Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/236

when at times the air had been heavy with the musk of remembrance and regret, of passion and longing, when his subconscious fancy had peopled his brain cells with pictures of his former existence—Pell Street, his friends sipping their tea and smoking their crimson-tasseled pipes in the "Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment," Marie Na Liu, her white smile flashing through the purple night—he had done penance, submitting to the supreme physical ordeals, gradually subduing his body and his mind.

Thus, finally, he had found peace, perfect, exquisite; and then somehow, he never knew why or how—"that, too, was Fate," he used to say afterwards, "I but followed the way of my Fate. Who can avoid what is written on the forehead in the hour of birth?"—he had returned to New York, and so he sat there by the window and looked out upon the shrill Babel of the Pell Street night—calm, serene, passionless.

Just below the window, an elderly Chinese was arguing with a countryman, quoting the polished and curiously insincere phrases of Mandarin sages, in a stammering falsetto:

"Pa nien jou chi—i tien jou ki—"

A policeman whistled shrilly. A barrel-organ creaked a nostalgic, Sicilian melody. …

Yu Ching neither saw nor heard.

These people—what did they matter? They were only cosmic atoms whirling aimlessly in the wind of desire, like formless swarming snatches of dreams. No! Nothing mattered, nothing was real, except the soul.

He smiled, and whispered praises to the Buddha, and then, suddenly, yet imperceptibly, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk, he felt that he was not