He was not sorry that the break had come. It had been inevitable, he realised, from the moment that Judith's contempt had driven him to put himself to the test. To prove her wrong he had proven himself wrong, and his whole life was upset thereby. The smoothly running engine had stopped short. But characteristically he put all thought of its previous smooth running out of his mind and devoted himself to a consideration of its present inaction.
At this crisis he felt neither need nor desire for friends. None, he realised clearly, could possibly understand or assist. He did not yet entirely understand himself. But he knew that whether he wanted friends or not, he could not well avoid them. The more candid would upbraid him and attempt conciliation: the more tactful would be sympathetic. Both he dreaded. So, after a day of meditation, in which his thoughts merely moved in a circle, he put a few essentials into a bag, stored the rest of his belongings, and disappeared, with a rod and a gun, into the north woods.
There, while his memory in St. Viateur's grew more vague and less fragrant, in contrast to the ductile genius of his successor, and with only an Indian guide for company, he spread out the map of his soul and planned his campaign.
The first possibility was the most obvious. But it was the least attractive. To be true to what he now conceived to be his real self would involve merely a repetition of his experience at St. Viateur's. He was young and comparatively inexperienced, and it never occurred to him that all churches were not alike. The result would be one living after another, all in a constantly descending scale, until he either capitulated or died. Neither prospect appealed to him. Night after night was spent with his pipe and the unwinking stars, but he came no nearer to a decision.
Finally he despaired of finding salvation in solitude, and went back to the city. He established himself in a hotel, preferring to avoid friends and relatives, few of whom, he felt, could possibly sympathise with him.
It is said that every criminal sooner or later visits the scene of his crime. Some such spirit actuated Imrie. The day after his arrival in the city was Sunday, and late in the morning, at an hour when he knew that the congregation would be settling back in resignation preparatory to the sermon, he strolled up to St. Viateur's.
But he did not enter. He preferred to stand across the street, and muse. It was not a beautiful building. Squat, massive, in places heavily ornate, in others dingily bare, it was a mere surface replica of pristine architecture, at best, a caricature. It was a pretence even if a candid one. It struck him with shocking force that its grim insincerity was symbolic. Within its counterfeit solidity, wood and tin masquerading as stone, machine-made carving strutting in fancied kinship to the inspired craftsmanship of mediæval ornament, dwelt a faith equally false, equally dead. Superficially it had not changed through the centuries: but the soul, the true life had gone from it. As the building was but the grinning skull of art, so the faith within its walls was but the dry and rattling bones of truth.
Those days in the changeless solitude of the forest, where the God in the brown mists and the everlasting purple hills, was too near to be worshipped, where Pan was more divine than Jehovah, had expanded Imrie's soul more than he realised.
A veil he knew then, had covered his eyes. He had seen truth with others' eyes. He had preached a truth which was his only by reflection. Now, for the first time in his life, he was exultantly conscious of seeing things with his own eyes.
St. Viateur's, which had once been so inspiring, was now only pitiful. Even its successor, more vital as a work of art, would still house but a ghost of truth.