Sir Bernard smiled good-humouredly.
“That won’t be necessary. We shall preserve some of the savage tribes instead. They are documents of priceless value to the anthropologist.”
“When does a man cease to be a priceless document, and become a criminal?” Stuart asked, with secret bitterness.
The other reflected for a moment.
“I suppose the answer is given by Johnson’s definition of dirt: When he is in the wrong place.”
It was the answer which Alistair had given to himself that night on Westminster Bridge. He was in the wrong place. But was there any right place in the world for him?
He lifted his eyes and looked away. They were sitting on the verandah of Vanbrugh’s house in the Malounine, facing eastward. The sun was just leaving the sky, and the red glow of the western horizon, caught full on the white walls and windows of St. Malo, bathed the city in fire. Alistair’s heart beat painfully as he strained his eyes on the flaming town. There was his world, there the vision that called to his soul. O, not in dingy lanes, not on the cold, grey pavements of reality, but amid those vermilion glories, his spirit should have dwelt and burned itself away.
He was an exile. Not from the Island of Oig, nor any other island of an earthly sea, but from that far-off sphere of which the sunset-smitten town reminded him. He was an exile from some world of which love, and not hate, was the keynote, banished for what fault he could not tell, condemned to mortal life as to a penance, but tormented and consoled by intimations from that happier state.
The soul has her imperial moments when she exercises a prerogative that reason cannot take away; when the toilsome knowledge gathered together by the senses falls into shards under her feet, and she enters into possession of herself, freed from the bonds and trammels cast about her by the material brain. In that moment Alistair did not think—he knew, knew well, more surely than if a voice from the beyond had spoken it in his ear, that he was an immortal spirit inhabiting eternity.
When his attention returned to the voice beside him, he found that the agnostic was expounding the folklore of the crucifixion.