He departed, and soon returned with a tumbler full of raw whisky which he placed on the table within reach of the arm.  A flaccid, unwholesome-looking hand was raised slowly, in a kind of deprecatory gesture; then allowed to fall again upon the belly where it lay, with the five fingers, round and chalky-white, extended like the rays of a starfish.  Nothing more happened.

“We must go away for a while,” said Keith, “or else he won’t touch it.  He does not object to alcohol, you know.  Whisky has not come out of a warm-blooded beast.  But it’s going into one.  A kind of Asiatic Socrates, don’t you think?”

“A Buddha,” suggested the Count.  “A Buddha in second-rate alabaster.  A Chinese Buddha of a bad, realistic period.”

“It’s odd,” remarked Mr. Heard.  “He reminds me of a dead fish.  Something ancient and fishlike—­it’s that mouth—­”

“He’s a beauty!” interrupted Edgar Marten, sniffing with disgust.  “Eyes like a boiled haddock.  And that thing has the cheek to call itself a Messiah.  Thank God I’m a Jew; it’s not business of mine.  But if I were a Christian, I’d bash his blooming head in.  Damned if I wouldn’t.  The frowsy, fetid, flow-blown fraud.  Or what’s the matter with the Dog’s Home?”

“Come, come,” said Mr. Heard, who had taken rather a liking to this violent youngster and was feeling more than usually indulgent that evening.  “Come!  He can’t help his face, I fancy.  Have you no room in your heart for an original?  And don’t you think—­quite apart from questions of religion—­that we tourists ought to be grateful to these people for diversifying the landscape with their picturesque red blouses and things?”

“I have no eye for landscape, Mr. Heard, save in so far as it indicates strata and faults and other geological points.  The picturesque don’t interest me.  I am full of Old Testamentary strains; I can’t help looking at men from the ethical point of view.  And what have people’s clothes to do with their religion?  He can’t help his face, you say.  Well, if he can’t help that greasy old mackintosh, I’ll eat my hat.  Can’t a fellow be a Messiah without sporting a pink shirt or fancy dressing-gown or blue pyjamas or something?  But there you are!  I defy you to name me a single-barrelled crank.  If a man is a religious lunatic, or a vegetarian, he is sure to be touched in some other department as well; he will be an anti-vivisectionist, a nutfooder, costume-maniac, stamp-collector, or a spiritualist into the bargain.  Haven’t you ever noticed that?  And isn’t he dirty?  Where is the connection between piety and dirt?  I suggest they are both relapses into ancestral channels and the one drags the other along with it.  When I see a thing like this, I want to hew it in pieces.  Agag, Mr. Heard; Agag.  I must have another look at this specimen; one does not see such a sight every day.  He is a living fossil—­post-pleistocene.”

He drew off; Keith and the Count, engaged in some deep conversation, had also moved a few paces away.