The old man must have envied the sleepers, for he turned his head on leaving, to feast his eyes once more on the sight of those blessed ones, who slept in cool seclusion behind the large glass panes.
He plodded on to the other side of the church and stopped at the principal entrance. He asked the dealer in relics to keep an eye on his barrow, and entered. He stirred the holy water with his right hand and cooled lips and brow. Inside the church it was cool, for the sunbeams were powerless to penetrate the stained-glass windows. The pulpit was occupied by a little abbé, freshly shaved, with traces of powder still visible on his bluish skin; he was speaking, and the old man listened.
"'Consider the lilies in the field,'" said the abbé, "'how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like any one of these! Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have store-houses nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls!'"
"How much more are we better than the fowls!" sighed the old man.
"But rather seek ye the Kingdom of God," concluded the abbé, "and all else will be added, to you."
"All else," sighed the old man, "all else! First the Kingdom of God, and then all else."
Leaning against a pillar in the side aisle, the wealthy man, holding a Baedeker in his hand, tried to solve the problem of the essence and origin of life by means of a careful study of the architecture of the past. He did not believe in the Kingdom of God, but he brooded over the purpose of life, and could not understand why a man should go to so much trouble to kill time until he was seventy or at the most eighty years old. Had it not been against all conventions, he would have gone to the old man and said to him who had already passed his allotted time—
"Give me your solution of the problem of life!"
And the old man, unless he had been too exhausted with hunger and thirst, would have answered—
"The problem of life, as I understood it, is the maintenance of one's own life."