In such an atmosphere then, and under a cloudless, burning sky, we gathered in the afternoon, some fourteen thousand strong, in a vast circle before the steps of the grotto church. Quite early the brancardiers, a self-appointed order of workers, who assist in transporting the sick, had been busy bringing their charges to the great square; so that the innermost row of the waiting host was already entirely composed of sufferers praying to be healed. Marching up and down before them, clad in their robes of office, were the various priests who had come with them, telling their beads, and invoking the multitudes to prayer. As doctor to our own little party, Bettany enabled me to step within the ring, and walking with him, before the service, I made a slow round of the circle, beholding such a clinic as could be seen, I suppose, nowhere else in the world—the clinic of Our Lady of Lourdes, and one that seemed to me to contain, on this particular afternoon, pretty nearly every malady under the sun.
"Seigneur, Seigneur, ayez pitié de moi." "Mein Herr und mein Gott." "Lord save us, or we perish." "Hail, Mary, blessed among women." "Seigneur, Seigneur, ayez pitié de moi." In every tongue, as we walked round, the age-old cries for mercy rang in our ears, from a faith that it was impossible to doubt, and from a depth of human need that here, at any rate, nothing short of the Divine might satisfy.
Presently, just as we had made our way back to our own little party, of whom many, hitherto unsuspected, had now, by kneeling in the front row, tacitly declared themselves to be in need of physical healing, a new and solemn sound began to break upon our ears—the sonorous chanting of men's voices on the way up from the grotto in a long and slow procession. "Ave, Ave, Ave Maria," marching four abreast they now came into sight, bearing lighted candles in their hands, and in an apparently endless succession, to turn presently into the great empty space about which the rest of us were gathered. Up the centre of this they now marched, all the able-bodied men of the Toulouse pilgrimage, accompanied by many of their priests, singing the Lourdes hymn, and massing themselves at last upon the broad terrace before the grotto church. Some twenty minutes it must have taken for them thus to file past us; and finally, under a canopy borne by four stalwart attendants, came the officiating priest, clad in his heavy and gorgeous robes, and bearing before him the golden, flame-shaped monstrance in whose centre rested, as all this expectant gathering believed, the actual and visible body of the Christ Himself. As they passed us I could see that the arduous task, under this thrilling June sun, of thus holding up his Saviour to each of these thousand sufferers had fallen to our own Bishop—the highest dignitary of the Church, I suppose, who happens just now to be in Lourdes. As he moved slowly up the centre of the hot amphitheatre the cries of the poor malades and their friends redoubled themselves in ardour. "Seigneur, Seigneur, ayez pitié de moi." The tides of adoration rose and fell and rose again until, as step by step he passed along the circle, they climbed up to a crest of almost agonising entreaty. "Lord, save us. Lord, save us, or we perish." To left and right we could hear the broken voices sobbing their prayers to God, and even among our more stolid English sufferers could see the tears running down the uplifted worshipping faces. Watching the Bishop, as at last, after perhaps half an hour, his laboured progress brought him opposite to ourselves, I could not help feeling how great must be the burden now bearing upon his shoulders, since apart from the actual physical strain, the continual stooping, in his thick robes and with his heavy monstrance, over patient after patient in this thunderous heat, the emotional tax must have been enormous. For upon him and That which he bore there impinged now the whole sum of these heart-wrung supplications. Upon his vicarious shoulders he must carry, as it were, the multitudinous petitions of all these kneeling thousands. And yet it was just this, as afterwards, in the cool of the hotel, he assured me, that was his chief support. Upborne by all this simple and unshakable belief, it was only then that he was beginning to feel the bodily weariness that the long procession had entailed upon him. So step by step he passed upon his way, until, more than an hour later, the long round had been at last completed. And it was then, in a momentary silence that followed the conclusion of his passage, that from the far end of the circle a little cry arose, and a woman, bedridden, as we afterwards learned, for more than fourteen years, rose up from her chair, and tottered out into the space before her. Instantly the cry was everywhere abroad, "A miracle, a miracle"; and like a leaf on the wind of ten thousand shoulders, she was being borne in an ecstasy of triumph towards the Bureau des Constatations.
It was here, an hour later, that I saw her, a gentle-faced, devout little peasant woman, about whose past history the evidence seemed fairly conclusive. Smiling at us, she took a few steps across the room among the uplifted hands and eager exclamations of the assembled priests. But, alas, there would appear to be no physical reason why she should not have walked thus at any time during her invalid years, if only some stimulus, sufficiently effective, had been applied to her before.
Making my way slowly back to the hotel for tea, I was touched on the arm by a young French priest to whom I had spoken earlier in the day. He had been lamenting the great wave of godlessness that has seemed for the moment to submerge the whole of France. But now his eyes were shining. "Is it not wonderful," he cried, "to see all this so great faith?" He moved his hands expressively. "Ah, la belle France, the heart of her people is still hungry for its God—and some day—some day it will lift Him up again for all the world to see." And in the evening I saw him once again at what was perhaps, after all, the great climax of the Lourdes day.
Sipping my coffee with Bettany at a small boulevard near the hotel, we had already seen hundreds of little points of flame gathering out of the growing darkness towards the grotto and its churches. And this evening procession of candle-bearing pilgrims marks perhaps the last word—if I may quite reverently put it so—in the stage-management of Lourdes. For at a given signal not only do a thousand slender lamps pencil out in gold and red and blue the uplifted tapering spire and every arch and pinnacle of the church upon the rock; but a couple of miles away, and three thousand feet high on the crest of the Pic du Ger, a great cross, illuminated by a battery from the town, springs suddenly out into the sky. The outline of the hill itself, and behind it the snow-clad, retreating summits of the higher Pyrenees have long since been blotted away in the night; so that now this gleaming cross shines out among the stars, among which it might well be some new and glorious constellation. To many, indeed, among the more ignorant of the processionists it must in itself savour strongly of the miraculous; and in any case, swung there in the southern sky, it lends a note, a little bizarre perhaps, and yet, in its way, extraordinarily impressive, to the general vision of Lourdes by night.
Presently the long procession has formed itself, and now begins to move from the grotto out towards the big statue of the Virgin at the opposite end of the square (itself lit up with coloured fairy lamps) and thence, a river of light in the soft June darkness, through the rocky defile, where are represented the seven stations of the Cross. And as it passes onwards the hymn once more swells up to us in a hundred keys and voices, altos and baritones and trebles, "Ave, Ave, Ave Maria," robbed, by the very depths of its sincerity, of any semblance of discord. For fully an hour we watched it—the solemn passing of these earnest, candle-lit faces; and then, moving down the broad terrace above the square, we met again the leaders of the procession as they drew up below the steps. Presently they had all gathered there, thousands strong; whereupon, led by a priest from the open door of the church, they recited in one voice the great credo of their faith. Catholic or not, materialist, or veriest atheist, it would have been impossible, I think, to listen unmoved to the deep-chested volume of sound that now rose up before us—superstitious if you will, but with a superstition that had laid its fibres into humanity's deepest being. And perhaps, after all, it was this strong, vibrating declaration of belief, purged, if not completely, yet to a very great extent, of such hysterical elements as had been obvious in the afternoon, that swept us up to the topmost pinnacle of the day's experiences. In the eyes of my young priest, at any rate, I could read that this was so. For him, as I could see, this was at once the bugle-note of the undefeatable hosts of God, and the herald of the great kingdom that was to come. It was the day's last word to him; and it rang gloriously with victory.
But for us there was another. For returning presently in a darkness that seemed doubly deep after the sudden extinguishing of all these lamps and candles, we came by accident upon a lover and his sweetheart. His arm was about her waist, and as we passed he was kissing her under the shadow of a doorway—a common enough spectacle, yet one that came upon us now with a shock that was almost startling. It served, at any rate, to demonstrate how far, in twenty-four hours, we had drifted from the normal—and to remind me, with an odd and almost unbelievable emphasis, that in less than three days' time I shall be walking through Kensington Gardens.
Yr. affect. brother,
Peter.