How, then, could he acquire sufficient merit so as to reach his tao, beyond the good and the evil?
Of course, first of all, mainly, by tearing from his body and heart even the last root of the liana of desire, of love, of regret for his wife; by again and again denying, impugning, destroying the thought of her, though, again and again, it would rise to the nostrils of his remembrance, with a stalely sweet scent like the ghost of dead lotus-blossoms.
She was on the shadow side of the forever. Her soul, he would repeat to himself, incessantly, defiantly, belligerently, had leaped the dragon gate. Broken were the fetters that had held him a captive to the tinkle-tinkle-tinkle of her jeweled earrings. A mere picture she was, painted on the screen of eternity, impersonal, immensely aloof, passed from the unrealities of the earth life to the realities of the further cosmos. He must banish the thought of her, must forget her.
And he did forget her, again and again, with the effort, the pain of forgetting choking his heart.
Sitting by the window, his subconscious mind centered on his tao, his salvation, the blessed destruction of his individual entity, “Reverential and Sedate” huddled in a fold of his loose sleeve, scrutinizing street and sky with unseeing eyes, he would forget her through the long, greasy days, while the reek of Pell Street rose up to the tortured clouds with a mingled aroma of sweat and blood and opium and suffering, while the strident clamor of Pell Street blended with the distant clamor of the Broadway mart.
He would forget her through the long, dim evenings, while the sun died in a gossamer veil of gold and mauve, and the moon cut out of the ether, bloated and anemic and sentimental, and the night vaulted to a purple canopy, pricked with chilly, indifferent stars.
He would sit there, silent, motionless, and forget, while the stars died, and the moon and the night, and the sky flushed to the opal of young morning, and again came day and the sun and the reek and the maze and the soot and the clamors of Pell Street.
Forgetting, always forgetting; forgetting his love, forgetting the tiny bound feet of the Plum Blossom, the Lotus Bud, the Crimson Butterfly. Her little, little feet! Ahee! He had made his heart a carpet for her little, little feet.
Forgetting, reaching up to his tao with groping soul; and then again the thought of his dead wife, again his tao slipping back; again the travail of forget ting, to be forever repeated.
And so one day he died; and it was Wuh Wang, the little, onyx-eyed, flighty wife of Li Hsu, the hatchet-man, who, perhaps, speaking to Tzu Mo, the daughter of Yu Ch’ang, the priest, grasped a fragment of the truth.
“Say, kid,” she slurred in the Pell Street jargon, “that there Li Ping-Yeng wot’s kicked the bucket th’ other day, well, you know wot them Chinks said—how he was always trying to get next to that—now—tao of his by trying to forget his wife. Well, mebbe he was all wrong. Mebbe his tao wasn’t forgetting at all. Mebbe it was just his love for her, his always thinking of her, his not forgetting her that was his real tao.”
“Mebbe,” replied Tzu Mo. “I should worry!”
The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 25
