheless it is true, I think, that nothing approaching to ordinary, exact scientific observation, as the modern medical world understands it, is carried out at Lourdes; I doubt indeed if it would be possible; and I saw no instance, either then or later, of a Lourdes cure that could not be explained upon the observed and established lines of mental suggestion, or, apart from this, could bear a thorough cross-examination. Needless to say, the two doctors, both ardent and devout Roman Catholics, entirely disagreed with me, and assured me that after twenty years at the shrine they were only the more convinced of Our Lady's blesséd and material favours. And perhaps, after all, it is merely a question of terminology.
But it is not until one has actually seen the procession of the Host at the afternoon service in the amphitheatre that one has penetrated, as it were, into the very heart of Lourdes. And so it was not, perhaps, until three o'clock on the next afternoon that I found myself laid under the full power of the strange, half-intoxicating, half-repellent spell of this almost passionately fervent and yet at the same time strangely commercial factory of miracles. All the morning, ever since the very early hours, special trains had been rolling into the station, carrying, as we learned at breakfast, a pilgrimage, ten thousand strong, from the towns and villages of Toulouse. At every turn we met them, groups of swarthy, and for the most part stunted, men and women, with sombre, toil-worn faces, yet lit, in the majority of cases, with a deep-burning and almost apostolic faith. Gathered about their parish priests, buying rosaries and trinkets, little images of Bernadette Soubirous (sold by her numerous relatives, most of whom have already, in one way and another, made considerable fortunes out of her vision), they filled the narrow streets to overflowing, ardent, undoubting, agog for the least whisper of some strange and fortunate miracle. And needless to say such whispers were plentiful enough. Just before noon, for instance, an apple-faced sister, collecting money from the more prosperous visitors at such hotels as ours for the free hostelries that are open elsewhere to the poor, told us with beaming smiles of a poor girl, with a large ulcer upon her arm that had resisted all treatment for years. Last night she had dipped it into the waters, and lo, this morning the disease had utterly vanished, and her skin was as the skin of a little child! There is a young priest here, a fine, upstanding fellow, who is a qualified doctor, and has been a house-surgeon at one of our London hospitals. He is trying hard, I can see, to square his scientific prejudices, as he would call them, with his religious desire to believe in these miracles. And at this he turned to me with something of triumph.
"If we could only find her out now," he said, "how would you account for that?"
But on closer inquiry we discovered, alas, that the sister had not herself seen the ulcer before the cure was wrought; and later on in the day the doctors at the bureau assured me that no reports of such an incident had reached them. And we never succeeded in finding the girl, although the rumour of her cure had already spread like wildfire, and will soon, no doubt, be reported as a definite miracle in cottages a thousand miles from here.