On the next day I visited the Home again. It was meal time. They all sat around a big table, much like the one I had seen at the orphanage. In the orphanage are fatherless children, in the Homes childless fathers. They sat around the table and tried to chew what was on their plates. Their toothless mouths worked in vain. When the superintendent remarked to me that most of them have stomach ailments and I suggested that a dentist examine their teeth the lady could not stifle her laughter. She was herself a woman of sixty and her mouth was in perfect condition--it was the dentist's work of course.
After the meal was over I tried very hard to get some of the old men to talk. They had nothing to say--this was the answer I got from a few.
"Are you satisfied here?" I asked, to which one fine looking old fellow replied:
"It all depends what one expects, you know. In the Talmud is a story how a man, once very rich, was not satisfied with a supper that three poor men together would have been satisfied about."
I humoured the old fellow and got him to walk with me about the grounds. When out of hearing of the others he told me how the attendants beat every one of them for the slightest infraction of the rules of the house.
"Why don't you complain to the superintendent?" I suggested.
"The ones that do so shorten their lives."
"Don't ask any further." A man understands closed lips.
In a rolling chair, at the further end of the garden, sat a paralysed old man.
"How are you feeling, Uncle?" I greeted him.
"Fine, fine," he answered. "I am all right, now."
"He is a lucky dog," remarked my companion, the old man of the Talmud story. "He is paralysed all over."
"Do you call that lucky?--man, it's the greatest misfortune."
"Not in a Home," he answered. "The paralysed are like the dead--they don't feel when they are hurt." Once his tongue was loosened the old man went on. "There is an attendant here, a brute. When he gets mad he runs around to find fault with some one, to hit him. Then we all get out of his way. This fellow here, he has a bad stomach. He would always be the scapegoat. My, how he would suffer. Only his legs got paralysed at first and he had to be turned over in his bed. When that drunkard would get through with him the poor fellow's body was black and blue from pinches and punches. Now he does not feel anything. He punches him and hits and pinches and gets mad to see that the fellow does not feel pain at all."