The Master, meanwhile, languished in prison.  He had nobody to take his part, not even among the Little White Cows; the new section, that clique of young extremists, were only too delighted to have him out of the way.  The communal doctor alone interceded on his behalf, imploring the judge in the name of the sacred brotherhood of freemasons that he, the Messiah, should be excarcerated in order that he, the physician, might be enabled to continue the daily treatment to which the old man had grown accustomed and for which he was being regularly remunerated.  “Think of my wife and children!” he said to the magistrate.

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?