“You can help me,” the Speaker said, “but you shall learn how another day. You shall understand how it is that you seem to have been sent by Heaven just at this moment. But now, tell me what do you think of these times?”
“I don’t know,” Jeremy began uncertainly. “I know so little. You seem to have lost almost all that we had gained——”
“And yet?” the Speaker interrupted harshly.
Jeremy sought to order in his mind the confused and contradictory thoughts. “And yet perhaps you have lost much that is better gone. This world seems to me simpler, more peaceful, safer.... We used to feel that we were living on the edge of a precipice—every man by himself, and all men together, lived in anxiety....”
“And you think that now we are happy?” the old man asked with a certain irony, pausing close to Jeremy’s chair, so that he towered over him. “Perhaps you are right—perhaps you are right.... But if we are it is the happiness of a race of fools. We, too, are living on the edge of a precipice as terrible as any you ever knew. Do you believe that any people can come down one step from the apex and fall no further?” He contemplated Jeremy with eyes suddenly grown cold and calculating. “You were not, I think, one of the great men, one of the rulers of your time. You were one of the little people.” He turned away and resumed his agitated pacing up and down, speaking as though to himself. “And yet what does it matter? The smallest creature of those days might be a great man to-day.”
A profound and dreadful silence fell upon the room. Jeremy, feeling himself plunged again in a nightmare, straightened himself in his chair and waited events. The Speaker struggled with his agitation, striding up and down the room. Gradually his step grew more tranquil and his gestures less violent; his eyes ceased to blaze, the lids drooped over them, the lines round his mouth softened and lost their look of cruel purpose.
“I am an old man,” he murmured indistinctly. His voice was again thick and soft, the voice of an elderly Jew, begging for help but determined, even in extremity, not to betray himself. “I am an old man and I have no son. These people, the people of my time, do not understand me. When my father died, I promised myself that I would raise this country again to what it was, but year after year they have defeated me with their carelessness, their indolence.... If you can help me, if you understand guns ... if you can help me, I shall be grateful, I shall not forget you.”
Jeremy, perplexed almost out of his wits, muttered an inarticulate reply.
“You must be my guest and my companion,” the Speaker went on. “I will give orders for a room near my own apartments to be prepared for you, and you shall eat at my table. And you must learn. You must listen, listen, listen always and never speak. I will teach you myself; but you must learn from every man that comes near you. Can you keep your tongue still?”
“I suppose so,” said Jeremy, a little wearily. He was beginning to think that this old man was possibly mad and certainly as incomprehensible as the rest. He was oppressed by these hints and mysteries and enigmatic injunctions. He thought that the Speaker was absurdly, unreasonably, melodramatically, making a scene.