The Corner of Harley Street Part 7

XVII

_To Miss Sarah Harding, The Orphanage, Little Blessington, Dorset._

HOTEL MODERNE, LOURDES, _June_ 7, 1910.

MY DEAR SALLY,

I have just encountered one of those strange half-accidents that crop up like rocks in the quiet stream of one's everyday life just where a rock is the least likely to be. You turn the bend from Tuesday into Wednesday, and hey presto, before you know what's happened, your little canoe has been shot out of the main current into some unsuspected channel, whence it emerges presently as from a waking dream.

Last week as I went into the club between an afternoon at the hospital and two evening visits in Kensington, I met Bettany, of whom you may perhaps have heard me speak. A quite successful Government official, he contrives also to edit one of the leading Roman Catholic newspapers and incidentally to organise with conspicuous ability periodical pilgrimages to various Continental shrines. He is a man who has always interested me, partly because he has seemed to me to possess in a very marked degree one of the strongest and most challenging characteristics of his Church--the habit, even in matters of religion, of completely dissociating the man from his function. A ladder for the faith of other people need not necessarily have any faith of its own--and be an extremely serviceable ladder for all that. In his particular case, a belief in the miraculous powers of those relics and waters to which he enables the faithful so comfortably to travel, is not, I think, _de fide_--demanded by his Church. In any case he does not possess it, but regards the whole phenomenon through his gold-rimmed spectacles with an entirely amiable, and of course very discreet, scepticism. At the same time his talent for organisation and his unique knowledge of Continental hotels and railways are entirely at the disposal of his more credulous brethren. And his name must be known in this connection to many thousands of Catholics on both sides of the Channel.

On this particular evening he told me that he was extremely busy making the final arrangements for what promised to be the largest English pilgrimage that has yet travelled to Lourdes. And then, remembering suddenly, I suppose, that I was a doctor of medicine, he sat bolt upright and said, "By George, you're the very man that can help me." For it seemed that there were so many invalids going out with the party--at least forty, he told me--some of whom were in a very bad way, that it had appeared desirable to take a medical man in case of emergencies upon the long journey. And did I know of anyone who would care to go? He had already made some inquiries, he said, among Catholic medical friends, but hadn't as yet found anyone who had been able to undertake the duties. He was not in a position to offer anything more than travelling expenses; and he was beginning, as a consequence, to feel rather doubtful about finding a man in time. It was not essential, he considered, that the accompanying physician should be himself a Catholic, provided that he was reasonably sympathetic; and then, reading my thoughts, I suppose, he asked me if I should be sufficiently interested to make the little trip myself.

Well at first, of course, this seemed quite out of the question; but on looking through my engagements I began to think that with a certain amount of arrangement it might become possible after all. We were to leave Charing Cross at ten o'clock on Friday morning, and would be home by the following Thursday night. And it was to be quite understood that I was coming not as an official, but only as a visitor who would be willing, if necessary, to render aid _en route_--all of which goes to account for the address upon my notepaper, and the fact that I seem at this moment to be very much more than eight hundred miles from Harley Street.

Joining the train at Charing Cross, it was quite obvious to me that a very considerable proportion of the party was Irish--the sing-song western accent was everywhere--and that a comparatively large number of priests would be travelling with us. Most of these I have since discovered to be genial, even hilarious, souls, drawn, as it appears, from every stratum of society, and differing, as a consequence, very greatly both in real education and superficial polish.

It was not until we got on board at Folkestone that I had a first opportunity of becoming acquainted with the sick people of the a.s.sembly; and by this time I was already conscious of being surrounded by some curious, indefinable atmosphere, that was walling us away from what to me, with my half-Protestant, half-scientific upbringing, represented the everyday world. I doubt if many of my fellow-pilgrims felt this. But I am certain that the other pa.s.sengers on the boat did. And it was both odd and a trifle amusing to observe the blank expressions upon numerous well-fed and monocled countenances on their way to a normal Paris. Yet from my own point of view I had to admit that there was a good deal of excuse for them. For we might all, as it seemed to me, very easily have stepped out of the Middle Ages.

Of the more obvious invalids there were none, as far as I could see, who stood the smallest chance of benefiting, in a material sense, from their visit to Lourdes. There were two blind girls, both cases of congenital organic disease--and who both chanced, by the way, to be among the very few sufferers from sea-sickness. There was a little boy from a Suss.e.x village, a case of infantile paralysis, brought by his mother in the fervent hope, as she told me, that Our Lady would use him as a means to convert an extremely Nonconformist community. There was an older girl, similarly affected; and an elderly man, travelling quite alone, in almost the last stages of cancer of the throat. With this poor fellow, who was almost too weak to stand unaided, I had a long and very pathetic conversation. He knew himself to be past all human aid, and was journeying from his home on the east coast to the shrine upon the Gave as to his last anchorage upon life. And I doubt, even so, if he had any real belief in its efficacy for himself. But his journey, a really enormous effort for a man in his condition, would at any rate show that he had had courage enough to make the trial. His is the only case that has given me cause for any immediate anxiety, and were it not for his extraordinary pluck and will-power I should be more than doubtful about getting him home alive.

Of the other invalids, none were sufficiently apparent to disclose themselves to me in a cursory tour round the ship with Bettany; and after making the poor cancer patient as cosy as possible in the special train that was waiting for us at Boulogne, I repaired to the very comfortable carriage reserved for us, and shared an excellent lunch with Bettany, his lady secretary, and another member of the committee. The journey to Paris was uneventful, and after manoeuvring round its southern suburbs, we found ourselves about seven o'clock in the Gare d'Orleans, where a portion of the refreshment-room had been reserved for our dinner. During this meal I was introduced by Bettany to the Bishop who is leading the pilgrimage--one of those rare men of whose essential saintliness one becomes instantly aware, yet a man, too, of abundant strength, and one, as I have since found out, capable of ensuring, with the profoundest personal humility, the utmost tribute of respect to the high office that he represents. I suppose every Church contains such men. It is at any rate pleasant to think so. But not all are wise enough to make them bishops--and missionary bishops at that.

The same train left Paris with us about nine o'clock on the long journey to Lourdes; and after some desultory conversation we made ourselves comfortable for the night. Fortunately, since our train was not of the corridor type, the sick persons seemed to settle down pretty easily, and the chief impressions that remain to me of the journey are a peep into a cool and cloudless sunrise over some vineyards between Poitiers and Angouleme and a very satisfactory _cafe complet_ at Bordeaux. Two or three times during the morning, both before and after reaching this place, we were jeered at by onlookers at various wayside stations, who had read the inscription _Pelerinage_ upon our carriage; and one or two of these had even gone so far as to throw stones. They were reminders, I suppose, that here in Lourdes seem almost incredible, of the enormous extent to which the anti-clerical movement has permeated elsewhere in France. The latter part of our journey, climbing slowly into the Pyrenees, was enlivened for us by the presence of the Bishop, who had given up his own carriage to some indignant Irish pilgrims that had been so unfortunate as to have spent a sleepless night. Haymaking was already in full swing in these steaming valleys, with men and boys and bare-legged, brown-faced women all backs down over what seems to be a very plentiful crop.

I have just here been tapped on the shoulder by an immaculately apparelled American Catholic, who has just joined the pilgrimage from Florence. He had learned, he told me, that I was a physician willing to oblige. He suffered a little from gout, he said, and then proceeded to pose me with the rather difficult question as to how often he ought to take the waters.

I explained to him that, as far as I knew, these have none but an ethical value--a reply that obviously puzzled him.

"You mean," he inquired at last, "that it's ENtirely a matter of faith?"

"Precisely," I answered, and his brow cleared a little.

"Do you think I might have a Seidlitz powder to go on with?" he asked.

We arrived at Lourdes at about four o'clock on Sat.u.r.day 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 Ess.e.x, 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 chateau on the one side and the nineteenth-century church that surmounts the shrine, on the other, is quite the most remarkable combination of mediaevalism 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 pa.s.sing 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 Ma.s.s.

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 circ.u.mference, gather the sick people and their helpers and relations for the afternoon pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sers-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 cla.s.sify the histories of the cures, examine the alleged _miracules_, 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 a.s.sured me that after twenty years at the shrine they were only the more convinced of Our Lady's blessed 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 pa.s.sionately 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sist 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 mult.i.tudes 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, 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 mult.i.tudinous pet.i.tions of all these kneeling thousands. And yet it was just this, as afterwards, in the cool of the hotel, he a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sembled 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 G.o.dlessness 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 G.o.d--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 pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.sing 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--superst.i.tious if you will, but with a superst.i.tion 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed 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.