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.