“I should like to go to America,” he said; “there must be great wastes of country where one would be out of the world.”
The sincerity of this expression stood out in the trivial talk. It indicated something that disturbed the man. He was as isolated as he could get in England, but that was not enough.
He sat for a moment silent, the fingers of his nervous hand moving on his knee. When he glanced up, with a sudden jerk of his head, he caught me looking at the little image of Buddha in its glass box on the mantelpiece.
Was this longing for solitude the influence of this mysterious religion?
Remote, lonely isolation was a cult of Buddha. The devotees of that cult sought the waste places of the earth for their meditations. To be out of the world, in its physical contact, was a prime postulate in the practice of this creed.
“Ah, Robin,” he cried, as though he were in a jovial mood and careless of the subject, “do you have a hobby?”
I answered that I had not felt the need of one. The inquiry was a surprise and I could think of nothing better to reply with.
“Then, my boy,” he went on, “what will you do when you are old? One must have something to occupy the mind.”
He got up and turned the glass box a little on the mantelpiece.
“This is a very rare image,” he said; “one does not find this image anywhere in India. It came from Tibet. The expression and the pose of the figure differ from the conventional Buddha. You might not see that, but to any one familiar with this religion these differences are marked. This is a monastery image, and you will see that it is cast, not graven.”