“I am highly flattered that you should have noticed it, Mr. Gilderman,” said Foord. “One can always get a capital effect of snow in reproductive process. And then, I suppose, the subject was very fetching. I stood there in the snow sketching the scene over the back of my Tartar pony, with the sketch-book resting on the saddle, while my two Kalmuck men brewed some tea in a deserted hut at the road-side.” Then he began describing incidental scenes connected with the circumstances of the massacre. He talked well, and Gilderman listened much interested.
From this subject, at a question from Norcott, the narrator branched out into his experience in a Tartar village. He described his introduction to a fat old Tartar chief, and he mimicked the obese Oriental with an almost startling vividness. Gilderman laughed heartily, and as he did so he registered in his own mind that he would give a man’s dinner-party and would ask Santley Foord. It would be very entertaining. How Stirling West would enjoy the fellow.
“But, after all,” said Foord, “you don’t have to go out to the far East to find such things. I’ve come across a mine of interest here that nobody seems to know or to think anything about. Did you, for instance, know that the disciples of that carpenter, about whom there was so much talk awhile ago, are still living here in the very midst of the city, a community in themselves? They claim to have had supernatural experiences and to have seen visions and all that sort of thing. They have strange religious ceremonies and meetings, in which they appear to go off into a trance state, and a good many of the poor people among whom they live believe all that they say to be a bona-fide fact.”
“I thought all that trouble was over and done with now,” said Gilderman.
“Oh no, indeed. Why, I’m going to meet Dolan–Inspector Dolan, you know–at eleven o’clock to-day, and we’re going down to a meeting that those people are going to hold this morning. I’m going to make a sketch of it. They are quite the most interesting thing I have come across for a long time, and I think the world will be rather struck to find that these strange folk are living in its very midst without its knowing anything at all about them.”
“Really!” said Gilderman. And then, after a moment of pause: “Do you know, Mr. Foord, I’d like immensely to go with you and Dolan and see these people.”
Santley Foord laughed. “Well, Mr. Gilderman, to tell you the honest truth, I don’t believe you would like it very much. The surroundings are not especially pleasant. I’ve got used to all those kinds of sights and smells by this time. One gets used to no end of such things knocking about on the rough side of the world, but I don’t believe you’d like it.”
Gilderman laughed in answer. “I don’t know that I would especially like the sights and smells,” he said, “but I’d like very much to see what these poor people are doing.” And then, after a brief second of hesitation, he continued: “Such things interest me very much. I saw the Man Himself two or three times while He was alive, and spoke to Him once face to face. He impressed me very singularly.”
“Did He, indeed?” said Santley Foord.
Gilderman had found it very hard one time to confess this to his wife. It had not been so hard to repeat the narrative in part to Stirling West, and since then he had described the scene in the cemetery several times to friends who had asked him about it. He described it now, growing conscious as he did so of how flat his narrative was compared to the clever way in which Foord would have told the story.