A sudden determination to act came upon him; a resolve not to let another day pass without showing that he, at least, knew which way true friendship lay.
So, partly in disgust at the trivialities around him, partly from a restless desire to think the matter out once for all, he told his wife curtly that he was leaving the dogcart at her disposal, and passed out through the garden into the almost deserted roads beyond.
The very thought of Shark Lane, however, was repellent in his present frame of mind; avoiding that direction, therefore, he wandered on aimlessly, conscious only at first that--after the glare and the noise--the darkness, the stillness, was restful to eyes, to heart, to brain. He did not think at all. For the time he was absolutely at fault, utterly depolarised.
So he felt startled, roused to a definite sensation of mingled pleasure and pain, when, forced to pull up by a shadowy void before him, he found it was the river; that, despite the confusion in his mind, his body had led him to the old way of salvation, to the old purification.
The night was too dark for him to see what lay before him; but his memory held its every detail. These were the bathing-steps, and below him lay the oldest building in Nushapore, the temple of Viseshwar. Here, to the insignificant block of rough-hewn stone tapered to a spire which rose square and bare from the very water, his mother had brought him as a child. Here, with childish delight in the action, childish disregard of its meaning, he had hung his jasmin garlands round the smooth upright black cone, which was all the shrine held for worship; yet which, even so, had been to his child's ignorance a god; as such in a way familiar, comprehensible, commonplace.
But now it was neither; now to his wider knowledge it had gained so much in mystery, in awe, by being symbol of the great incomprehensible problem of life and death, that, as he stood in that wedding-garment of culture--a suit of dress-clothes--looking down through the darkness to where he knew that lingam must rise, smoother, more worn by worship than ever, a shiver ran through him at the thought that there, among the withered chaplets at its feet, humanity had knelt for ages and found no answer to the riddle of life.
He sat down mechanically on the uppermost of the steps, and gave himself up, as it were, to the night, conscious of a vague content that it should be so dark.
To begin with, it hid many things best left unseen--himself most of all! For that meant forgetfulness of much. His dress-clothes, for instance, and things to be classed with them! Then it hid the railway bridge--strange sight in such environment--which spanned the river a few yards below the little spit of rock, ending the steps, on which the more modern temple sacred to Kâli, Shiva's consort, had been built. But something more modern still found foothold on that same spit of rock, though farther out, hidden below the levels of the river. This was the first pier of the railway bridge, from which the two drawbridges--one towards the town, the other towards the river--were worked; thus securing the passage against attack from either side. The pier itself rose sheer from the water, a solid block of masonry, and was prolonged into a tower, gated at each end.
Chris, picturing it in his mind's eye, thought how quaint a neighbour it was even to Kâli's temple, though her cult could not claim the mystery, the significance, of the other. Hers was the cult of ignorance, of terror; and his----
He was a Smarrta Brahmin by birth, and as he sate there in the darkness, thinking of that upright stone--severe, rigid in its mysticism--and then of the many-armed, bloodstained idol in the temple beyond, a proud exultation in his own priesthood to the older cult surged up in him.