“What is it that you all have there, Mother?” he asked one. She shot him a look of resentful astonishment, and said, as she hurried by, “Dust of Saint Dominik. . . .”
“Ahhh . . he murmured. All was now clear. He made his way through the church and into the churchyard. The throng was clustered round a tomb of incredibly antique design; it had been whitewashed, and a number of priests were standing next to it. One was scraping the side of the tomb with a short knife of exactly the sort which painters use to remove old paint before putting on a fresh coat. A second priest gathered the powder in a paper, and, when the first paused, transferred it to a bowl, whence a third spooned it up, tiny spoon by tiny spoon – the fourth and last priest stood a slight bit apart, reading aloud from the Psalter.
Two men, evidently the verger and the sexton, allowed the pilgrims to approach the tomb one by one, each knelt, and (presumably) prayed a moment, arose, held out a hand, received a tiny spoonful of dust, withdrew. This, then, was the somewhat famous tomb of Saint Domenicus Paleologus, a younger son of a cadet branch of the Imperial House of Byzantium. His missionary labors had included the free treatment of the sick; so great his reputation, that his very tomb had repeatedly been, and literally, tom to pieces in order that the hallowed fragments might prove medically utile. At length the ecclesiastical authorities had fenced and walled the Saints last resting-place: the present ceremony was already hundreds of years old; once a year the dust was scraped from the tomb and distributed. Doubtless the ceremony had been fashionable, but not for long years now; those clustering here and straining for the puissant dust were all from the poor.
The pious rich had other places.
The bell began to ring in the church tower, a flock of doves wheeled up and around, the crowd set up a melancholy howl, pressed closer round the priests at the tomb, who began to move faster and faster. The ceremony was coming to its conclusion. In front of Eszterhazy was an old man dressed in blue canvas, worn soft, worn full of holes, scarcely in any better condition than the remnant of a sack which he had about his back and shoulders. The aged supplicant knelt, received his bit of dust, hastily spooned out, had begun to hobble away—when a heavy old woman, perhaps a fishwife by the sound and smell of her, hurrying so as not to miss out, fell full against him. The hand he had clenched fell out, fell open, in a second was empty.
The old man gazed at his empty hand, still lightly covered by the dust of lime, with stupefaction. He hooted once, twice, in grief and senile disbelief, turned as though to return for another portion, was pushed back, pushed aside. Tears ran from his rufous eyes into his snowy beard. Then, with a sudden and unexpected movement, he plunged his head forward, tongue out, and licked the dust adhering to his hand. Then he tottered away, and Eszterhazy tried to follow after him. But the press was too great.
The last toll of the bell echoed in the air, the last spoon of dust was distributed from the bowl, the priest with full deliberateness lifted the bowl and smashed it, and the unsatisfied remnant of the crowd gave voice to one more howl of sorrow. . . .
The ceremony was over.
As fast as he could, as soon as he could, Eszterhazy scuttled from the churchyard, his eyes darting everywhere around the square. He darted, first up one street, then back to the square and then up another—all, all in vain. The old man was not to be seen, was nowhere to be seen.
Old man whose face was the face of the old man who was Emperor.
Eszterhazy at last sat down in a low dramshop, ordered cognac. The rough, pale spirit in the dirty glass had never been to France, had been nowhere near France. No matter. He sipped, then he gulped. Then he coughed, choked. Then he made himself be calm and still, and he made himself reflect, there in the stifling room with the rough concrete walls and the flies and the stench from the privy in the nearby yard.
First he forced himself to consider what might have been the state of his own mind, to have created this sudden obsession with every white- bearded old man he saw had the Emperors face . . . then he reproached himself for the exaggeration: stilclass="underline" two, in little over an hour s time. . . . Briefly, he considered protesting this last ceremony to the cardinal-archbishop, to the Minister of Cults; decided not to; in the six centuries which had passed since the death of St Domenicus Paleologus (himself close kin to an Emperor) the ceremony had been repeatedly—and uselessly—forbidden: now, at least, it was reduced to one hour, once a year; no one nowadays was injured . . . and, perhaps, he thought, wryly, the lime content of the dust might be of some mild use to the body!
But, back to his own state of mind—certainly, he had been increasingly, if somewhat unconsciously, uneasy about the state of the nation. And to him, as to almost everyone else, the Emperor was the nation. Had he not been uneasy, too, about the state of the aged Emperors health? Did not every report of even a cold send ripples of uneasiness throughout the land, cause prayers, most of them genuine, to be offered for old Bobbo’s health? So it was perhaps not a completely unreasonable thing if he had seen his Sovereigns face in the face of other old men who suffered. . . . He suddenly sat up. Suppose (his heart thumped) suppose it was not an illusion! Suppose—could it be possible!—that it was Ignats Louis himself whom he had seen? The first old man, laboring in the pit—no, that was impossible, he could not have had the strength; that one had been too far off for him to have been sure. But this other, this second one? The pouched, protruding and reddened eyes, the bifurcated beard, the long nose, the very stoop and gait? Could the Emperor have suddenly taken a notion to play Haroun al-Rashid and go about incognito to take the pulse of the city, so to speak? This pilgrimage just now over, for instance . . .
For although the King-Emperor reigned and lived in an age of telephones and gramophones and motor-cars, he had been bom in an age when the steamboat was only a toy on a pond. Bom to an obscure princeling in a house—not even a castle—on the Gothic-Slovatchko border-marches, deep in the forest, raised in infancy and early childhood not by nannies, mademoiselles, frauleins, but according to antique custom by his wet nurse in her own cottage. What tales of ages even earlier yet had he heard day after day and night after night? He had already had his first beard when destiny, in the form of a court circle alarmed at the growing insanity of the then-emperor, had plucked him from the hunting lodge and the wilderness and sent him to military school—their idea and their only idea of how to fit the Heir for the heavy task ahead.
Small wonder that religious eccentrics of all sorts, not to say outright charlatans, were able to find access, increasingly as his hearing diminished, to his ancient ear; yes, it just might be possible that he had of his own mere whim and fancy decided to participate in the now- brief pilgrimage for the Dust of Saint Dominik. One might find out.
One would have to. . . .
He had by this time left the dramshop and, wandering about in a deep study, marked not his steps, and, looking up, found himself, as the bells tolled noon, at another of the scenes continued from ancient ages: the distribution of the Beggars’ Dole. Only a single arch of heavy masonry remained to mark the location of the City Gates. Down to the early years of the present Reign, the Imperial Capital had remained a walled city, its gates literally locked at sunset, the keys ceremonially handed over to the Emperor to keep till shortly before dawn. The city had since spread far and wide, the walls for the most part demolished. But the City Gates remained—or, at any rate, one of the arches of the Main Gate still remained. And at this spot, where once assembled the lame, the halt, the blind, the pauper and the leper, to beg for alms, at this same place forever commemorated in living legend and in folklore, each noon the ancient beneficence of bread and milk was still distributed.