Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/223

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 embrodiered 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,