Mr. Cecil Barth was unfeignedly low in his mind, that morning. The
causes were various and sundry.
First of all, Quebec was a bore. In the second place, the only people to
whom he had brought letters of introduction had most inconsiderately
migrated to Vancouver, and, fresh from his English university, he was
facing the prospect of a solitary winter before he could go out into
ranch life in the spring. A Britisher of sorts, it had not appeared to
him to be necessary to inform himself in advance regarding the
conditions, climatic and social, of the new country to which he was
going. Now, too late, he recognized his mistake. A third grievance lay
in the non-arrival of the English mail, that morning; and the fourth and
most fatal of all lurked in the kindly efforts of his table companion to
draw him into the conversation. To his mind, there was no reason that
the swarthy, black-browed little Frenchman at his elbow should offer him
any comments upon the state of the weather. The Frenchman had promptly
retired from the talk; but his dark eyes had lighted mirthfully, as they
had met the asphalt-like stare of his neighbor’s eyeglasses. Adolphe St.
Jacques possessed his own fair share of a sense of humor; and Cecil
Barth was a new element in his experience.
“Monsieur has swallowed something stiff that does not agree with him,”
he observed blandly to his fellow student across the table; and Barth,
whose French was of Paris, not of Canada, was totally at a loss to
account for their merriment.
For the past week, the group of students and the chatter of their
Canadian _patois_ had been anathema to him. He understood not a word of
their talk, and consequently, with the extreme sensitiveness which too
often accompanies extreme egotism, he imagined that it related solely to
himself. In vain he tried to avoid their hours for meals. Rising
betimes, he met them at the hurried early breakfast which betokened an
eight o’clock lecture. The next morning, dreary loitering in his room
only brought him into the midst of the deliberate meal which was the
joyous prerogative of their more leisurely days. Barth liked The Maple
Leaf absolutely; but he hated the students of his own table with a
cordial and perfect hatred.
Dropped from the Allan Line steamer, one bright September morning, as a
matter of course he had been driven up through the gray old town to the
Chateau Frontenac. A week at the Chateau had been quite enough for him.
To his mind, its luxurious rooms had been altogether too American. Too
American, also, were its inhabitants. He shrank from the obvious brides
in their new tailor gowns and their evident absorption in their
companions. He resented those others who, more elderly or more detached,
roused themselves from their absorption to bestow a friendly word on the
solitary young Englishman. Their clothes, their accent, and, worst of
all, their manners betrayed their alien birth. No self-respecting woman,
bride or no bride, ever wore such dainty shoes. No man of education ever
stigmatized an innocent babe as _cunning_. And there was no, absolutely
no, excuse for the familiar greetings bestowed upon himself by complete
strangers.
“Americans!” quoth Mr. Cecil Barth. “Oh, rather!”
And, next morning, he went in search of another hostelry.
He found it at The Maple Leaf, just across the Place d’Armes. Fate
denied to him the privilege of sleeping in the quaint little _pension_
whose roof was sanctified by having once sheltered his compatriot,
Dickens; he could only take his meals there, and hunt for a room
outside. At noon, he came to dinner, too exhausted by his fruitless
search to care whether or not the students were at the table, or on it,
or even under it. Go back to the Chateau he would not; but he began to
fear lest the only alternative lay in a tent pitched on the terrace in
the lee of the Citadel and, in that wilderness, he questioned whether
anything so modern as a tent could be bought.
After dinner, the Lady of The Maple Leaf took his affairs in hand. She
possessed the two essentials, a kindly heart and a sense of humor. She
had seen stray Britishers before; she had a keen perception of the
artistic fitness of things and, by twilight, Mr. Cecil Barth was sitting
impotently upon his boxes in the third-floor front room of the town
house of the Duke of Kent. He had very little notion of the way to
proceed about unpacking himself. Nevertheless, as he put on his glasses
and stared at the panelled shutters of his ducal casement, he felt more
at peace with the world than he had done for two long weeks.
In after years, he never saw fit to divulge the details of his
unpacking. It accomplished itself chiefly by the simple method of his
tossing out on the floor whatever things lay above any desired object,
of leaving those things on the floor until he became weary of tangling
his feet in them, then of stowing them away in any convenient corner
that offered itself. By this simple method, however, he had contrived to
gain space enough to permit of his tramping up and down the floor, and
it was there that he had been taking petulant exercise, that bright
October morning.
At last he halted at the window and stood looking down into the street
beneath. The Duke of Kent’s house has the distinction, rare in Saint
Louis Street, of standing well back within its own grounds, and, from
his window, Barth could watch the leisurely procession passing to and
fro on the wooden sidewalks which separated the gray stone buildings
from the paler gray stripe of asphalt between. Even at that early hour,
it was a variegated procession. Tailor-made girls mingled with
black-gowned nuns, soldiers from the Citadel, swaggering jauntily along,
jostled a brown-cowled Franciscan friar or a portly citizen with his
omnipresent umbrella, while now and then Barth caught sight of a
scarlet-barred khaki uniform, or of the white serge robe and
dove-colored cloak of a sister from the new convent out on the Grand
Allée.
Barth had travelled before; he had seen many cities; nevertheless, he
acknowledged the charm of this varied humanity, so long as it remained
safely at his feet. Then he glanced diagonally across the road to the
Montcalm headquarters, and discovered the patch of sunshine that lay
over its pointed gables.
“Jolly sort of day!” he observed to himself. “I believe I’ll try to see
something or other.”
With a swift forgiveness for the past days of scurrying clouds, of the
woes of moving, even of students and Americans, he turned away from the
window, caught up his hat, stick and gloves, and ran lightly down the
staircase. Once out in the street, he strayed past the English
cathedral, past the gray old front of the Basilica, turned to his left,
then turned again and wandered aimlessly down Palace Hill. Ten minutes
later, he stopped beside an electric train and watched the crowd
scrambling into its cars.
“Sainte Anne-de-Beaupré,” he read from the label in a rear window. “What
can be the attraction there? Oh, I know; it’s that American Lourdes
place. How awfully American to go to its miracles by electricity! I
believe I’ll go, too. It might be rather interesting to see what an
American miracle is like.”
Ticket in hand, he boarded the train, already moving out of the station.
He had some difficulty in finding a seat to his liking, since a man of
finical habits objects to having two bundle-laden habitants in the same
seat with himself. However, by the time he was sliding along under the
bluff at Beauport, with the Saint Lawrence glistening on his right, he
decided that the morning was ideal for a country ride. By the time the
train halted opposite the Falls of Montmorency, he had forgotten the
ubiquitous students at his table, and, as he entered into the fertile
valley of L’Ange Gardien, he came to the conclusion that chance had led
him wisely. Just how wisely, as yet he was in ignorance.
It was still long before midday when the train drew up at Sainte Anne
station, and Barth stepped out upon the platform. Then in amazement he
halted to look about him. Close at hand, an arched gateway led into a
broad square garden, bounded by gravel walks and bordered on two sides
by a row of little shrines, aged and weatherbeaten. On the third side
stood the church of the Good Sainte Anne, its twin gray towers rising
sharply against the blue October sky and flanking the gilded statue of
the saint poised on the point of the middle roof. Around the four sides
of the courtyard there slowly filed a motley procession of humanity,
here a cripple, there one racked by some mental agony, the sick in mind
and body, simple-hearted and trusting, each bringing his secret grief to
lay at the feet of the Good Sainte Anne. Mass was already over, and the
procession had formed again to march to the shrine and to the holy
altar.
Barth’s eyes roved over the shabby procession, over the faces, dull and
heavy, or alert with trust; then he turned to the rose-arched figure
borne on the shoulders of the chanting priests, and his blood throbbed
in his veins, as he listened to their rich, sonorous voices.
“A pilgrimage!” he ejaculated to himself. “And now for a miracle! May
the saint be propitious, for once in a way!”
Following hard on the heels of the crowd, he pushed his way through one
of the wide doors, gave a disdainful glance at the huge racks of
crutches and braces left by long generations of pious pilgrims, looked
up at the vaulted roof, forward to the huge statue of Sainte Anne
half-way up the middle aisle, and drew a deep breath of content. The
next minute, he choked, as the stifling atmosphere of the place swept
into his throat and nostrils.
“Oh, by George!” said Mr. Cecil Barth.
However, once there, he resolved to see the spectacle to the end.
Furthermore, Barth was artist to the core of his being, and those
sonorous voices, now ringing down from the organ loft above, could atone
for much stale air. A step at a time, he edged forward cautiously and
took his place not far from the altar rail.
The students of his table would have found it hard to recognize the
haughty young Englishman in the man who knelt there, looking with
pitiful eyes at the forlorn stream of humanity that flowed past him. Was
it all worth while: the weary fastings and masses, the scrimping of tiny
incomes for the sake of the journey and of the offering at the shrine,
the faith and hope, and the infinite, childlike trust, all to culminate
in the moment of kneeling at the carved altar rail, of feeling the
sacred relic touched to one’s lips and to the plague-spot of body or of
soul? And then they were brushed aside with the monotonous brushing of
the relic across the folded napkin in the left hand of the priest. For
better or worse, the pilgrimage was over. It was the turn of the next
man. Brushed aside, he rose from his knees to give place to the next,
and yet the next.
Just once the monotony was broken. A worn pair of crutches dropped at
the feet of the statue; a worn old man, white to his lips, staggered
forward, knelt and received the healing touch on lip and thigh and knee.
Then, with every nerve tense, he struggled to his feet and made his
toilsome way to the outer world, while the priests recorded one more
miracle wrought by the Good Sainte Anne. Then the monotony fell again,
and became seemingly interminable.
At length Barth could endure it no longer. Rising impatiently, he forced
his way down the crowded aisle and came out into the air once more.
After the dim, dark church and the choking cloud of the incense, the
rush of sunshiny ozone struck him in the face like a lash, and
involuntarily he raised his head and squared his shoulders to meet it.
He loitered along the gravel pathway, watching the habitants who, their
pious pilgrimage over, were opening their crumpled valises and spreading
out their luncheons in the cloisters to the south of the church. Then,
tossing a coin into the tin cup of the blind beggar in the gateway, he
came out of the court and crossed the road to the little hillside chapel
built of the seventeenth-century materials of the old church of Sainte
Anne. But the spell of the place was still upon him; in his mind’s eye,
he yet saw the endless line of pilgrims, bowing and rising in unbroken
succession. With unseeing gaze, he stared at the rows of carts heaped
with their ecclesiastical trinkets, at the stray figures lifting
themselves heavenward by means of the Scala Sancta Chapel, and at the
line of white farmhouses poised high on the bluff beyond. Then, yielding
to the spell of the kneeling figures, of the incense-filled air and of
the chanting voices, he turned and hurried back again to the church.
By the time he reached the steps once more, the procession was flowing
swiftly outward, and the little platform at the doorway was crowded with
excited figures. Barth tried this door and then that, in a futile
endeavor to regain his old place near the altar rail; but again and
again he was forced backward to the very verge of the steps. Then an
unduly tall habitant elbowed Barth’s glasses from his nose. He bent down
to pick them up, was jostled rudely from behind, lost his balance and
rolled down the steps where he landed in a dusty, ignominious heap in
the midst of a knot of women.
During one swift second, it seemed to Barth that the vast statue of
Sainte Anne had tumbled from the roof, to dazzle his eyes with her
gilding and to crush his body with her weight. Then the dancing lights
and the shooting pains ended in darkness and peace.