by Howard Pyle
“Did you ever see the Man yourself, John?” said Gilderman, suddenly.
“Yes, sir,” said the groom. “Me and Jackson was down in the town last Wednesday night a week ago. He was teaching there in front of an old frame church.”
“What sort of looking man is He?” said Gilderman; and John, the groom, answered almost exactly as Latimer-Moire had done one time before.
“Oh, I don’t know; He just looks like any other man.”
Then they were at the platform of the railroad station. Gilderman jumped out of the cart. He drew a dollar out of his pocket and gave it to the man. “Thankee, sir,” said the groom, touching his hat with the finger that held the whip. He waited a little while till Gilderman had walked away across the platform, then he turned the horse and drove away.
There were a few scattered people waiting for the train, which was late. The day, which had been so clear in the morning, had become overcast and threatening. The wind had become cold and raw. Gilderman turned up the collar of his overcoat as he walked up and down the platform.
Suddenly it entered his mind that he would stay over another train. He might never again have such an opportunity of seeing this Man whom nearly all the nether world now believed to be divine. He would have made up his mind to stay only for the latent shame of changing his plans for such an object. But, after all, if he choose to indulge his curiosity no one need know. Finally he concluded if there was another train by a quarter-past three he would stay; if not he would go back home as he had intended. He would let that decide the question. He went up to the ticket-office. “What time is the next train for New York?” he asked.
“Three-twenty-two,” said the clerk, without looking up.
Three-twenty-two! Well, that decided it; he would go back to the city. As he came out upon the platform he heard the thunder of the approaching train. Then it appeared, coming around the curve. The brass-work on the huge engine twinkled as it came rushing forward. There was a screaming of the brakes as the train drew shudderingly up to the platform. Then there was an instant bustle of people getting aboard. Gilderman walked forward along the platform to the parlor-car. “Chair in the parlor-car, sir?” said the conductor, and he nodded his head.
The conductor preceded him into the car and swung around a revolving seat for him. At that moment the train began to move. Gilderman was yet standing close to the door. As the train began moving an instant determination came over him to stop over, after all. It overmastered him–why he could not tell. He turned quickly to open the door. It stuck, and he had some difficulty in pulling it open. The train was moving more and more swiftly. A brakeman was standing on the platform.
“Look out, sir!” he cried, as he saw Gilderman preparing to jump.
Then Gilderman leaped out upon the platform. He did not know how fast the train was going until his feet touched the earth. It nearly flung him prostrate. He regained his balance with a tripping run. The train swept along the curve and the platform seemed strangely deserted. Then Gilderman felt very foolish and wished that he had not acted upon his impulse.
He stood considering for a while, then he walked down along the open platform to the station. He did not at all know what he should do, now that he had stayed. In the morning, when he had come up from New York, there had been a great sign of stir and interest; now everything seemed unusually quiet. The few people in the neighborhood of the station seemed almost oblivious of anything but their own affairs. How foolish had he been to miss his train. A man came to the door of the men’s waiting-room and stood looking at him. Gilderman passed by without speaking to him–then he suddenly turned back and asked the man whether He whom he sought was in the town.
“Yes, sir, He is,” said the man. “He came an hour or more ago.”
“Where is He now?” said Gilderman.
“Well, sir,” said the man, “I don’t just know. He went down in the lower part of the town, there, with a great crowd of people.”
“Which way did He go?”
“Over yonder,” said the man, pointing across the railroad tracks.
Gilderman stood for a moment considering. Should he stay where he was? It looked very like rain–he hesitated–then again came that strange propulsion forward, urging him to pursue the undertaking. He crossed the five or six broad lines of railroad track. He walked down the road and over the bridge. There was a steep embankment on the other side of the bridge, and the stream went winding down the level, open lot or field below. Gilderman wondered whether this was the place where Tom Kettle had received his sight. He walked on for perhaps a quarter of a mile without seeing any sign of a crowd. At last he came to a sort of tobacco-shop that was half a dwelling-house. He hesitated for a moment or two and then went up the two dirty steps and pushed open the door. It stuck for a moment, and then suddenly gave way with a loud jangling of a bell over his head. The bell continued a persistent tink-tinking for some time. The place was full of a heavy, musty smell that was not altogether of tobacco. A woman emerged somewhere from an inner room. Gilderman felt very foolish. Then he asked her if she had seen anything of the Man whom he sought. He marvelled at the freak of fancy that seemed to thrust him forward upon his strange quest. It seemed to him that he was suddenly becoming translated into a different sphere of life from any that he had ever known before.
The woman stared at him for a moment or two without answering. She had a frowsy head of hair and a shapeless figure, and was clad in a calico dress. She told him that a crowd had gone over towards the cemetery; that the town had been full of people all the morning, and that they all appeared to have gone over after the Man.
“How far is the cemetery from here?” asked Gilderman.
“About a mile, I reckon.”
“A mile?”
“Yes.”
Gilderman lingered for a moment. Then he said, “Thank you,” and he opened the door with the same momentary resistance that finally gave way to a repeated clamorous jangling of the bell. Again he suddenly realized that he was entering a strange life, such as he had never before beheld. He stood for a while uncertainly in the street. What should he do next? He was conscious that the woman was looking at him from the store window, and he realized how strange and remote he must appear in these unusual surroundings. He could not go a mile to the cemetery and back again in time for his train. A negro came driving a farm wagon down the road towards the station. Gilderman called to the man, who drew in the horses with a “Whoh!”
“Look here, my man,” said Gilderman, “I want to go out to the cemetery, and I want to get back again in time for the three-twenty-two train. I will give you five dollars if you will drive me there and back.” The negro made no reply, but he drew up to the sidewalk with alacrity.
Gilderman could see the cemetery from a distance as he approached it. It was a bleak, cheerless place, and it looked still more bleak and cheerless under the damp, gray sky above. It was surrounded by a high, white paling fence, and there was a wide gateway with high wooden gate-posts, painted white. Through the palings Gilderman could see that the cemetery was half filled with a dark crowd of people. A straggling crowd still lingered about the other gateway. There was a ceaseless hum of many voices. Gilderman thought he heard a voice speaking with loud tones in the distance. “This will do,” he said. “Let me out here, and wait till I come back.” As the negro drew up the farm wagon to the road-side, Gilderman leaped out over the wheel. He hurried to the gate of the cemetery, almost running. After he had entered he saw that the crowd had gathered together beyond a stretch of dead, brown grass, and between him and them were a number of poor, cheap-looking gravestones and wooden head-boards and two or three newly made graves. The place looked squalid and poor. The crowd had grown suddenly silent, as though listening or waiting. Gilderman walked around the outskirts of the throng, and then, finding an open place, he pushed his way into it. He felt a strange eerie excitement taking entire possession of him. In pushing his way he pressed against the shoulder of a woman. She w
ore a plaid shawl, and Gilderman noticed that indescribable, musty, human smell that seems to belong to the clothes of poor people.
“Good Lord, don’t shove so!” said the woman. She moved to one side, and Gilderman edged his way past her. The press grew more and more dense the farther he penetrated into it, and now and then he could not move. By-and-by he could see before him at some little distance that the crowd surrounded a cavelike vault, and then that the keeper of the cemetery was opening the door.
Gilderman had almost come to the very centre of the crowd. He could see the vault very clearly. He wondered, dimly, whether he would be able to make the three-twenty-two train, and he wished he had asked what time was the next train. He pushed a little more forward, and then he could see the faces of those who fronted the vault. Two of them were women, their eyes red and swollen with crying. Some of those who stood near them were evidently friends of the family. One of these, a woman, was crying sympathetically, wiping her eyes with the corner of her shawl. They were all poor people. One of the two women had that indefinable look that belongs to a woman of ill repute. She was handsome, after a certain fashion, but she had that hard expression about the mouth which there is no mistaking. Now her face was wet and softened with her crying.
They stood just behind and over against a man whom Gilderman at once singled out as Him whom he had come to see. Gilderman looked at His face. Tears were trickling unnoticed down the cheeks; the lips were moving as though the Man were speaking to himself. But though He was weeping, Gilderman knew that it was not because of sorrow for the dead man that He wept.
“Open the door!” cried a loud, clear voice.
Gilderman heard one of the women say: “He has been dead four days and he stinks.”
The Other turned His face slowly towards her, and Gilderman heard Him say to her: “Did I not tell you that if you would believe you should see the glory of God?”
The cemetery-keeper had opened the door. Gilderman was watching tensely and curiously. He wondered what the Other was going to do. He supposed that some singular funeral ceremony was about to take place.
The Man raised His face and looked up into the gray and cheerless sky. He began speaking in a loud, distinct voice, but just what He said Gilderman could not understand. Presently He ceased speaking, and then followed a perfectly dead and breathless hush. Then, suddenly, in a loud, piercing voice, He cried out, “Lazarus, come forth!”
Again there was a pause–a pause for a single moment. Those near to Him stood breathless and motionless. Suddenly there was the sound of something falling with a loud clatter inside the black depths of the vault. The cemetery-keeper, who stood near the door, sprang backward with a shriek. Then a man suddenly appeared at the mouth of the vault. He stood for a moment at the door of the pit, craning his neck and peering around with a strange, bewildered look. His white, lean face was bound about with a cloth, his eyes were somewhat dazed and bewildered. He plucked at the cloth about his face, and then he came up out of the vault. All about where Gilderman stood there was a tumult of shrieks and cries–a violent commotion swept the crowd like a whirlwind. Gilderman hardly heard it. He saw everything dizzily, as though it were not real. What did it all mean; was he really seeing a dreadful miracle performed; were all those people real? Suddenly he felt some one clutch him and fall, struggling, against him. He looked down. A woman had fallen in a fit at his feet. Gilderman awoke to himself with a shock and began to struggle violently backward through the crowd. He hardly knew what he was doing. He elbowed his way, struggling and trampling, and striving to get out of the press. He did not know himself; he was as another man. He knew in his soul that he had, indeed, seen a miracle–a dreadful, an astounding miracle! He was in a state of blind terror–terror of what was to happen next. Presently he found himself out of the thick of the crowd. He ran away across the graves. The crowd behind him was crying and screaming. Gilderman found that he was running towards the entrance gateway. Then he was out of the place. He seemed to breathe more freely. The negro with the cart was still waiting for him.
“What’s the matter over there?” he said. “What have they been doing?” Gilderman did not reply. He sprang into the wagon. “Anything happened over there?” the man asked once more. Then he added: “Why, you’re as white as a sheet.”
“Can you make the three-twenty-two train?” cried Gilderman.
“I don’t know. What time is it now?” said the man.
Gilderman looked at his watch, which he held in a shaking and trembling hand. “It’s a quarter-past three,” he said. Had it been only three-quarters of an hour since he had leaped from the moving train to the platform?
“I don’t know whether I can ketch her now, unless she’s late,” the man was saying, but it sounded to Gilderman as though his voice came from a great distance away.
The train was already at the station when the farm wagon rattled up to it. As Gilderman stepped aboard of it, it began moving. He took the first vacant seat that offered; it was in the smoking-car. There was an all-pervading smell of stale tobacco smoke, and the floor under the seat was foul with the sprinkling of tobacco ashes. He sat down in the seat, pulled up his overcoat collar, and drew the brim of his hat over his eyes; then, folding his arms, he gave himself up to thinking.
He did not know what he thought, and he did not direct his mind at all. He thought about what he had seen, but the most trivial things that surrounded him crept into the chinks of his broken and shattered intelligence. He looked at the plush cover on the seat directly in front of him–the ply was worn off in the pleats where it was gathered at the button, and he thought trivially about it; at the same time he saw the bleak and naked cemetery, with its white paling fence, almost as though with his very eyes. There was a man just in front of him smoking a pipe and reading a comic paper printed in colors. There was a garish caricature of Cæsar on the front page. The man was looking steadily at it, evidently ruminating upon its import. Gilderman, staring over his shoulder, tried to see the legend below, but the paper was too far away from him to decipher it. At the same time he thought of that man as he had come up peering out of the vault; he could see him with the eyes of his soul exactly as he looked. He saw the face almost as vividly as though it really stood before him–a thin, lean face, the unshaven beard beneath the chin. The man looked as if he had just climbed out of his coffin; there was something horribly grotesque about the black clothes and the starched shirt, so exactly like the clothes an undertaker would have put upon a dead body. The man in the seat ahead turned over the paper; there was a comic picture of a church sociable upon the other page. Gilderman looked at it, but at the same time he thought of the face of the Man who had raised the dead; there was something dreadful about that, too. Why were the tears running down the cheeks, and why was He muttering and groaning to Himself?
The cloudy day was rapidly approaching dusk and they were nearing the tunnels. The brakeman came in and lit the lamp. Gilderman watched him as he stood straddling between the seats like a colossus. He turned back the chimney of the brass lamp and then lit it with the match which he held deftly between his fingers. Gilderman watched him light the next lamp with the same match. There was something ghastly, when he came to think of it, about that Man living with the dead man and his sisters. Was it possible that He could live amid such squalid, evil surroundings, and yet be divine? Why had He cried and groaned and muttered? What did it mean? What was He suffering? He did not seem to have been sorrowing at the death of the other. Had that one really been dead, or was it all a trick? Then they rushed into the tunnel with a roar and a sudden obliteration of the outside light.
Gilderman could not tell his wife where he had been. He was very silent and distraught all the evening. His brain tingled, and he felt that he had endured a terrible, nervous shock. He wished he had not gone to the cemetery. He knew he would not be able to sleep that night, and he did not sleep. He got up and rang the bell, and when his man came he told him to bring him a bottle of soda and some
whiskey. He sat up and tried to read the paper and forget what he had seen. He was very tired of it, and wished he could obliterate it from his mind, if only for a little while. Then he went to bed again, and about three o’clock in the morning began to drop off into a broken sleep. But as he would fall asleep he would see that figure again, standing craning its neck against the black background of the vault, and then he would awaken once more with a start only to drop off again and to awaken with another start. His nerves thrilled and his muscles twitched at every sound. He wondered if he were going mad. He realized that he would go mad if he gave way to his religious vagaries. Well, he would have done with such things now and forever; henceforth he would lead a natural, wholesome life as other men of his kind lived; he would give up these monstrous speculations into unrealities–speculations that had led him into such a dreadful experience as that of the afternoon.
XI. NOTHING BUT LEAVES
GILDERMAN AWOKE IN the morning suddenly and keenly wide-awake. The sleep, such as it had been, was of that sort that cuts sharply and distinctly across the thread of life, and for a few moments he could not join the severed skeins of thought that he held in his hand to those which had gone before. There had been something uncomfortable. What was it? Then instantly the broken ends were joined and recollection came like a flash. Oh yes; that was it!
He lay in bed inertly thinking about it. A feeling of stronger and stronger distaste grew up every instant within him, but he made no effort to detach his mind from its thought. By-and-by he found that he hated it; that he was deathly tired of it all; but still he let his thoughts dwell upon it. How unnatural, how unwholesome it had all been, how revolting to all that was sweet and lucid. Again he realized that if he tampered too much with these things he would unhinge his mind. Yesterday he had almost believed that he had seen a miracle; now, in the calmer, saner morning light of a new day, he recognized how impossible it was. It could have been nothing but a hideous trick, devised to deceive those poor, ignorant, superstitious wretches who followed that strange Man and believed in Him. No; it could not have been all a trick, either, for the grief of those two women had been a real grief and not a simulated agony. What had it been? Maybe that other man had had a cataleptic fit. Ach! how ugly it all was–how poor, how squalid. That woman who had fallen against him in a fit–he could conjure up an almost visible picture of how she had looked as she lay struggling upon the ground. She wore coarse yarn stockings, and one of her shoes was burst out at the side. He writhed upon his bed. Ach! he was sick, sick of it. He wished he could think of something pleasanter. He tried to force his mind to think of the great and coming hope of his life. In a little while now he would be a father, and he tried to forecast the joys of his coming paternity. But when he made the attempt he found he could not detach his mind from that other thing.