It seemed very strange to be sitting here, in this quiet room, after the rush and push of the enormous crowds through which they had made their way this morning. The air of the room was exceedingly business-like, and not in the least even suggestive of religion, except in the matter of a single statue of Our Lady of Lourdes on a bracket on the wall above the President"s head.
And these dozen men who sat here seemed quietly business-like too. They sat here, men of various ages and nationalities, all in the thin white doctor"s dress, with papers spread before them, and a few strange instruments scattered here and there, leaning forward or leaning back, but all intently listening to and watching the Russian, who, still with closed eyes, answered the short questions put to him continuously by the President. There seemed no religious excitement even in the air; the atmosphere was one, rather, of simple science.
There seemed something faintly familiar in all this to the man who had lost his memory. . . . Certainly he had known of Lourdes as soon as it was mentioned to him, and he seemed now to remember that some such claim to be perfectly scientific had always been made by the authorities of the place. But he had supposed, somehow, that the claim was a false one. . . .
The Russian suddenly rose.
"Well!" whispered Monsignor sharply as the doctors began to talk.
The monk smiled.
"He"s just said an interesting thing. The President asked him just now whether he had seen anything of the crowds as he came down this morning."
"Yes?"
"He said that people looked like trees moving about. . . . Oh no!
he didn"t know he was making a quotation. Look! he"s going down to the grotto. He"ll be back in half an hour to report."
Monsignor leaned back in his chair.
"And you tell me that the optic nerves were destroyed?"
The monk looked at him in wide-eyed wonder.
"Certainly. He was examined on Tuesday, when he came.
To-day"s Friday."
"And you believe he"ll be cured?"
"I shall be very much surprised if he"s not."
There was a stir by the door as the Russian disappeared. A young, bright-eyed doctor looked in and nodded, and the next instant a brancardier appeared, followed by a litter.
"But how have you time to examine all these thousands of cases?"
asked the prelate, watching the litter advance.
"Oh, not one in a hundred comes through to us here. Besides, this is only one of a dozen committee-rooms. It"s only the most sensational cases--where there"s real organic injury of a really serious kind--that ever come at all before the highest courts. Cases, I mean, where, if there"s a cure, the publication of the miracle follows as a matter of course. . . .
What"s this case, I wonder?" he ended sharply, glancing down at the printed paper before him, and then up again at the litter that was being arranged.
Monsignor looked too at the paper that lay before him. Some thirty paragraphs, carefully numbered, dated, and signed, gave, as it seemed, a list of the cases to be examined.
"Number fourteen," murmured the monk.
Number fourteen, it appeared, was a case of fractured spine--a young girl, aged sixteen; a German. The accident had happened four months before. The notes, signed by half a dozen names, described the complete paralysis below the waist, with a few other medical details.
Monsignor looked again at the girl on the other side of the table, guarded by the brancardiers and a couple of doctors, while the monk talked to him rapidly in Latin. He saw her closed eyes and colourless lips.
"This case has attracted a good deal of attention," whispered the monk. "The Emperor"s said to be interested in it, through one of the ladies of the Court, whose servant the girl was. It"s interesting for two or three reasons. First, the fracture is complete, and it"s marvellous she hasn"t died. Then it"s been taken up as a kind of test case by a group of materialists in Berlin. They"ve taken it up, because the girl has declared again and again that she is perfectly certain she will be cured at Lourdes. She claims to have had a vision of Our Lady, who told her so. Her father"s a freethinker, by the way, and has only finally allowed her to come so that he can use her as an argument afterwards."
"Who has examined her?" asked Monsignor sharply.
"She was examined last night on her arrival, and again this morning. Dr. Meurot, the President here" (he indicated with his head the doctor who sat three places off, who was putting his questions rapidly to the two attending physicians)--"Dr. Meurot examined her himself early this morning. This is just the formal process before she goes to the grotto. The fracture is complete.
It"s between the eleventh and twelfth dorsal vertebrae."
"And you think she"ll be cured?" The monk smiled.
"Who can tell?" he said. "We"ve only had one case before, and the papers on that are not quite in order, though it"s commonly believed to be genuine."
"But it"s possible?"
"Oh, certainly. And her own conviction is absolute. It"ll be interesting."
"You seem to take it pretty easily," murmured the prelate.
"Oh, the facts are established a hundred times over--the facts, I mean, that cures take place here which are not even approached in mental laboratories. But---"
He was interrupted by a sudden movement of the brancardiers.
"See, they"re removing her," he said. "Now, what"ll you do, Monsignor? Will you go down to the grotto, or would you sooner watch a few more cases?"
"I think I"d sooner stay here," said the other, "at least for an hour or two."
(IV)
It was the hour of the evening procession and of the Benediction of the Sick.
All day long the man who had lost his memory had gone to and fro with his companions, each wearing the little badge that gave them entrance everywhere; they had lunched with Dr. Meurot himself.
If Monsignor Masterman had been impressed by the social power of Catholicism at Versailles, and by its religious reality in Rome, he was ten thousand times more impressed by its scientific courage here in Lourdes. For here religion seemed to have stepped down into an arena hitherto (as he fancied) restricted to the play of physical forces. She had laid aside her oracular claims, her comparatively unsupported a.s.sertions of her own divinity; had flung off her robes of state and authority and was competing here on equal terms with the masters of natural law--more, she was accepted by them as their mistress. For there seemed nothing from which she shrank. She accepted all who came to her desiring her help; she made no arbitrary distinctions to cover her own incapacities. Her one practical desire was to heal the sick; her one theoretical interest to fix more and more precisely, little by little, the exact line at which nature ended and supernature began. And, if human evidence went for anything--if the volumes of radiophotography and sworn testimony went for anything, she had established a thousand times over during the preceding, half-century that under her aegis, and hers alone, healing and reconst.i.tuting forces were at work to which no merely natural mental science could furnish any parallels. All the old quarrels of a century ago seemed at an end. There was no longer any dispute as to the larger facts. All that now remained to be done by this huge organization of international experts was to define more and more closely and precisely where the line lay between the two worlds. All cures that could be even remotely paralleled in the mental laboratories were dismissed as not evidently supernatural; all those which could not be so paralleled were recorded, with the most minute detail, under the sworn testimonies of doctors who had examined the patients immediately before and immediately after the cure itself. In a series of libraries that ab.u.t.ted on to the Place, Monsignor Masterman, under the guidance of Dom Adrian Bennett, had spent a couple of hours this afternoon in examining the most striking of the records and photographs preserved there. He was amazed to find that even by the end of the nineteenth century cures had taken place for which the most modern scientists could find no natural explanation.
Ten minutes ago he had taken his place in the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, with the monk"s last word still in his head.
"It is during the procession itself," he had said, "that the work is done. We lay aside all deliberate knowledge as the Angelus rings, and give ourselves up to faith."
And now the procession had started, and already, it seemed to him, he had begun to understand. It was as he himself emerged, a few paces in front of the Blessed Sacrament Itself, walking with the prelates, that that understanding reached its climax. He paused at the head of the steps, to wait for the canopy to come through, and his heart rose within him so mightily that it was all he could do not to cry out.
Beneath him, seen now from the opposite end from which he had looked this morning, lay the Place, under a wholly different appearance. The centre of the great oval was cleared, with the exception of a huge pulpit, surmounted by a circular sounding-board, that stood in the middle. But round this empty s.p.a.ce rose, in tier after tier, ma.s.ses of humanity beyond all reckoning, up and up, as on the sides of an enormous amphitheatre, as far as the highest roofs of the highest buildings that looked on to the s.p.a.ce. Before him rose the pile of churches, and here too, on every platform roof and stair, swarmed the spectators. The doors of the three churches were flung wide, and far within, in the lighted interiors, lay the heads of countless crowds, as cobble-stones, seen in perspective.
The whole Place was in shadow now, as the sun had just gone down, but the sky was still alight overhead, a vast tender-coloured vault, as sweet as a benediction. Here and there, in the illimitable blue, like crumbs of diamond dust, gleamed the first stars of evening.
And from this vast mult.i.tude, swayed by a white figure within the pulpit, articulate now as the listener emerged, rose up a song to Mary, as from one soft and gigantic voice, appealing to Her Presence who for over a century and a half, it seemed, had chosen to dwell here by virtue and influence, the Great Mother of the redeemed and the Consoler of the afflicted, whose Divine Son was even now on His way, as at Cana itself, to turn the water of sorrow into the wine of joy. . . . Then, as the canopy came out, at an imperious gesture from the tiny swaying figure in the pulpit, the music ceased; great trumpets sounded a phrase; there was a rustle and a movement as of a breaking wave as the crowds knelt; and the _Pange Lingua_ rose up in solemn adoration. . . .
As he came down the steps, his eyes quick with tears, he saw for the first time the lines of the sick in the place to which he had been told to look. There they lay, some four thousand in number, placed side by side in two great circling rows round the whole arena, a fringe of pain to the exultant crowds, in litters laid so close together that they seemed but two great continuous beds, and between them the high flower-strewn platform along which Jesus of Nazareth should pa.s.s by. There they lay, all of them bathed to-day in the strange water that had sprung up a hundred and fifty years ago under the fingers of a peasant child, waiting for the sacramental advent of Him who had made both that water and those for whose healing it was designed.
And yet not all were cured--not perhaps one in ten of all who came in confidence. That surely was wonderful. . . . Was it then that that same Sovereign Power who had permitted the pain elected to retain His own sovereignty, and to show that the Lawgiver was fettered by no law? One thing at least was certain, if those records which the priest had examined this morning were to be believed, that no receptiveness of temperament, no subjective expectancy of cure, guaranteed that the cure would take place.
Natures that had responded marvellously in the mental laboratories seemed ineffective here; natures that were inert and immovable under the influence of sympathetic science leapt up here to meet the call of some Voice whose very existence a hundred years ago had been in doubt.