Had it not been for the fog his long walk might have made him sleepy,
but the necessity of keeping every faculty on the alert and of sharply
watching every crossing and every landmark made that out of the
question. Moreover, now that he had quite recovered from his illness it
took a great deal to tire him, and, whenever he did succumb, it was to
mental worry, never to physical fatigue. So he tramped along pretty
cheerfully, rather enjoying the novelty of the thing, but making as much
haste as he could on account of Sigrid. He had just reached the outer
door of the model lodgings and was about to unlock it with the key which
was always furnished to those whose work detained them beyond the hour
of closing, when he was startled by something that sounded like a sob
close by him. He paused and listened; it came again.
“Who is there?” he said, straining his eyes to pierce the thick curtain
of fog that hung before him.
The figure of a woman approached him.
“Oh, sir,” she said, checking her sobs, “have you the key, and can you
let me in?”
“Yes, I have a key. Do you live here?”
“No, sir, but I’m sister to Mrs. Hallifield. Perhaps you know
Hallifield, the tram conductor. I came to see him to-night because he
was taken so ill, but I got hindered setting out again, and didn’t allow
time to get back to Macdougal’s. I’m in his shop, and the rule at his
boarding-house is that the door is closed at eleven and mayn’t be opened
any more, and when I got there sir, being hindered with the fog, it was
five minutes past.”
“And they wouldn’t let you in?” asked Frithiof. “What an abominable
thing—the man ought to be ashamed of himself for having such a rule!
Come in; why you must be half-frozen! I know your sister quite well!”
“I can never thank you enough,” said the poor girl. “I thought I should
have had to stay out all night! There’s a light, I see, in the window;
my brother-in-law is worse, I expect.”
“What is wrong with him?” asked Frithiof.
“Oh, he’s been failing this long time,” said the girl; “it’s the long
hours of the trams he’s dying of. There’s never any rest for them you
see, sir; winter and summer, Sunday and week-day they have to drudge on.
He’s a kind husband and a good father too, and he will go on working for
the sake of keeping the home together, but it’s little of the home he
sees when he has to be away from it sixteen hours every day. They say
they’re going to give more holidays and shorter hours, but there’s a
long time spent in talking of things, it seems to me, and in the
meanwhile John’s dying.”
Frithiof remembered how Sigrid had mentioned this very thing to him in
the summer when he had told her of his disgrace; he had been too full of
his own affairs to heed her much, but now his heart grew hot at the
thought of this pitiable waste of human life, this grinding out of a
larger dividend at the cost of such terrible suffering. It was a sign
that his new life had actually begun when, instead of merely railing at
the injustice of the world, he began to think what he himself could do
in this matter.
“Perhaps they will want the doctor fetched. I will come with you to the
door and you shall just see,” he said.
And the girl thanking him, knocked at her sister’s door, spoke to some
one inside, and returning, asked him to come in. To his surprise he
found Sigrid in the little kitchen; she was walking to and fro with the
baby, a sturdy little fellow of a year old.
“You are back at last,” she said, “I was getting quite anxious about
you. Mr. Hallifield was taken so much worse to-day, and hearing the baby
crying I came in to help.”
“How about the doctor? Do they want him fetched?”
“No, he came here about ten o’clock, and he says there is nothing to be
done; it is only a question of hours now.”
At this moment the poor wife came into the kitchen; she was still quite
young, and the dumb anguish in her face brought the tears to Sigrid’s
eyes.
“What, Clara!” she exclaimed, perceiving her sister, “you back again!”
“I was too late,” said the girl, “and they had locked me out. But it’s
no matter now that the gentleman has let me in here. Is John worse
again.”
“He’ll not last long,” said the wife, “and he be that set on getting in
here to the fire, for he’s mortal cold. But I doubt if he’s strength to
walk so far.”
“Frithiof, you could help him in,” said Sigrid.
“Will you, sir? I’ll thank you kindly if you will,” said Mrs.
Hallifield, leading the way to the bedroom.
Frithiof followed her, and glancing toward the bed could hardly control
the awed surprise which seized him as for the first time he saw a man
upon whom the shadow of death had already fallen. Once or twice he had
met Hallifield in the passage setting off to his work in the early
morning, and he contrasted his recollection of the brisk,
fair-complexioned, respectable-looking conductor, and this man propped
up with pillows, his face drawn with pain, and of that ghastly ashen hue
which is death’s herald.
“The Norwegian gentleman is here, and will help you into the kitchen,
John,” said the wife, beginning to swathe him in blankets.
“Thank you, sir,” said the man gratefully. “It’s just a fancy I’ve got
to die in there by the fire, though I doubt I’ll never get warm any
more.”
Frithiof carried him in gently and set him down in a cushioned chair
drawn close to the fire; he seemed pleased by the change of scene, and
looked round the tidy little room with brightening eyes.
“It’s a nice little place!” he said. “I wish I could think you would
keep it together, Bessie, but with the four children you’ll have a hard
struggle to live.”
For the first time she broke down and hid her face in her apron. A look
of keen pain passed over the face of the dying man, he clinched and
unclinched his hands. But Sigrid, who was rocking the baby on the other
side of the hearth, bent forward and spoke to him soothingly.
“Don’t you trouble about that part of it,” she said. “We will be her
friends. Though we are poor yet there are many ways in which we can help
her, and I know a lady who will never let her want.”
He thanked her with a gratitude that was pathetic.
“I’m in a burial club,” he said, after a pause, stretching out his
nerveless fingers toward the fire; “she’ll have no expenses that way;
they’ll bury me very handsome, which’ll be a satisfaction to her, poor
girl. I’ve often thought of it when I saw a well-to-do looking funeral
pass alongside the tram, but I never thought it would come as soon as
this. I’m only going in thirty-five, which isn’t no great age for a
man.”
“The work was too much for you,” said Frithiof.
“Yes, sir, it’s the truth you speak, and there’s many another in the
same boat along with me. It’s a cruel hard life. But then, you see, I
was making my four-and-six a day, and if I gave up I knew it meant
starvation for the wife and the children; there is thousands out of
work, and that makes a man think twice before giving in—spite of the
long hours.”
“And he did get six shillings a day at one time,” said the wife looking
up, “but the company’s cruel hard, sir, and just because he had a
twopence in his money and no ticket to account for its being there they
lowered him down to four-and-six again.”
“Yes, that did seem to me hard; I’ll not deny, I swore a bit that day,”
said Hallifield. “But the company never treats us like men, it treats us
like slaves. They might have known me to be honest and careful, but it
seems as if they downright liked to catch a fellow tripping, and while
that’s so there’s many that’ll do their best to cheat.”
“But is nothing being done to shorten the hours, to make people
understand how frightful they are?” asked Sigrid.
“Oh, yes, miss, there’s Mrs. Reaney working with all her might for us,”
said Hallifield. “But you see folks are hard to move, and if we had only
the dozen hours a day that we ought to have and every other Sunday at
home, why, miss, they’d perhaps not get nine per cent. on their money as
they do now.”
“They are no better than murderers!” said Frithiof hotly.
“Well,” said Hallifield, “so it has seemed to me sometimes. But I never
set up to know much; I’ve had no time for book-learning, nor for
religion either, barely time for eating and sleeping. I don’t think God
Almighty will be hard on a fellow that has done his best to keep his
wife and children in comfort, and I’ll not complain if only He’ll just
let me sit still and do nothing for a bit, for I’m mortal tired.”
He had been talking eagerly, and for the time his strength had returned
to him, but now his head dropped forward, and his hands clutched
convulsively at the blankets.
With a great cry the poor wife started forward and flung her arms round
him.
“He’s going!” she sobbed. “He’s going! John—oh, John!”
“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.