“Do you think we shouldn’t have courts of law to help us to obtain justice, Hr. Borring?”
“Judicial proceedings of that kind, dear Wangen, are a bad means of bringing right to light. They may perhaps get hold of the fruit but never of the root. Just you notice when the witnesses stand forward. They lie without knowing it; they raise a dust, and the court passes judgment from the dust. It is human; but God deliver us both from the sentence and its consequences!”
All this time Wangen was in the belief that the pastor had been sent by Norby, and that he wanted to entice him with fair words. He had therefore become impatient and wished to put an end to the interview. He rose with an impetuous movement, and began to pace the floor.
“The only thing I’m afraid of,” he said demonstratively—for he was quite willing that Norby should hear this—“is that he’ll get off too easily. After thinking it over, I don’t think he ought to come out of prison any more.”
The pastor felt as if he had received a blow, and rose quickly. “If he is in the right,” he thought, “then Heaven help the right that has fallen into such hands! Can being in the right make a man so coarse and bad? No! He is guilty!”
He sighed and took his leave despondently. Wangen went to the door with him, and on the steps remarked:
“This is much more than a question between Norby and me. It most concerns the working men, who are left without bread. It is a social question.”
“Indeed?” said the pastor, seating himself in his sledge, and gathering up the reins, thinking as he did so: “Of course! If a man only has toothache nowadays, he tries to make it into a social question. People are too cowardly to bear anything alone.”
“Yes,” continued Wangen, “I don’t stand so much alone now, thank goodness, as Norby thinks.”
“Then he’s not so much to be pitied after all,” thought the pastor, adding aloud: “Yes, I hear you’ve started a new working-men’s union, and that you’ve often given lectures there lately.”