Jesus Christ -- Fiction; Religious fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
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?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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