# Alien Souls/Tao

Included in Alien Souls 1922, pp. 231-248.

### TAO

It was now the custom of Li Ping-Yeng, the wealthy retired banker, to sit near the open window and look up at the sky, which seemed always to be packed with dirty clouds, or down into Pell Street, toward the corner, where it streams into the Bowery in frothy, brutal, yellow-and-white streaks. Occasionally, huddled snug and warm in a fold of his loose sleeve, a diminutive, flat-faced Pekinese spaniel, with convex, nostalgic eyes and a sniffy button of a nose, would give a weak and rather ineffectual bark. Then, startled, yet smiling, Li Ping-Yeng would rise and go down-stairs to the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace in search of food.
To do this, he had to cross his apartment.
Fretted with shifting lights, it lay in dim, scented splendor. Underfoot stretched a thick-napped dragon rug of tawny orange and taupe, picked out with rose-red and brown. Age-darkened tulip- wood furniture faded into the corners, where the shadows drooped and coiled. The door of the outer hall was hidden by a great, ebony-framed screen of pale lotus silk embroidered with conventionalized figures, black and purple and maroon, that represented the "Hei-song-che-choo," the "Genii of the Ink," household gods of the literati; while here and there, on table and taboret and étagère, were priceless pieces of Chinese porcelain, blue-and-white Ming and Kang-he beakers in aubergine and oxen-blood, crackled clair-de-lune of the dynasty of Sung, peachblow celadon, Corean Fo dogs and Fong-hoang emblems in ash-gray and apple-green.
This was the room, these were the treasures, which years ago he had prepared with loving, meticulous care for the coming of his bride.
She had come, stepping mincingly in tiny bound feet, "skimming," had said an impromptu Pell Street poet who had cut his rice gin with too much heady whompee juice, "over the tops of golden lilies, like Yao Niang, the iron-capped Manchu prince's famous concubine."
But almost immediately—the tragedy had not loomed very large in the morning news, starting with a crude head-line of "Woman Killed in Street by Car on Wrong Side," and winding up with "The Chauffeur, Edward H. Connor, of No. 1267 East I57th Street, was held at the West 68th Street Station on a charge of homicide"—her body had passed into the eternal twilight, her soul had leaped the dragon gate to join the souls of her ancestors.
And to-day Li Ping-Yeng, in the lees of life, was indifferent to the splendors of Ming and Sung, of broidered silks and carved tulip-wood. To-day there was only the searching for his personal tao, his inner consciousness removed from the lying shackles of love and hate, the drab fastening of form and substance and reality.
Daily, as he sat by the window, he approached nearer to that center of cosmic life where outward activity counts for less than the shadow of nothing. Daily he felt the tide rise in his secret self, trying to blend with the essence of eternity. Daily, beyond the dirty clouds of lower Manhattan, beyond the Pell Street reek of 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 flopping, ragged clothes, his face turned blindly to the stars and a childlike smile curling his lips; or, perhaps, hugging the blotchy shadows of a postern, the tiny figure of Wuh Wang, the wife of Li Hsü, the hatchet-man, courting a particularly shocking fate by talking, face close against face, to a youth, with a checked suit and no forehead to speak of, whose native habitat was around the corner, on the Bowery.
Also voices brushed up, splintered through the open window, the stammering, gurgling staccato of felt-slippered Cantonese, suggestive of a primitive utterance going back to the days before speech had evolved; the metallic snap and crackle of Sicilians and Calabrians talking dramatically about the price of garlic and olive-oil; the jovial brogue of Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch, telling a licenseless peddler to "beat it"; the unbearable, guttural, belching whine o Russian Hebrews, the Pell Street symphony, with the blazing roar of the elevated thumping a dissonant counterpoint in the distance.
Li Ping-Yeng saw, he heard, but only with the conscious, the worthless part of his brain; while the real part, the subconscious, was occupied with the realization of himself which he must master in order to reach the excellent and august wisdom of tao—the search of his inner soul, beyond the good and the evil, which, belike, he had muddied by his too great love for his wife.
This tao was still too dim for him to see face to face. It was still beyond the touch and feel of definite thought. Its very possibility faded elusively when he tried to bring it to a focus. Yet he knew well what had been the basis of it. He had learned it by the bitterest test of which the human heart is capable—the negative test; the test of suffering and unfulfilled desire; the test of acrid memory. "Memory," he would say to himself, over and over again, patiently, defiantly, almost belligerently, when the thought of his wife's narrow, pleasurable hands rose flush with the tide of his regrets and, by the same token, caused his tao once more to dim and fade—"memory, which is of the dirt-clouted body, and not of the soul."
Yet in the matter of acrid memory and unfulfilled desire Miss Edith Rutter, the social-settlement investigator who specialized in the gliding vagaries of the Mongol mind as exemplified in Pell Street, had brought back at the time an entirely different tale, an entirely different interpretation of Chinese philosophy, too.
But be it remembered that philosophy is somewhat affected by surroundings, and that Miss Rutter had been on a visit to an aunt of hers in Albany, balancing a Jasper ware tea-cup and cake-plate on a scrawny, black-taffeta-covered knee, and, about her, tired, threadbare furnishings that harped back to the days of rep curtains, horsehair chaise-longues, wax fruit, shell ornaments, banjo clocks, pictures of unlikely children playing with improbable dogs, cases of polished cornelian, levant-bound sets of Ouida, and unflinching, uncompromising Protestant Christianity.
"My dear," she had said to Aunt Eliza Jane, "the more I see of these Chinamen, the less I understand them. This man I told you about, Mr. Li Ping-Yeng—oh, a most charming, cultured gentleman, I assure you, with such grand manners!—I saw him a few minutes after they brought home the poor crushed little body of his young bride, his two days bride, and, my dear,—would you believe it possible?—there wasn't a tear in his eyes, his hands didn't even tremble. And when I spoke to him, tactful, gentle, consoling words, what do you imagine he replied?"
"I've no idea."
"He smiled! Yes, indeed, smiled! And he said something—I forget the exact words—about his having, perhaps, loved too much, his having perhaps been untrue to his inner self. I can't understand their philosophy. It is—oh—so inhuman!" She had puzzled. "How can anybody love too much? What can he have meant by his inner self?"
"Pah! heathens!" Aunt Eliza Jane had commented resolutely. "Have another cup of tea?"
Thus the judgment of the whites; and it was further crystallized in detective Bill Devoy's rather more brutal: "Say, them Chinks has got about as much feelings as a snake has hips. No noives—no noives at all, see?" and Mr. Brian Neill, the Bowery saloon-keeper's succinct: "Sure, Mike. I hates all them yeller swine. They gives me the bloody creeps."
Still, it is a moot point who is right, the Oriental, to whom love is less a sweeping passion than the result of a delicate, personal balancing on the scales of fate, or the Occidental, to whom love is a hectic, unthinking ecstasy, though, given his racial inhibitions, often canopied in the gilt buckram of stiffly emotional sex-romanticism.
At all events, even the humblest, earthliest coolie between Pell and Mott had understood when, the day after his wife's death, Li Ping-Yeng had turned to the assembled company in the back room of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, which was for yellow men only and bore the euphonic appellation, "The Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity," and had said:
"The ancients are right. One must preserve a proper balance in all emotions. The man who, being selfish, loves too much, is even as the one who cooks the dregs of wretched rice over a sandalwood fire in a pot of lapis lazuli, or as one who uses a golden plow in preparation for cultivating weeds, or as one who cuts down a precious camphor-grove to fence in a field of coarse millet. Such a man is the enemy of his own tao. It is most proper that such a man should be punished."
After a pause he had added:
"I am such a man, brothers. I have been punished. I tied my soul and my heart to a woman's jeweled ear-rings. The ear-rings broke. The woman died. Died my heart and my soul. And now, where shall I find them again? Where shall I go to seek for my tao?"
There had come a thick pall of silence, with only the angry sizzling of opium cubes as lean, yellow hands held them above the openings of the tiny lamps; a sucking of boiling-hot tea sipped by compressed lips; somewhere, outside, on the street, a cloudy, gurgling trickle of obscene abuse, presently fading into the memory of sounds.
The men sighed heavily. Coolies they were, the sweepings of the Canton gutters and river-banks, cooks, waiters, grocers, petty traders; yet men of an ancient race, behind whom stretched forty centuries of civilization and culture and philosophy, in solemn, graven rows. Thus they were patient, slightly hard, not easily embarrassed,, submimely unselfconscious, tolerant, permitting each man to look after his own fate, be it good or evil. Anti-social, an American would have called them, and he would have been wrong.
Li Ping-Yeng had bared his naked, quivering soul to their gaze. He was their friend; they respected him. He was a rich man, an educated man. Yet Li Ping-Yeng's life was his own to make or to mar. Sympathy? Yes; but not the arrogant indelicacy of help offered, of advice proffered.
Thus they had thought, all except Yu Ch'ang, the priest of the joss-temple.
For many years, since he made his frugal living by catering to the spiritual weal of Pell Street, it had been the latter's custom, when he foregathered with his countrymen, to gain face for himself and his sacerdotal caste by talking with nagging, pontifical unction about things religious and sectarian. But, being a hedge-priest, self-appointed, who had received only scanty training in the wisdom of the "three precious ones," the Buddha past, the Buddha present, and the Buddha future, he had found it hard to uphold his end when tackled by Li Ping-Yeng, the banker, the literatus, anent the contents of such abstruse books of theological learning as the "Park of Narratives," "Ku-liang's Commentaries," or the "Diamond Sutra."
Now, with the other baring his bleeding soul, he had seen a chance of settling the score, of causing him to lose a great deal of face.
"Little brother," he had purred, "I am a man of religion, a humble seeker after truth, whose knowledge is not to be compared with yours; yet have I thought much. I have thought left and thought right. Often in the past have we differed, you and I, on minor matters of philosophy and ceremonial. May I, the very useless one, address words of advice to you, the great literatus?"
"Please do."
"Ah! Then let me reply with the words of Confucius, that he who puts too much worth on worthless things, such as the love of woman, the love of the flesh, is like the wolf and the hare, leaving the direction of his steps to low passions. To lead such a man into the august ways of tao is as futile as tethering an elephant with the fiber of the young lotus, as futile as the attempt to cut a diamond with a piece of wood, as futile as trying to sweeten the salt sea with a drop of honey, or to squeeze oil from sand. Ah, ahee!" He had spread out his fingers like the sticks of a fan and had looked about him with brutal triumph.
The other's features, as yellow as old parchment, indifferent, dull, almost sleepy, had curled in a queer, slow smile. He was smoking his fourth pipe, a pipe of carved silver, with a green-amber mouthpiece and black tassels. The room had gradually filled with scented fog. The objects scattered about had lost their outlines, and the embroidered stuffs on the walls had gleamed less brilliantly. Only the big, violet-shaded lanterns on the ceiling had continued to give some light, since poppy vapors are slow to rise and float nearer the ground.
"You are wrong, wise priest," he had replied.
"Wrong?"
"Yes. For there is one who can tether the elephant with the fiber of the young lotus, who can cut a diamond with a piece of soft wood, sweeten the salt sea with a drop of honey, and squeeze oil from sand."
"Who?" Yu Ch'ang had asked, smiling crookedly at the grave assembly of Chinese who sat there, sucking in their breath through thin lips, their faces like carved ivory masks.
Li Ping-Yeng had made a great gesture.
"The Excellent Buddha," he had replied, in low, even, passionless, monotonous accents that were in curious, almost inhuman, contrast to the sublime, sweeping faith in his choice of words. "The Omniscient Gautama! The All-Seeing Tathagata! The Jewel in the Lotus! The most perfectly awakened Blessed One who meditates in heaven on His seven-stepped throne!"
And again the grave assembly of Chinese had sat very still, sucking in their breath, staring at their neat, slippered feet from underneath heavy, hooded eyelids, intent, by the token of their austere racial simplicity, on effacing their personalities from the focus of alien conflict; and then, like many a priest of many a creed before him, Yu Ch'ang, sensing the silent indifference of his countrymen and interpreting it as a reproach to his hierarchical caste, had let his rage get the better of his professional, sacerdotal hypocrisy.
"The Buddha? Here? In Pell Street?" he had exclaimed. He had laughed hoarsely, meanly. "Find Him, the Excellent One, the Perfect One, in Pell Street? Look for the shining glory of His face—here—in the soot and grease and slippery slime of Pell Street? Search, belike, for fish on top of the mountain, and for horns on the head of the cat! Bah!" He had spat out the word, had risen, crossed over to the window, thrown it wide, and pointed to the west, where a great, slow wind was stalking through the sky, picking up fluttering rags of cloud. "Go! Find Him, the Buddha, in the stinking, rotten heaven of Pell Street! Go, go—by all means! And, perhaps, when you have found Him, you will also have found your tao, fool!"
"I shall try," had come Li Ping-Yeng's reply. "Yes; most decidedly shall I try." He had walked to the door. There he had turned. "Little brother," he had said to the priest over his shoulder, without malice or hurt or bitterness, "and why should I not find Him even in the Pell Street gutters? Why should I not find my tao even in the stinking, rotten heaven that vaults above Pell Street? Tell me. Is not my soul still my soul? Is not the diamond still a diamond, even after it has fallen into the dung-heap?"
And he had stepped out into the night, staring up at the purple-black sky, his coat flung wide apart, his lean, yellow hands raised high, indifferent to the rain that had begun to come down in flickering sheets.
"Say, John, wot's the matter? Been hittin' the old pipe too much? Look out! One o' these fine days I'll raid that joint o' yours," had come detective Bill Devoy's genial brogue from a door-way where he had taken refuge against the elements.
Li Ping-Yeng had not heard, had not replied; except to talk to himself, perhaps to the heaven, perhaps to the Buddha, in staccato Mongol monosyllables, which, had Bill Devoy been able to understand, would have convinced him more than ever that that there Chink was a sure-enough hop-head:
"Permit me to cross the torrent of grief, O Buddha, as, even now, I am crossing the stream of passion! Give me a stout raft to gain the other side of blessedness! Show me the way, O King!"
Back in the honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity, slant eye had looked meaningly into slant eye.
"Ah, perhaps indeed he will find his tao," Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, had breathed gently; and then to Yu Ch'ang, who had again broken into harsh, mean cackling, said:
"Your mouth is like a running tap, O very great and very uncouth cockroach!"
"Aye, a tap spouting filthy water." This was from Nag Sen Yat, the opium merchant.
"A tap which, presently, I shall stop with my fist," said Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, winding up the pleasant round of Oriental metaphor.
Thus was displayed, then, the serene, if negative, sympathy of the Pell Street confraternity, further demonstrated by its denizens leaving Li Ping-Yeng hereafter severely alone and by replying to all questions and remarks of outsiders with the usual formula of the Mongol when he does not wish to commit himself: "No savvy!"
"I feel so terribly sorry for him,"—this from Miss Edith Rutter,—"Is there really nothing I can do to—"
"No savvy."
"Looka here,"—from Bill Devoy,—"you tell that brother-Chink o' yourn, that there Li Ping-Yeng, to stop hittin' the black smoke, or I'll pinch him on spec, see?"
"No savvy."
"Listen!"—from the old Spanish woman who kept the second-hand store around the corner, on the Bowery,—"What do you think he's going to do with all the truck he bought for his wife? I'd like to buy the lot. Now, if you want to earn a commission—"
"No savvy."
"Is he goin' t' try holy matrimony again, or near-matrimony?"—from Mr. Brian Neill, the saloon-keeper, who occasionally added to his income by unsavory deals between the yellow and the white,—"For, if he wants another goil, there's a peacherino of a red-headed good-looker that blows into my back parlor once in a while and that don't mind Chinks as long's they got the kale—"
"No savvy."
And even to the emissary of a very great Wall Street bank that in the past had handled certain flourishing Manila and Canton and Hankow accounts for the Pell Street banker, and who, unable to locate him personally and being slightly familiar with Chinese customs, had sought out the head of the latter's masonic lodge and had asked him why Li Ping-Yeng had retired from business, and if, at all events, he wouldn't help them with the unraveling of a knotty financial tangle in far Shen-si. Even there was the same singsong answer:
"No savvy," exasperatingly, stonily repeated.
"No savvy, no savvy."
For two days after his wife's tragic death Li Ping-Yeng, to quote his own words, had given up vigorously threshing mere straw, by which term he meant all the every-day, negligible realities of life.
He had begun by selling his various business interests; nor, since he was a prosy Mongol whose brain functioned with the automatic precision of a photographic shutter and was nowise affected by whatever was going on in his soul, had he made a bad deal. On the contrary, he had bargained shrewdly down to the last fraction of a cent.
Then, prudently, deliberately, the patient and materialistic Oriental even in matters of the spirit, he had swept his mind clear of everything except the search for his tao, the search for his salvation. This tao was to him a concrete thing, to be concretely achieved, since it was to link him, intimately and strongly, not with, as would have been the case had he been a Christian, an esoteric principle, a more or less recondite, theological dogma, but with a precious and beneficent influence 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 a giant rush of splendor and, greatly, blessedly, overwhelm him and destroy his clogging, individual entity.
But how was this to be attained? Had he been a Hindu ascetic, or even a member of certain Christian sects, he would have flagellated his body, would have gone through the ordeal of physical pain. But, a Mongol, thus stolidly unromantic and rational, almost torpidly sane, he had done nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he had continued to take good care of himself. True, he had begun to eat less, but not purposely; simply because his appetite had decreased. And his real reason for keeping his wife's Pekinese spaniel tucked in his sleeve was because "Reverential and Sedate" reminded him when it was time for luncheon or dinner, hours he might otherwise have forgotten.
The idea of suicide had never entered his reckoning, since he held the belief of half Asia, that suicide destroys the body and not the soul; that it is only a crude and slightly amateurish interruption of the present life, leaving the thread of it still more raveled and tangled and knotted for the next life, and yet the next.
He had passed over the obvious solution of devoting himself to charity, to the weal of others, as it had seemed to him but another instance of weak and selfish vanity, fully as weak and selfish as the love of woman; and the solace of religion he had dismissed with the same ready, smiling ease. Religion, to him, was not an idea, but a stout, rectangular entity, a great force and principle, that did its appointed duty not because people believed in it, but because it was. The Buddha would help him, if it be so incumbent by fate upon the Buddha, regardless, if he prayed to him or not, if he memorized the sacred scriptures, if he burned sweet-scented Hunshuh incense-sticks before the gilt altar or not. For the Buddha, too, was tied firmly to the Wheel of Things. The Buddha, too, had to do his appointed task. Thus, Li Ping-Yeng had decided, prayers would be a waste of time, since they could not influence the Excellent One one way or the other.
How, then, could he acquire sufficient merit so as to reach his tao, beyond the good and the evil?
Of course, first of all, mainly, by tearing from his body and heart even the last root of the liana of desire, of love, of regret for his wife; by again and again denying, impugning, destroying the thought of her, though, again and again, it would rise to the nostrils of his remembrance, with a stalely sweet scent like the ghost of dead lotus-blossoms.
She was on the shadow side of the forever. Her soul, he would repeat to himself, incessantly, defiantly, belligerently, had leaped the dragon gate. Broken were the fetters that had held him a captive to the tinkle-tinkle-tinkle of her jeweled ear-rings. A mere picture she was, painted on the screen of eternity, impersonal, immensely aloof, passed from the unrealities of the earth life to the realities of the further cosmos.He must banish the thought of her, must forget her.
And he did forget her, again and again, with the effort, the pain of forgetting choking his heart.
Sitting by the window, his subconscious mind centered on his tao, his salvation, the blessed destruction of his individual entity, "Reverential and Sedate" huddled in a fold of his loose sleeve, scrutinizing street and sky with unseeing eyes, he would forget her through the long, greasy days, while the reek of Pell 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 was all wrong. Mebbe his tao wasn't forgetting at all. Mebbe it was just his love for her, his always thinking of her, his not forgetting her—that was his real tao."
"Mebbe," replied Tzu Mo. "I should worry!"
THE END