I Was Now Past My Fortieth Mile, And Though The Heat Had Gone, Yet My
Dead Slumber Had Raised A Thousand Evils.
I had stiffened to lameness,
and had fallen into the mood when a man desires companionship and the
talk of travellers rather than the open plain.
But (unless I went
backward, which was out of the question) there was nowhere to rest in
for a long time to come. The next considerable village was Thayon,
which is called 'Thayon of the Vosges', because one is nearing the big
hills, and thither therefore I crawled mile after mile.
But my heart sank. First my foot limped, and then my left knee
oppressed me with a sudden pain. I attempted to relieve it by leaning
on my right leg, and so discovered a singular new law in medicine
which I will propose to the scientists. For when those excellent men
have done investigating the twirligigs of the brain to find out where
the soul is, let them consider this much more practical matter, that
you cannot relieve the pain in one limb without driving it into some
other; and so I exchanged twinges in the left knee for a horrible
great pain in the right. I sat down on a bridge, and wondered; I saw
before me hundreds upon hundreds of miles, painful and exhausted, and
I asked heaven if this was necessary to a pilgrimage. (But, as you
shall hear, a pilgrimage is not wholly subject to material laws, for
when I came to Epinal next day I went into a shop which, whatever it
was to the profane, appeared to me as a chemist's shop, where I bought
a bottle of some stuff called 'balm', and rubbing myself with it was
instantly cured.)
Then I looked down from the bridge across the plain, and saw, a long
way off beyond the railway, the very ugly factory village of Thayon,
and reached it at last, not without noticing that the people were
standing branches of trees before their doors, and the little children
noisily helping to tread the stems firmly into the earth. They told me
it was for the coming of Corpus Christi, and so proved to me that
religion, which is as old as these valleys, would last out their
inhabiting men. Even here, in a place made by a great laundry, a
modern industrial row of tenements, all the world was putting out
green branches to welcome the Procession and the Sacrament and the
Priest. Comforted by this evident refutation of the sad nonsense I had
read in Cities from the pen of intellectuals - nonsense I had known to
be nonsense, but that had none the less tarnished my mind - I happily
entered the inn, ate and drank, praised God, and lay down to sleep in
a great bed. I mingled with my prayers a firm intention of doing the
ordinary things, and not attempting impossibilities, such as marching
by night, nor following out any other vanities of this world.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 29 of 189
Words from 14674 to 15177
of 97758
