From the Ends of the Earth they come—Old and Young, the Lame and the Blind—to Ask for the Blessing. Afternoon. There was not a vacant place left in the long line of waiting sick, so that at the last, when a little, white-faced blind boy with dreadful horny growths on his eyes, was handed over the heads of the crowd, he seemed to have come too late.
His mother’s voice rose anxiously, in reiterated piteous demands to the stretcher-carriers to make a place for him, any place, where he could receive the blessing, for it was the day of the greatest pilgrimage of the year, when twenty-five thousand people sang and prayed together for the cure of the sick, when the Host was carried in solemn procession to bless them, lying in long lines up and down the broad esplanade.
[90]“Oh, for the love of God, find a place for him!” she implored, in so strained a voice of entreaty that the crowd, dense as it was, gave way a little and allowed her to press forward, back of the wheeled chairs of the cripples. The stretcher-carrier who had taken the child in his arms hesitated, looking about him for a vacant spot. He glanced at a wounded soldier, rigid on his litter, his face as white as it would be in his coffin; and then turned to a child stricken with a disease of the bones which paralyzed his legs and made of his hands only twisted, shapeless stumps, but which still permitted him to sit in one of the wheeled chairs. His little withered body did not half fill it, and it was there beside him that the attendant decided to put down the blind boy.
His mother gave a long sigh of intense feeling and between the closely packed bodies of the crowd strained forward to be near him.
“I’m here, darling, I’m here,” she said in a voice of concentrated tenderness.
The blind boy turned his hanging head a little, toward the sound of her voice and stretched[91] back a thin, waxy-white hand. She managed to touch it for an instant, but then said, “Not now, darling. You mustn’t turn back toward Mother. You must join your hands and pray to be cured, pray for the blessing. You must repeat whatever the priest says.”
For at that moment the powerfully built, bearded priest, with the eyes of fire and the thrown-back head of born command, strode down the center of the great open place and stood looking intently about him at the lines of the white-faced sick, and the immense throngs of pilgrims back of them. He raised his hands suddenly in a vivid gesture, and cried in a trumpet-like voice, like a captain leading forward a charge, “Brothers, pray! Pray for our sick. With all your soul, with all the strength of your body and mind, pray God for our sick!”
He paused a moment. Every eye was on him.
The blind boy held his face lowered meekly as blind children often do, as sensitive children who know themselves unsightly always do. His thin, white neck was bent like that of a victim[92] awaiting the blow, but he put his little pale fingers together and, turning for a moment, tried to show to his mother that they were in the attitude of prayer. She whispered, “Yes, yes, darling, that is right. But not toward me. Toward where the blessing is coming, so that you may be cured.”
“Lord save us! Lord God save us, for we perish!” prayed the priest in a loud clear voice of exaltation; and after him all the multitude cried it aloud, in a great murmur like the voice of a forest, or of the sea.
The blind boy’s lips moved with the rest, but his little face was clouded and anxious. He whispered to the crippled child beside him:
“Are you blind, too, or can you see?”
“I can see,” said the other, “but I have never walked.”
“Then you must show me where I must put my hands so that they will be toward the blessing,” begged the blind child.
The other took the thin, transparent fingers between his twisted stumps, and directed them toward the priest, thrillingly upright, aspiring[93] visibly toward the sky. “There, you must keep them turned toward the priest now,” he said with an accent of certainty. “Later on it will be toward the procession as it moves along, and then at the last toward the church.”
“You must tell me when to change them,” said the blind boy.
He stretched out his joined hands farther in the direction indicated by his companion and repeated with the others, after the priest, his little voice lost in the great upward rush of the supplications of the thousands around him, “Lord! Lord! Our sole trust is in Thee!”
The priest’s voice soared into a glorious note of song, in which the multitude joined, their eyes on him, their faces solemn in expectation. The priest sang a line, the multitude chanted a response; the man’s voice ran out again, yearning, beseeching, the voice of the multitude rose thousand-fold in answer. The earth seemed to shake in unison, the low-hanging, heavy gray clouds to send back the sound. The chanting, imploring, impassioned voice of the throng[94] seemed more alive than its multitudinous bodies, rapt into utter stillness.
“Is it thus that I should hold my hands?” whispered the blind boy after a time.
“No, now the procession has just come into the other end of the square,” said the crippled child. With an effort he leaned, took the little white fingers again, and pointed them another way.
“So?” asked the blind child humbly.
“Yes, so,” answered the other. He tried to put his own shapeless stumps together in the attitude of prayer and began to sing with the pilgrims now defiling before them in endless lines, “Praise! All praise to Thee! Praise, all praise to Thee, Lord God!” The pilgrims were passing by, now, in single file, each with his long white taper, burning yellow in the gray light of the gray day. Their voices were loud and personal, each one as he passed being heard for an instant alone. “Glory! Glory to Thee!” they all sang the propitiatory words together, over and over, a hundred times repeated—the old wrinkled peasants in their blouses; the elegant[95] officers in their well-cut uniforms; the stout elderly merchants; the thin, weedy boys; the white-faced, shaven priests; the black men from Senegal with bushy, woolly hair; the tall, fair-haired man from England; the occasional soldier on leave in his shapeless, faded, blue-gray uniform. Above all their voices rose the silver bugle-like call of the priest, burning, devouring in its ardor, “Brothers! Brothers! with all your souls, now. GLORY BE TO THEE! Oh, Lord, save us, for we perish! Lord, our trust is in Thee. Praised be Thy name!”
With each clamorous exhortation, repeated clamorously by all those imploring voices, he lifted the multitude up another step toward the great moment of awe and faith. The tears were streaming down the faces of many of the women in the crowd. The little boy’s mother sobbed loudly, and prayed with all her might.
The march past of the innumerable men, the incessant flickering passage of their pale-yellow lights, the never-ending procession of their pale, anxious faces, became an obsession. It seemed that every one, everywhere in the world, was[96] marching together, singing and praying, hoping against hope for a miracle.
“Isn’t it time to change my hands?” asked the little blind boy desperately. “I have heard so many people pass. I am very, very tired.”
“No, it is not yet time to change,” said the other, leaning forward to look down the esplanade. “The procession with the Host goes very ............