Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/259

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 forgetting, 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