‘Facts, please!’ reminded the president.
‘He kept silent even later, when his father seized him by the hair in a fit of drunkenness and flung him out into the street on a snowy winter’s night. He quietly picked himself up out of the snow and ran whither his feet carried him. He kept silent all the way to the great town—however hungry he might be, he only begged with his eyes. Bathed in a cold sweat, crushed under heavy loads, his empty stomach convulsed with hunger—he kept silent. Bespattered with mud, spat at, driven with his load off the pavement and into the road among the cabs, carts, and tramways, looking death in the eyes every moment. He never calculated the difference between other people’s lot and his own—he kept silent. And he never insisted loudly on his pay; he stood in the doorway like a beggar, with a dog-like pleading in his eyes—‘Come again later!’ and he went like a shadow to come again later, and beg for his wage more humbly than before. He kept silent even when they cheated him of part, or threw in a false coin.
‘He took everything in silence.’
‘They mean me after all’, thought Bontzye.
‘Once’, continued the advocate, after a sip of water, ‘a change came into his life: there came flying along a carriage on rubber tires, drawn by two runaway horses. The driver already lay somedistance off on the pavement with a cracked skull, the terrified horses foamed at the mouth, sparks shot from their hoofs, their eyes shone like fiery lamps on a winter’s night—and in the carriage, more dead than alive, sat a man.
‘And Bontzye stopped the horses. And the man he had saved was a charitable Jew who was not ungrateful. He put the dead man’s whip into Bontzye’s hands, and Bontzye became a coachman. More than that, he was provided with a wife. And Bontzye kept silent!’
‘Me, they mean me!’ Bontzye assured himself again, and yet had not the courage to give a glance at the Heavenly Court.
He listens to the advocate further:
‘He kept silent also when his protector became bankrupt and did not pay him his wages. He kept silent when his wife ran away from him.’