Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/245

sewer-gas and opium and yellow man and white, he caught a little more firmly at the fringe of final fulfillment.

Food? Yes. There was still the lying reality called body which needed food and drink and occasionally a crimson-tasseled pipe filled with a sizzling, amber cube of first-chop opium. Also, there was the little Pekinese spaniel that had once belonged to his bride, "Su Chang," "Reverential and Sedate," was its ludicrous name,—and it cared nothing for tao and cosmic eternity, but a great deal for sugar and chicken bones and bread steeped in lukewarm milk.

"Woo-ooff!" said "Reverential and Sedate."

And so, startled, yet smiling, Li Ping-Yeng went down-stairs to the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, exchanged courtly greetings with the obese proprietor, Mr. Nag Hong Fah, and ordered a heaped bowl for the spaniel, and for himself a platter of rice, a pinch of soey cheese, a slice of preserved ginger stem, and a pot of tea.

Twenty minutes later he was back in his chair near the window, scrutinizing sky and street.

Unseeing, meaningless scrutiny; for it was only the conscious, thus worthless, part of his brain which perceived, and reacted to, the details of what he saw: the lemon tints of the street lamps leaping meanly out of the trailing, sooty dusk and centering on a vivid oblong of scarlet and gold where Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, flung his sign-board to the winds and proclaimed thereon in archaic Mandarin script that "Trade revolves like a Wheel"; an automobile-load of tourists gloating self-righteously over the bland, shuffling Mongol's base infinitudes; a whisky-soaked nondescript moving along with hound-like stoop and