Signor Malipizzo on this occasion did not mean to be baulked of his prey. He was in bad humour; Don Giustino had got on his nerves. By means of a lightning-like discharge of symbols intelligible only to the Elect he retorted that a physician, who depended for his livelihood upon a legitimate practice among BONA FIDE patients, was not fit to be a freemason.
Then the doctor urged the humanitarian aspects of the case. The old man needed the treatment which could be given in prison just as well; the fees would doubtless be paid sooner or later.
The magistrate proved inexorable, adamantine. What was good enough for a native, he argued, was good enough for a vicious old alien. A stomach-pump in prison! What more? They would be wanting fried fish and asparagus next.
As a special concession to the Master's age and rank a separate upper chamber, described as very airy, had been allotted to him in the local gaol. The poor old man did not know how he got there; they had thrust him into this strange place and locked the door on him. Long hours had passed. He sat on an uncomfortable cane-bottomed chair, his hands folded across his stomach. There was already a slight sense of oppression in that region of his body. His head, too, felt heavy. Without knowing how or why, he had fallen into a trap, after the manner of some dumb beast of earth. When would they take him out again? And when would that kind gentleman with the machine arrive?
Daylight entered through a small but thickly grated window. Looking out from where he sat, he could detect neither men nor houses nor trees—nothing but four rectangular patches of deep blue. The sea! Often had he wondered about the sea, and why it was there. It had ever been an enigma to him, this purposeless mass of water. Not even good to drink. He knew nothing of those fables of the pagans—of old Poseidon and white-armed Leucothea and the blithe crew of Triton and silver-footed Thetis moving upon the placid sunlit waters; nothing of that fair sea-born goddess whose beauty swayed the hearts of men. His Venus ideals had been of a more terrestrial nature—the wives or daughters of army generals and state functionaries who desired advancement, and sometimes got it.
Not even good to drink! There was nothing like this in Holy Russia. God would never have allowed it. The uselessness of this sea had always been to him a source of perplexity and even vague apprehension. The spectacle of this shining immensity troubled his world-scheme. Why did God create water, when land would have been so much more useful? Often had he puzzled on the subject…. Why?
But now, in the evening of his life and the extremity of his anguish, the truth was made manifest. A Revelation drew nigh. It just came to him.
The fishes.
It was a dying gleam of intelligence, his last inspired thought, his swan-song. How else could the fishes live save in the water? All these long years he had remained ignorant of the truth. Ah, if only his disciples were at hand, to jot it down into that GOLDEN BOOK!
But why—why must the fishes live in water? And why so much water for so few fishes? Why cannot fishes live on land? Then everybody would be satisfied. Inscrutable are the ways of God….