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.
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 pitie de moi." "Mein Herr und mein Gott."
"Lord save us, or we perish." "Hail, Mary, blessed among women."
"Seigneur, Seigneur, ayez pitie 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 pitie 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.
XVIII
_To Robert Lynn, M.R.C.S., Applebrook, Devon._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_June_ 25, 1910.
MY DEAR BOB,
I have had a talk with Arthur, as you suggested, about his new
appointment, and I think, on the whole, that he would be well advised to
take it. As he said to me, poor boy, he has had just lately to readjust
his future a bit, and the practice that he had thought of buying has
ceased to have much attraction for him. And I needn't tell you again how
very sorry I am that Molly, and perhaps to a lesser degree both Esther
and myself, have been responsible for this. For you know quite well that
there is nobody whom we would more gladly have welcomed as an extra son;
and until quite lately we both fully believed--although we had never of
course actually ascertained this--that Molly returned his feelings.
Alas, however, for the best-laid plans--for since we discussed the
matter at Applebrook, I have become almost certain that although her
answer would be "yes" on every other ground but this, on this
particular one she will never, I'm afraid, be able to meet him with open
arms. The event may contradict me, but I think not. The divine spark has
not yet touched her heart. And I know you are with me in believing that
she would be wrong, with all her youth in front of her, not to wait for
it a little longer. And so Arthur, being robbed (but only for a time, I
hope) of what he tells me sorrowfully was his _raison d'etre_, has
decided to postpone his debut as a general practitioner--yet not
without, unless I am very greatly mistaken, a certain secret atom of
relief. For his real inclinations, I am sure, still centre in the
laboratory and the microscope; and it was chiefly for financial reasons
that he had abandoned any ideas of further dallying with them. He wanted
to "do Molly," as he confided to me, "as well as he could"; and that
would have been impossible, he was afraid, as a bacteriologist or
pathologist. And there, from a strictly monetary standpoint, he was
perhaps in the right. For though, as a profession (and through us, the
great public), we must needs lean each year more heavily upon these
skilled workers at our right hand, yet at present we are all very
reluctant to give them their full dues either in professional _eclat_
or pounds, shillings, and pence. All the same, their day is coming, if
perhaps a little slowly; so that maybe, after all, Miss Molly's
unintentional cruelty may prove to be an angel in mufti. And now that he
is in no immediate need of earning more money than can comfortably
support himself, I think that this new appointment, as assistant in the
inoculation department, is just the job for him. It will mean of course
two years of life; but he has already been a house-surgeon and a
house-physician, and in any case a two years' training in the exactest
of all scientific technique will not be a waste of time whatever his
ultimate occupation is destined to be.
Moreover (though it is seldom wise to prophesy) I am becoming pretty
thoroughly convinced that the future of medicine lies more wholly in the
hands of the vaccino-therapists than any of us are as yet quite able to
realise. For when one comes to think of it, although surgery, during the
last fifty years, has been advancing by leaps and bounds, medicine has
been standing very still indeed. Where it has moved at all it has been
chiefly on the lines of improving its methods of diagnosis, while as
regards treatment it has remained very nearly as empirical as it was a
century ago. Perhaps this is rather a hard saying, but in the main I am
quite sure that it is a true one. And I think its restoration to lively
and effective growth will be more dependent upon the methods, so sound
in their conception and so brilliant in their performance, of Sir
Almroth Wright and his fellow-workers, at home and abroad, than upon any
other factor now making for medical progress. As a school they are no
doubt destined to confront a good many reverses. And they will presently
be forced, I suspect, to re-state a certain number of their present
beliefs. But their guiding principle is so essentially sane, so really
scientific, in the true sense of an abused adjective, that I cannot
think your boy will go far wrong in perfecting himself in their methods,
and even perhaps deciding later to specialise altogether in this
particular branch of medicine.
To determine by culture the precise organism that is causing a patient's
malady (and how few are the diseases left to us that may be definitely
classed as non-microbic); to learn by an examination of his blood-cells
the exact condition of his resisting powers; and to increase these by
carefully graduated doses of his own or similar bacteria until his newly
stimulated anti-bodies have been so increased and fortified as to be
able to win their own battle--it is a general method of treatment that
seems to me to hold more palpably the key to future victory than any
other. There's an infinity yet to be learned about it, of course. The
mysteries of the anti-body have been scarcely fringed. And the technique
is still so difficult that none but a highly trained man can be trusted
with it. But if anybody is to win an ultimate triumph over incidental
disease it is that trained man who is going to do it. And the sooner we
consulting physicians learn rather to count him as a brother than a mere
laboratory assistant, the better will it be for the march of light and
healing. Amen. This little peroration was put into my head by a passage
in an address that I heard delivered the other day at an evening lecture
to post-graduates.
"Gentlemen," said the lecturer--a well-known provincial consultant, "I
should like the day to dawn when I could be met at the door of my
hospital by a trained chemist, a trained bacteriologist, a trained
pathologist, so that when I came to some complicated case I could say,
'Chemist, a part of this problem is yours, take it and work it out.
Bacteriologist, perform your share in elucidating this difficulty.
Pathologist, advance, and do likewise.'"
There was a little applause; and after all, he had got, I suppose, some
glimmering of what the new medicine is to be. Only he, the lecturer, was
still, do you see, to be the _deus ex machina_. He was a genial old
gentleman and quite without conceit, and was merely taking, as we all
do, I'm afraid, the predominant position of the consulting physician as
fixed for eternity. Whereas instead it is quite healthily rocking, I
fancy, on waters that are ceasing to be stagnant.
Yours ever,
P. H.
XIX
_To Hugh Pontrex, Hotel Montana, Biarritz._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_July_ 16, 1910.
MY DEAR HUGH,
So the pendulum of our frailty swings. The warm airs of July have
surrounded you with well-being in your Atlantic quarters, and a
confounded carbuncle under my left shoulder has been painting my world
quite black for at least four days, and grey for the inside of a week.
It's the penalty, I suppose, of being rarely laid aside by sickness,
that when some trivial misfortune does make its appearance, one
exaggerates its proportion in the general scheme of things to a quite
unmerited degree--and especially, I think, if one happens to be a
doctor. "Physician, heal thyself," the mockers say. But he should never
attempt to. He knows too much about the various possibilities, the
remoter significances of each one of his little troubles, to be a
sufficiently clear-minded judge. And he is far better advised when he
resigns his body _in toto_ to the care of some outside mind, and
confines his own mental powers to the fortification of his private
philosophy.
Pain, sleeplessness, and that peculiar sense of being disowned by one's
own body that a high temperature always seems to induce--I suppose if
all the comfortable words that have been uttered in their explanation
were to be gathered up into a book the whole world would not be great
enough to contain it. We were told not so desperately long ago that they
represented the direct tenancy of the evil one or some of his
dependents. Then a more enlightened but still stern theology informed us
that they represented the well-deserved judgments of God; until a later
and more generous interpretation has inclined rather to believe in them
as evidences, a little puzzlingly disguised, of a chastening yet still
indubitable Love.
But, alas, it is so easy, even in the full comfort of bodily health, to
perceive the bottomless gaps in these and all other arguments about the
great problem of pain, that in the actual enduring of it there seems,
after all, very little to be done but to lie low, and bear it humbly--as
many a better fellow and weaker woman have borne worse things before us
since the foreconsciousness of death became the price of the first
man's soul. And yet I believe quite orthodoxly that these unattractive
episodes in one's life--even carbuncles--do really contain some sort of
a message to one's intelligence, apart from the patent one that
somewhere or other one has blundered against a natural law, and paid the
necessary penalty.
For there comes a period in most illnesses, I think, sometimes during a
temporary respite, more often perhaps at the first dawn of
convalescence, when one becomes extraordinarily conscious, yet without
discomfort, of the almost trivial delicacy of one's surrounding tissue.
It is generally, I suppose, a moment of exhaustion, both mental and
physical, either upon the bugle of a victory or a truce. But it is a
moment when one's spiritual aesthesis, as it were, is peculiarly at
liberty. Very soon, in a minute or two even, Nature will begin her work
of restoration--none more willing than she, given a very little patience
and half a straw to make her bricks with. But now she is standing by for
a moment, trowel in hand, and the outer wind is breathing through the
gap. And it's then, I think, if you'll only listen carefully enough,
that you can sometimes hear it whispering.
"Presently," you can hear it say, "this little house of yours will be
mended, and the more easily maybe, because its walls are so thin. But
don't--don't forget too quickly that it is but a house after all."
Yet I suppose we do forget it, most of us, and probably quite healthily,
when once the dwelling-place is bricked up again, and the new paint is
on, and it stands foursquare to the winds that may not enter now. And
yet again, if the message has once been heard, or twice, or thrice, as
circumstances have it, I don't believe that it is ever entirely lost.
And there, perhaps, may even lie the key to all the mystery; so that
when the last storm blows, and Nature must shake her head, and let the
frail house fall, its tenant may not go out altogether unprepared.
I felt all this very strongly some ten days ago, having made or reviewed
my will about twenty-seven times, resigned myself to the administration
of gas and the skilful weapons of old Sir Jeremy across the way, and
awakened next morning to a normal temperature and a comparatively
comfortable back. But a week's high feeding, and three days with Esther
at Eastbourne, in the occasional brisk and simple company of Claire and
her pals, have been steadily blunting my higher susceptibilities. So
that's why I've been setting them on record with so much circumstantial
detail--a great deal less for your satisfaction than my own.