Page:Weird Tales Volume 09 Issue 02 (1927-02).djvu/40

 every cause there is an effect. For every effect there has been a cause.

"I place my hand in that fire which flames on your hearth. It burns me and I take my hand away. Never will I put my hand in fire again. It has hurt me and I fear it. Cause has produced effect. Do we desire knowledge? We must ever seek to know the causes of the effects we see.

"Now this fear, this horror, you have for cats: when you were a baby, a small child perhaps, a cat frightened you?"

"My mother says not, but that I cried at sight of one, even before I could talk," I told him. "And she had always loved cats. She had five of the animals as pets at the time of my birth, but even as a baby I showed such signs of fright at them, she gave them, every one, away. We never had a cat afterward, and my dislike of the creatures continued as I grew older."

"Then, my friend, your feeling for these animals is the unconscious remembrance of another life. Sometime, somewhere, misfortune came to you in the guise of a cat. We people of the East know these things to be true.

"But you of the West, with your numerous schools and your much education, laugh at the thought that the soul may live through many lives, coming into different bodies, and acting different dramas, but learning each time a little bit more of that which it has willed to learn, and working all these experiences into one perfect plot in the end.

"You laugh, although daily you see about you proof of the truth of these things, which my people have taught and known for ages. A man is introduced to a maiden, and with the meeting of their eyes he knows that she is the one among all others for whom he has been seeking. And she, too, meeting his ardent glance (for the soul looks out through the eyes) knows that he is the man of her heart.

"Recognition leaps like a flash of electric flame between them. You of the West term it 'love at first sight;' but we of the East say 'love, not at first sight, but love for each other many times in many lives has been the joy of that man and that maid.' And insofar as they have loved truly in the past, they seek for and find the beloved again. Does not your Scripture say, 'Love is stronger than the grave'?" [sic]

"Then have I not met the one I loved in the past," I told him. "Many lives must I have loved myself alone, for I have always been content to be a bachelor, and no woman has ever appeared to me as desirable above all other women. But we were speaking of cats, not love, my friend."

"We speak of reincarnation, the chapters of life," replied the Hindoo. "And your hatred of cats, Aristé, is doubtless part of a chapter now past—a chapter perhaps you are happier for not remembering."

After some further talk of the same nature but more deeply philosophical, Amir Das left me to ponder his statements in the cozy firelight of the old-fashioned fireplace. This fireplace, together with Mrs. O'Flynn's tea-making abilities, has kept me for many months a contented lodger in the warm-hearted Irishwoman's house, in spite of the detestable cat that she insists on keeping.

The fiendish voice of this cat I now heard wailing from a distant part of the house. I presumed that probably it had been locked into some room, as it accompanied Mrs. O'Flynn, a prowling shadow, on one of her busy housewifely rounds.

I watched the red fire on the hearth and thought of what my Hindoo friend had said. I thought of