, 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!"