And the opium clouds drove the night to the west, and the broad, level wedge of day streamed out of the east; and the strength of the young sun came, stemming the morning mists.
The air was a rapidly whirling wheel of gleaming dust, shedding crimson and purple sparks; a brook went gurgling past, sparkling like a flow of emeralds, there was a staccato breeze flickering over the sun-spotted fields like the wind of a Manchu lady’s gaily-flirted fan; and the voice of his heart’s desire whispered through the green roll of creation, and he saw, etched against the distance, the Pavilion of Exquisite Love that rose slowly from a garden of great black poppies, curved fantastically into an upper story framed by balconies, then raced away with spires and turrets and tinkling silver bells to a bright, pigeon-blue sky.
So he smoked again.
The fragrant fumes of his pipe, with the light of the lamp playing upon them, laid a shining ribbon of gold from his heart to the pavilion.
His feet stepped softly upon it. He reached the pavilion, and entered.
The Plum Blossom was sitting erect on a chair of ebony and lacquer encrusted with rose-quartz, and the sweep of his heart’s desire came down upon Yung Han-Rai like a gentle, silvered miracle.
“Hayah! my bridegroom!” she said, rising, and bowing low.
“Hayah! my bride!” he replied, and kowtowed three times.
He trembled a little. In his blood he felt pulsing the whole earth with her myriad expressions of life and the making of life, as if dancing to the primal rhythm of all creation.
He looked at her.
He saw her very clearly. The poppy smoke had faded into memory.
Her face was like a tiny, ivory flower, beneath the great wedding-crown of paper-thin gold leaves, with emeralds like drops of frozen green fire, with carved balls of moonstone swinging from the lobes of her ears. The finger nails of her right hand were very long, and encased by pointed filigrees of lapis lazuli studded with seed pearls.
She wore a long gown, that was like a current of glossy silver, embroidered with trailing powder-blue clouds and peach blossoms and, along the bottom of the skirt, a golden dragon in whose head shimmered the seven mystic jewels. The jacket, with its loose sleeves of plum-color encircled by bands of coral lotus buds, was tight and short, of apple-green satin embroidered with sprays of yulan magnolias and guelder roses, loped with fretted buttons of white jade; while her slippers were of porcelain, of the one called Tingyao, which is fifth in rank among all perfect porcelains, thin as a paper of rice, fragile as the wings of the silk-moth, melodious as the stone khing when gently struck by a soft hand, violet as a summer’s night and with an over-glaze like the amber bloom of grapes.
Again he kowtowed.
She was very close to him. Nothing separated them except the delicate threshold between dream and fact. Beyond that threshold there was peace, there was love, there was the eternal thrill of fulfillment, there was an end of those yearnings, of the loneliness and the pains of actual life that had bruised his soul these many years.
So he smoked again. He enveloped himself in a thick, strongly-scented poppy cloud, and he stepped a little beyond the threshold, and knelt at her feet.
“I love you, Plum Blossom,” he said. “I love you, O very small Blossom of the Plum Tree!” and he reached for the kin, the Chinese lute, which was at her elbow on a pillow of yellow satin embroidered with an iridescent rain of pearls.
His fingers caressed the instrument. They brushed over the cords.
The ancient Tartar melody winged up in minor, wailing harmonies, like the fluting of long-limbed rice birds flying against the dead-gold of the autumn sky; and he sang:
“I love you. You are in my heart. You are in my soul. You are in the soul within my soul, where the world has not been spotted by dirt and lies, but is pure as the laughter of little children; where there are no fetters of the flesh nor galls of earthly restraint; where the winds roam in the pathless skies of outer creation, with none but the Buddha’s will to check their vagabond waywardness.…”
Gently his fingers trembled across the strings of the lute. The accompaniment rippled in white tone-waves, silver-flecked; it quivered on a high note, spreading a network of infinitely delicate tone filaments, then brushed out with an abandon of throbbing cadences, like tiny, drifting ghosts of spring tinkling their girdle gems of fretted jade.
“I love you,” he sang. “Daily my love for you echoes through the vaulted halls of my dreams, my life; echoes in smiles and tears and hopes of fulfillment. Daily the thought of you comes to me with flute songs and flowers. Daily I launch the boat of my desire on the lilied pond of your soul. Daily I seek you in the whirling smoke of the poppies.…”
He paused.
Skillfully, between thumb and second finger, he twanged the third string. The note trembled as on the brink of an abyss. It sobbed like a flame in the meeting of winds. Then it blew clear into a high rush of ecstasy, and he sang again:
“Daily I have sought you in the whirling smoke of the poppies. Hayah, my bride! And today I have found you found you.”
Again he paused.
An overpowering desire tore across him burningly. In a back cell of his brain, he caught the whispered fragment of some enormous truth; saw, with the eyes of his body, the opium fumes pointing with dreamy, blue fingers; saw, with the eyes of his soul, the Plum Blossom’s starry little face.
“Today I have found you,” he sang; and again he twanged the third cord between thumb and second finger.
It trembled. The clear note rose, then broke a little. And he bent over the lute and pulled the cord taut.
It sobbed protestingly. There was a tiny snap. Then, suddenly, the cord broke, with a jarring ring.
“Today I have found you,” he sang; and his voice broke; vanished in the whirling fog of the poppies.
He felt a curious, sweet pain. An immense shutter seemed to drop across his mind with a speed of lightning. There was a momentary break in his conscious ness, a sense of vague, yet abrupt dislocation, of in finite, rather helpless regret, and the door opened.
“Looka here, yer darned Chink hop-head!” came a rough voice.
Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and on the Pell Street beat of sewer gas and opium and yellow man and white, stepped inside. He sniffed, turned up the gas jet, then crossed to the window and opened it wide.
“Gosh! Wot a smell!”
He looked about the room, dusty, grimy, bare of all furnishings except the narrow, wooden bunk where Yung Han-Rai lay stretched out, the bamboo pipe in his stiff fingers, and the small taboret with the smoker’s paraphernalia which stood beside the bunk.
He touched the Chinese on the shoulder with his heavy hand.
“Looka here, Yung,” he said. “I don’t wanta pinch yer. Ye’re a decent lad. I’m only gonna talk t’ yer like a Dutch uncle, see? Yer gotta cut out the poppy, get me? Wottahell! Look at yerself! Look at this room! Doity and grimy, and not a stick o furniture! Ain’t yer ashamed o’ yerself? Wottya mean—soakin’ yerself in th’ black smoke every night, wastin’ every cent yer earn on hop? Ain’t yer got no sense at all, yer poor Chink? And they tells me yer useter be a gent, back home in Chinkieland—a real gent, eddycated and of a swell family! Wottya mean, yer poor, weak-spined fish?”
Again he touched the other on the shoulder. He bent down a little more closely. Then a hush came into his voice, as he saw the wistful smile on the yellow, wrinkled old face of the dead man.
“Gee!” he whispered. “Oh, Gee!”
THE PERFECT WAY
Here, where Pell Street jutted out from the Bowery, there was not even a trace of the patina of antiquity, that bitter and morose grace which clings about old houses like the ghosts of dead flowers. There was nothing here except the marks of the present—hard, gray, scabbed, already rotting before having lived overmuch.
The noises of the street seethed in frothy, brutal streaks: the snarling whine of Russian Jews bartering over infinitesimal values; the high, clipped tenor of m
etallic, Italian vernaculars; the gliding sing-song of Chinese coolies; and only occasionally an English word, sharp and lonely and nostalgic. There was the rumbling overtone of the Elevated around the corner on Chatham Square; the sardonic hooting of a four-ton motor dray; the ineffectual tinkle-tinkle of a peddler’s bell. Rain came and joined in the symphony; spluttering in the leaky eaves-troughs, dripping through the huddled, greasy alleys, mumbling angrily in the brown, clogged gutters.
And Yu Ching sat there by the window and stared with cold, black eyes into the cold, wet evening, neither seeing nor hearing. Behind him shadows coiled, blotchy, inchoate, purplish-black, with just a fitful dancing of elfin high-lights on a teakwood screen, its tight, lemon silk embroidered with japonica, fluttering their silvered petals, and on a small crystal statue of Confucius that squatted amid the smoking incense sticks.
The corner lamp flared up, mean and yellow. The light stabbed in and mirrored on the fingernails of his pudgy right hand. The hand was very still. Still was the man’s face—large, hairless, butter-colored.
The rain spluttered and stammered. The street cries belched defiantly. The peace in Yu Ching’s heart was perfect, exquisite.
Momentarily, there came to him fleeting memories of the days when his own life, too, had been an integral and not unimportant part of that cosmic Pell Street energy, when he had been a shrewd and respected merchant, who had contributed his share of wisdom and gossip to the evening gatherings of his countrymen in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company—the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment.”
Came memories of his wife, Marie Na Liu, sweet with lissome, unformed sweetness of sixteen years, tiny and soft and high-breasted, with the golden hair of a Danish mother and the creamy, waxen skin, the sloe-black eyes of a Chinese father.
Across the poetry of her youth had lain the stony drag and smother, the subtle violence, the perfumed dirt of the bastard Pell Street world. She had been like a rainbow bubble floating on the stinking puddles of Chinatown vice. But he had loved her dearly. His love for her had burned away the caked, black cinders, the dross and the dirt.
* * * *
Her love for him—? There were classic, scholarly traditions in his clan; one of his ancestors had been a poet of no mean repute in the days of the Ta Tsing Kwoh, the “Great-Pure Kingdom”; and so Yu Ching had compared Marie Na Liu’s love to a dewdrop on a willow spray, a flaunting of fairy pennons, and the sound of a silver bell in the green mists of twilight—smiling, with kindly intent, at the last simile; for he had been forty-seven years of age and she sixteen when he had married her, quite respectably, with a narrow gold ring, a bouquet of cabbagy, wired roses, a proper, monumental wedding cake, a slightly shocked Baptist clergyman mumbling the words of the blessed ritual, and at the organ a yellow, half-caste boy introducing wailing Cantonese dissonances into the “Voice that breathed o’er Eden.”
Down at the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,” the comment had been brutally unflattering.
“You are old, and she is young!” had said Nag Hong Fah, the paunchy restaurant proprietor, fluttering his paper fan. “Hayah! On the egg combating with the stone, the yolk came out, O wise and older brother!”
“The ass went seeking for horns—and lost its ears!” Yung Lung, the wholesale grocer, had darkly suggested.
And Yu Chang, the priest of the joss temple, had added with pontifical unction:
“When I see the sun and the moon delivered up by the eclipse to the hands of the demons; when I perceive the bonds that fasten an elephant; and when I behold a wise man surrendering—ah—to the foolish abominations of the flesh, the thought forces itself upon me: How mighty is the power of evil!…”
Thus, at the time of their marriage, had run the gliding, malicious gossip of Chinatown. But when, quite casually, Yu Ching had repeated it to his wife, who was busying herself amongst the cook pots of their neat little Pell Street flat, she had given him a rapid kiss.
“You sh’d worry, yer fat old sweetness!” she had laughed. “Them Chinks is just plain jealous. You treat me on th’ level—and I’ll retoin the compliment, see? Besides, I’m stuck on yer snoozly old phiz! I ain’t goin’ t’waste no time huntin for thrills, as long as ye’re true to me! I’m a good Christian—I am—”
“And I am a good Buddhist, Plum Blossom!”
“Hell’s bells—wot’s the difference, sweetness?”
* * * *
They had been happy. And today he had forgotten her. He had completely forgotten her; and he knew—subconsciously, for he never reflected on the subject—that she had been faithful to him; that never, either by word or deed, had she caused him to lose faith; that she had lived up, straight and clean, to the words of the ritual: love, honor, obey.
He knew—subconsciously—that he had broken her heart when he walked out of her life, three years ago.
Very impersonally, he wondered what had become of her. Then he cut off the wondering thought. He smiled. He said to himself that she, too, had been an illusion, a mirroring of shadows in the dun dusk of his soul.
She did not matter.
Why—he put his fingers together, delicately, tip against tip—nothing mattered.…
* * * *
Outside, more lights sprang up against the violet of the sky, spotting the gloom. The noises grew as, with night, grew and heaved the dark-smoldering passions of the city. A pint pocket flask dropped, smashed against a stone. A foul curse was answered by throaty, malign laughter. Came the tail-end of a gutter song; a shouted, obscene joke, old already when the world was young; more curses and laughter; a sailor’s sodden, maudlin mouthings; a woman’s gurgling contralto:
“Aw—chase yerself! Wottya mean, yer big stiff?”
The drama of the city. The comedy. The vital, writhing entrails. Life, clouting, breathing, fighting eternally.
But Yu Ching did not see, nor hear. His heart was as pure as the laughter of little children, as pure as a gong of white jade. There was hardly a trace of the outer world, dimly, on the rim of his conscious ness.
His soul had reached the end of its pilgrimage. Calm, serene, passionless like the Buddha, it sat enthroned beyond the good and the evil.
“All forms are only temporary!”—there was the one great truth.
He smiled. Mechanically, his thin lips formed the words of the Buddha’s Twenty-Third Admonition:
“Of all attachments unto objects of desire, the strongest is the attachment to form. He who cannot overcome this desire, for him to enter the Perfect Way of Salvation is impossible.…”
The rain had ceased. A great slow wind walked braggingly through the skies. The Elevated, a block away, rushed like the surge of the sea. The Bowery leered up with a mawkish, tawdry face.
The noises of the street blended and clashed, blended and clashed. A thousand people came and went, people of all races, all faiths gulping down life in greedy mouthfuls.
And still the peace in Yu Ching’s heart was perfect and exquisite. Still he smiled. Still, mechanically, his lips mumbled the words of the Buddha:
“By day shineth the sun. By night shineth the moon. Shineth also the warrior in harness of war. But the Buddha, at all times by day and by night, shineth ever the same, illuminating the world, calm, passionless, serene—”
The end of his soul’s pilgrimage.…
And presently today, tomorrow, next year, ten years from now his body would die, and his spirit would leap the dragon gate, would blend its secret essence with the eternal essence of the Buddha’s soul.… And what else mattered?
He bent his head.
“Fire and night and day art Thou,” he whispered, “and the fortnight of waxing moon—and the months of the sun’s northern circuit—”
The end of his pilgrimage!
And the beginning had been hard. For he had loved Marie Na Liu. He had not wanted to harm her.
But the Voice had spoken to him in the night, asking him to arise and throw off the shackles of desire, the fe
tters of the flesh; to forget the illusions; telling him that, whatever meritorious results might be attained by prayers and sacrifices, by austerities and gifts, there was no sacrifice to be compared with that of a man’s own heart. Such a sacrifice was the excel lent sanctifier—exhaustless in result.
“Sure,” had said Bill Devoy, a detective of Second Branch and detailed to the Pell Street beat of opium and sewer gas and yellow man and white; he had caught on to the gossip in the course of a murder investigation that had nothing whatsoever to do with the pilgrimage of Yu Ching’s soul—“that Chink’s got religion—wot he calls religion. I don’t know if a yaller Billy Sunday’s come down to Pell and Mott, but I do know as that there Yu Ching’s hittin the trail to salvation—as them Chinks hit it—sittin’ all day like a bump on a log, just smilin’, and never sayin’ a damn word. Meditatin’ they calls it. Gee! He gives me the creeps, he does—”
At first, Marie Na Liu had laughed.
“Say—wottya mean, sweetness?” she had asked. “Leave me? Goin’ t’leave—me?” Then her voice had risen a hectic octave. “Is there another skoit? For if there is—say—”
“No, Plum Blossom. There is no other woman—never will be. Woman is an illusion—”
“Wottya handin’ me?”
“The flesh is an illusion. There is just my soul—the Buddha has spoken to me in the night—”
“You’ve been eatin’ Welsh rabbit again down to the Dutchman’s! You know it never agrees with yer!”
“No, no!”
He had smiled, gently and patiently. Gently and patiently, he had tried to explain to her, had tried to make her understand.
“But—sweetness—listen’ t’me! Yer can’t leave me—oh, yer can’t.…”
The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 22
