“Nine per cent. on their money!” thought Frithiof. “My God! if they could but see this!”
By-and-by, when he had done all that he could to help, he went back to his own room, leaving Sigrid still with the poor widow. The scene had made a deep impression on him; he had never before seen any one die, and the thought of poor Hallifield’s pathetic confession that he had had no time for anything, but the toil of living, returned to him again and again.
“That is a death-bed that ought not to have been,” he reflected. “It came for the hateful struggle for wealth. Yet the shareholders are no worse than the rest of the world, it is only that they don’t think, or, if they do think for a time, allow themselves to be persuaded that the complaints are exaggerated. How easily men let themselves be hoodwinked by vague statements and comfortable assurances when they want to be persuaded, when it is to their own interest to let things go on as before.”
And then, quite unable to sleep, he lay thinking of the great problems which had so often haunted him, the sharp contrasts between too great wealth and too great poverty, the unequal chances in life, the grinding competition, the ineffable sadness of the world. But his thoughts were no longer tainted by bitterness and despair, because, though he could not see a purpose in all the great mysteries of life, yet he trusted One who had a purpose, One who in the end must overcome all evil, and he knew that he himself was bound to live and could live a life which should help toward that great end.
Three days later poor Hallifield’s “handsome funeral” set out from the door of the model lodgings, and Frithiof, who had given up his half-holiday to go down to the cemetery, listened to the words of the beautiful service, thinking to himself how improbable it was that the tram-conductor had ever had the chance of hearing St. Paul’s teaching on the resurrection.
Was there not something wrong in a system which should so tire out a man that the summit of his wishes on his dying day should be but an echo of the overworked woman whose epitaph ended with—
“I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever”?
How could this great evil of the overwork of the many, and the too great leisure of the few, be set right? A socialism which should compulsorily reduce all to one level would be worse than useless. Love of freedom was too thoroughly ingrained in his Norse nature to tolerate that idea for a moment. He desired certain radical reforms with his whole heart, but he saw that they alone would not suffice—nothing but individual love, nothing but the consciousness of individual responsibility, could really put an end to the misery and injustice of the present system. In a word, the only true remedy was the life of Sonship.