Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/256

that, although invisible, was not in the least supernatural. For he was of the East, Eastern; he did not admit the existence of the very word "supernatural." To him everything was natural, since everything, even the incredible, the impossible, the never-to-be-understood, had its secret, hidden roots in some evolution of nature, of the Buddha, the blessed Fo, the active and eternal principle of life and creation.

Perhaps at the very first his search had not been quite as concise, had rather shaped itself to his perplexed, groping mind in the terms of a conflict, a distant and mysterious encounter with the forces of fate, of which his wife's death had been but a visible, outward fragment.

Then, gradually—and by this time it had become spring, wakening to the white-and-pink fragrance of the southern breezes—spring that, occasionally, even in Pell Street, painted a sapphire sky as pure as the laughter of little children—he had stilled the poignant questionings of his unfulfilled desires, his fleshly love, and had turned the search for his tao into more practical channels.

Practical, though of the soul! For, again, to him, a Chinese, the soul was a tangible thing. Matter it was, to be constructively influenced and molded and clouted and fashioned. It had seemed to him to hold the life of to-morrow, beside which his life of to-day and yesterday had faded into the drabness of a wretched dream. He had wanted this to-morrow, had craved it, sensing in it a freedom magnificently remote from the smaller personal existence he had known heretofore, feeling that, presently, when he would have achieved merit, it would stab out of the heavens with