“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 wore 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!”