"No, the servants did not like him."
"But that's no reason for a man to die!"
The old man looked at me from under his bushy eyebrows. His look said plainly: "You stupid ass." Then he turned away from me and mingled with the other people. He avoided me when I approached him.
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."