Alien Souls/Black Poppies

, with nervous, agile fingers he kneaded the brown poppy cube against the tiny bowl of his pipe, then dropped it into the open furnace of the lamp and watched the flame change it gradually into amber and gold.

The opium boiled, sizzled, dissolved, evaporated. The fragrant, opalescent smoke rolled in sluggish clouds over the mats, and Yung Han-Rai, having emptied the pipe at one long-drawn inhalation, leaned back, both shoulders pressed well down on the square, hard, leather pillows, so as better to inflate his chest and keep his lungs filled all the longer with the fumes of the kindly drug.

The noises of the outer world seemed very far away. There was just a memory of street cries lifting their hungry, starved arms; just a memory of whispering river wind chasing the night clouds that clawed at the moon with cool, slim fingers of white and silver.

A slow smile overspread Yung Han-Rai's placid, butter-yellow features. He stared at the rolling opium clouds. They seemed filled with a roaring sun set of colors, fox-brown and steel-blue and purple; like the colors of his past dreams moving and blazing before him, changing into his future dreams.

That evening he had smoked thirty-seven pipes, each pipe an excellent and powerful mixture of Yunan and Benares poppy-juice.

Earlier in the evening he had used a precious pipe of rose crystal with a yellow jade mouthpiece and three black silk tassels, which his older brother had given him years earlier, during the Eighth Moon festival in honor of Huo Shen, the god of fire. It was a charming pipe, the mouthpiece carved minutely with all the divinities of the Taoist heaven, from Lao Tzu himself to the Spiritual Exalted One; from the Pearly Emperor to the Ancient Original; from the Western Royal Mother to the god of the T'ai Shan, the Eastern Peak, who watches the rock-strewn coast of the Yellow Sea against the invasions of the outer barbarian.

Yung Han-Rai liked this pipe. But he did not love it.

He loved his old bamboo pipe, quite plain, with out tassels or ornaments. Once it had been white as ivory. But to-day it was blackish-brown, with a thousand and ten thousand smokes. It was fragrant with a thousand and ten thousand exquisite memories. Yung Han-Rai had used it during the latter part of the evening, and was using it now.

He called it his pipe of August Permanence, while he called the other his pipe of Delightful Vice, comparing the first to a wife grown gnarled and wrinkled and berry-brown in her lord's service, and the second to a courtezan, whom one caresses, pays—and forgets.

He smoked three more pipes, one after the other, in rapid succession.

The immaterial substance of his inner self had floated away on the gray wings of smoke. His soul reached to his former life, his longings, his loneliness, and his failure. It was failure no longer. He would find that old life fair and satisfying. He might even find the lesser gods.

The opium sizzled with a reedy, fluting song. There was no other sound. Even the whispering wind had died; the street cries had guttered out like spent candles.

He smoked. …

Then came to him the vision.

He saw very little now except the house itself, and, of the house, veiled through the opalescent saraband of the poppy fumes, he saw really only the three violet lanterns above the door.

He had seen the house so often, remembered it so well. It was part of his dreams, thus part of his real life. He had always loved it, with an almost physical, sensuous love. It was like a fretted, chiseled ingot, with a pagoda roof that shimmered in every mysterious blending of blue and green and purple, like the plumage of a gigantic peacock, or the shootings of countless dragonflies.

Too, he had always loved the three lamps below the carved, deep-brown pagoda beam. They were of a glorious, glowing violet, faintly dusted with gold; and, depending from them, fluttered long streamers of pottery-red satin, with inscriptions from the Chinese classics in archaic Mandarin hieroglyphics.

These inscriptions changed every night; they seemed to blend with his own changing moods. That was their greatest charm.

Last night he had been in a poetic mood, and the silken strips had lisped some of Han Yu's lilting lines, about "moonlight flooding the inner gallery, where the japonica stammers with silvered petals." To-night the drift of his mind inclined toward the philosophical, and he read on the fluttering streamers three quotations from the Kung-Yuan Chang.

The first was: "Is virtue a thing remote?" The second: "I wish to be virtuous!" The third: "Lo and behold—virtue is at hand!"

He loved the entrance hall of the house, with the floor completely hidden under a shimmering mass of Kien-Lun brocades that were like moon-beams on running water, and, square in the center, an ancient Ming rug of imperial yellow stamped with black bats as a sign of good luck. These, with the three small tables of ebony and dull-red lacquer supporting an incense burner, an ivory vase for the hot wine, and a squat, earthen pot filled with a profusion of feathery parrot-tulips in exotic shades, and, in the far corner, a huge, fantastic tiger in old crackle-glaze porcelain—all these, made for him a little world in themselves.

He loved the stilted, never-changing ceremonial of Pekinese politeness with which the master of the house—somehow, because of the whirling clouds of poppy smoke that veiled the room, he had never been able to see his features distinctly—greeted him, night after night. He would receive his caller on the threshold, bowing with clasped hands, and saying:

"Please deign to enter first."

Whereat Yung Han-Rai would bow still lower.

"How could I dare to, O wise and older brother?" he would retort, sucking in his breath, and quoting an appropriate line from the Book of Ceremonies and Exterior Demonstrations, which proved that the manner is the heart's mirror.

Then, night after night, after another request by his host, he himself still protesting his unworthiness, he would enter as he was bidden and be asked to "deign to choose a mat," on the west side of the room, as a special mark of honor. And a soft-footed servant in a crimson, dragon-embroidered tunic and a cap with a turquoise button would bring two jade cups; cups not of the garish green iao jade which foreigners like, but of the white and transparent iu jade that the rites reserve for princes, viceroys, Manchus, ministers, and distinguished literati.

He himself was a literatus.

Had he not, many years ago, competing against ninety-seven picked youths from all the provinces of the Middle Kingdom, passed first in the examination at the Palace of August and Happy Education, and obtained the eminent degree of San Tsoi? Had not the Dowager Empress, in person, thereon congratulated him? Had not his mother been thanked publicly for having given birth to such a talented son? And his prize poem—was it not being quoted to this day by white-bearded priests, sipping their jasmine-flavored tea in the flaunting gardens of Pekin's Lama monastery?

He remembered how the poem began:

Yes. He himself was a literatus. But he would again protest his unworthiness.

"I shall drink if you wish me to, O wise and older brother," he would say. "But from a wooden cup with no ornaments," he would add.

And then, according to the proper rules of conduct prescribed by the ancients, the master of the house would insist three times, and he would drink the hot, spiced wine from the jade cup.

It was so to-night.

He entered, exchanged the customary Pekinese civilities, sipped his cup of wine, and smiled at his host who smiled back.

"Will you smoke?" asked the latter.

"Gladly."

"A pipe of jade, or a pipe of tortoise-shell with five yellow tassels?"

"Either would be too flattering for me. Are you not my brother, very wise and very old? And am I not the unworthy and very little one? Let me, I beseech you, smoke my old bamboo."

"Your lips will endow even an old bamboo with harmonious beauty far more precious than all the precious metals of the Mountains of the Moon," his host replied courteously, and bowed.

He filled both pipes. The folds of smoke joined over the lamp whose flame was hidden by a filagree screen of butterflies in green enamel.

"The opium will clear the clouds from our brains," continued the master of the house slowly. "It will purify our judgments, make our hearts more sensitive to beauty, and take away the tyrannical sensations of actual life—the sources, these, of all vulgar mistakes. Will you smoke again?"

"With pleasure."

Both men drew in the acrid fumes with all the strength of their lungs.

Yung Han-Rai smiled dreamily.

"Did not Hoang Ti, the Yellow Emperor himself, once remark that. …?"

The sentence died unfinished on his lips. They smoked in silence for nearly half an hour. The room was filling with scented fog. Already the objects scattered about had lost their outline, and the silken stuffs on the walls and the floor gleamed less brilliantly.

Yung Han-Rai felt a confused sensation of the marrow of his bones and his muscles, some of which seemed to soften and almost to melt away, while others seemed to strengthen and grow greatly, while his subconscious brain seemed endowed with a new and intense vitality. He no longer noticed the weight of his body pressing on the mat; rather he became conscious of a tremendous intellectual and ethical power.

Hidden things became clear to him. The soul within his soul came to the surface with a flaming rush of speed. He felt himself part of nature—a direct expression of cosmic life. The currents of the earth pulsed in his veins with a puissant and mysterious rhythm.

High on the wall he saw a soft glow. It was an ancient gilt-wood statue representing Han Chung-le, the greatest of the Taoist immortals, who was supposed to have found the elixir of life.

Yung Han-Rai smiled at him familiarly, even slightly ironically.

After all, the thought came to him, he and Han Chung-le were brothers, immortal both.

He smoked again.

The poppy tasted sweet as summer rain. …

After a lapse of time, hours, days, weeks—he knew not, he became conscious that the master of the house was addressing him. The voice was soft, like the far piping of a reed.

"I have considered everything," the voice said. "I have thought well. I have thought left and thought right. There exists no doubt that my daughter, the Plum Blossom, will greatly appreciate your many and honorable qualities. She, on the other hand, will make you a delightful wife. Her eyes are like sunbeams filtering their gold through the shadows of the pine woods. The mating-songs of all the birds are echoed in the harmony of her voice. Too, she is a vessel filled with all the domestic virtues. She is strong and high-breasted. She will bear you as many men-children as there are hairs in my queue."

"Your too-indulgent lips have pronounced words full of the most delicate beauty," replied Yung Han-Rai. "Alas, it grieves me, but I cannot accept. I am the very little and unimportant one. My ancestry is wretched, my manners deplorable, and my learning less than the shadow of nothing at all. The honor would be too great, O wise and older brother."

"It is my own justly despised family which will be exquisitely honored," replied the other, rising, and bowing deeply with clasped hands. "Let there—I humbly implore you—be a marriage between you and the Plum Blossom. You will make an excellent son-in-law, virtuous, learned, a respecter of the ancient traditions of Ming and Sung."

Yung Han-Rai was about to speak, to protest once more, as the proper ceremonial demanded, his utter unworthiness. His lips had already formed the carefully chosen words when, very suddenly, he was silent. He became nervous, uneasy, frightened. Cold beads of perspiration trickled slowly down his nose.

He bent forward; listened.

That noise. What was it?

Something from the outside world, the unreal world of facts, seemed to brush in on unclean, sardonic wings, to disturb the perfect peace of the house, to break and shiver the poppy-heavy air.

Cries of the street, in an uncouth, foreign language:

"Yer gotta travel the straight an' narrow if yer want me t' stick t' yer, get me?"

"Gee, kid! Listen t' me! I ain't never spoke a woid to th' guy, I tells yer honest!"

"Well—looka here. …"

The voices drifted away. Came other noises. The hooting of the Elevated, around the corner on Chatham Square. The steely roar of a motor exhaust.

Motor? Elevated? Chatham Square?

What was it, Yung asked himself? What did the words signify?

Streets—noises—foreigners—coarse-haired barbarians. …

No, no—by the Excellent Lord Buddha!

They were only the figments of his dreams; dreams which he had often, day after day; dreams which he hated and feared—

Dreams which he must kill!

With shaking fingers he reached for the opium jar. He kneaded the brown cube. He roasted it, filled his pipe, and smoked.

And, at once, the poppy ghosts drew swiftly down about him on silver-gray wings, building around him a wall of fragant [sic], gossamer clouds, suffusing the soul within his soul with the wild loveliness of a forgotten existence.

With a wealth of deep, radiant conviction, this former existence, blending with his life of might-have-been, poured into his brain. His brain inflamed his heart. His thoughts softened; they trembled like a wavering line of music in a night-blue wind of spring. The fringe of his inner consciousness stretched far and out, away to the stars and the high winds, into a great and sweet freedom.

He smoked again.

He became conscious of something like a rain of summer flowers. The feet of his soul were walking down the path of some tremendous, dazzling verity. The facts of the outer world touched him no longer with their hard, cutting edges. These facts were untrue; they were not; they were only the lying thoughts of the lying, lesser gods.

The poppy fumes whirled up, wreathing everything in floating vapors. They darkened the air with a solid, bloating shadow. The room disappeared. Disappeared his host.

He saw again the outside of the house, the tilted, pagoda roof shimmering like a gigantic peacock; saw again the three violet lanterns above the door.

He was now walking away from the house, but he turned and saw that the inscriptions on the three fluttering streamers had changed once more.

The first read: "Love—like moon-born clouds casting their tremulous shadows over stairs of rose-red jade!" The second: "Love—like little ghosts of May-time ruffling the river of heart's desire!" The third: "Love—like a hidden lute softly lilting behind a silken alcove!"

So he strolled away, beneath a vaulted night, subtly perfumed, secret, mystical, netted in delicate silver mist, and the soft starlight drifting down through budding boughs into budding earth, and the dreams in his soul moving thick and soft ahead of him; and he felt, deep within him, as the Lord Gautama Buddha must have felt on the day of creation, when his golden smile first dawned on chaos and the love in his heart released the forces of nature.

And the opium clouds drove the night to the west, and the broad, level wedge of day streamed out of the east; and the strength of the young sun came, stemming the morning mists.

The air was a rapidly whirling wheel of gleaming dust, shedding crimson and purple sparks; a brook went gurgling past, sparkling like a flow of emeralds, there was a staccato breeze flickering over the sun- spotted fields like the wind of a Manchu lady's gaily-flirted fan; and the voice of his heart's desire whispered through the green roll of creation, and he saw, etched against the distance, the Pavilion of Exquisite Love that rose slowly from a garden of great black poppies, curved fantastically into an upper story framed by balconies, then raced away with spires and turrets and tinkling silver bells to a bright, pigeon-blue sky.

So he smoked again.

The fragrant fumes of his pipe, with the light of the lamp playing upon them, laid a shining ribbon of gold from his heart to the pavilion.

His feet stepped softly upon it. He reached the pavilion, and entered.

The Plum Blossom was sitting erect on a chair of ebony and lacquer encrusted with rose-quartz, and the sweep of his heart's desire came down upon Yung Han-Rai like a gentle, silvered miracle.

"Hayah! my bridegroom!" she said, rising, and bowing low. "Hayah! my bride!" he replied, and kowtowed three times.

He trembled a little. In his blood he felt pulsing the whole earth with her myriad expressions of life and the making of life, as if dancing to the primal rhythm of all creation.

He looked at her.

He saw her very clearly. The poppy smoke had faded into memory.

Her face was like a tiny, ivory flower, beneath the great wedding-crown of paper-thin gold leaves, with emeralds like drops of frozen green fire, with carved balls of moonstone swinging from the lobes of her ears. The finger nails of her right hand were very long, and encased by pointed filagrees of lapis lazuli studded with seed pearls.

She wore a long gown, that was like a current of glossy silver, embroidered with trailing powder-blue clouds and peach blossoms and, along the bottom of the skirt, a golden dragon in whose head shimmered the seven mystic jewels. The jacket, with its loose sleeves of plum-color encircled by bands of coral lotus buds, was tight and short, of apple-green satin embroidered with sprays of yulan magnolias and guelder roses, loped with fretted buttons of white jade; while her slippers were of porcelain, of the one called Ting-yao, which is fifth in rank among all perfect porcelains, thin as a paper of rice, fragile as the wings of the silk-moth, melodious as the stone khing when gently struck by a soft hand, violet as a summer's night and with an over-glaze like the amber bloom of grapes.

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 [sic] 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, then brushed out with an abandon of throbbing cadences, like tiny, drifting ghosts of spring tinkling their girdle gems of fretted jade.

"I love you," he sang. "Daily my love for you echoes through the vaulted halls of my dreams, my life; echoes in smiles and tears and hopes of fulfillment. Daily the thought of you comes to me with flute songs and flowers. Daily I launch the boat of my desire on the lilied pond of your soul. Daily I seek you in the whirling smoke of the poppies. …"

He paused.

Skillfully, between thumb and second finger, he twanged the third string. The note trembled as on the brink of an abyss. It sobbed like a flame in the meeting of winds. Then it blew clear into a high rush of ecstasy, and he sang again:

"Daily I have sought you in the whirling smoke of the poppies. Hayah, my bride! And to-day I have found you—found you."

Again he paused.

An overpowering desire tore across him burningly. In a back cell of his brain, he caught the whispered fragment of some enormous truth; saw, with the eyes of his body, the opium fumes pointing with dreamy, blue fingers; saw, with the eyes of his soul, the Plum Blossom's starry little face.

"To-day I have found you," he sang; and again he twanged the third cord between thumb and second finger.

It trembled. The clear note rose, then broke a little. And he bent over the lute and pulled the cord taut.

It sobbed protestingly. There was a tiny snap. Then, suddenly, the cord broke, with a jarring ring.

"Today I have found you," he sang; and his voice broke; vanished in the whirling fog of the poppies.

He felt a curious, sweet pain. An immense shutter seemed to drop across his mind with a speed of lightning. There was a momentary break in his consciousness, a sense of vague, yet abrupt dislocation, of infinite, rather helpless regret, and the door opened—

"Looka here, yer darned Chink hop-head!" came a rough voice.

Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and on the Pell Street beat of sewer gas and opium and yellow man and white, stepped inside. He sniffed, turned up the gas jet, then crossed to the window and opened it wide.

"Gosh! Wot a smell!"

He looked about the room, dusty, grimy, bare of all furnishings except the narrow, wooden bunk where Yung Han-Rai lay stretched out, the bamboo pipe in his stiff fingers, and the small taboret with the smoker's paraphernalia which stood beside the bunk.

He touched the Chinese on the shoulder with his heavy hand.

"Looka here, Yung," he said. "I don't wanta pinch yer. Ye're a decent lad. I'm only gonna talk t' yer like a Dutch uncle, see? Yer gotta cut out the poppy, get me? Wottahell! Look at yerself! Look at this room! Doity and grimy, and not a stick o' furniture! Ain't yer ashamed o yerself? Wottya mean—soakin' yerself in th' black smoke every night, wastin' every cent yer earn on hop? Ain't yer got no sense at all, yer poor Chink? And they tells me yer useter be a gent, back home in Chinkieland—a real gent, eddycated and of a swell family! Wottya mean, yer poor, weak-spined fish?"

Again he touched the other on the shoulder. He bent down a little more closely. Then a hush came into his voice, as he saw the wistful smile on the yellow, wrinkled old face of the dead man.

"Gee!" he whispered. "Oh, Gee!"