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KARMA 

BY LAFCADIO HEARN 




NEW YORK 

BONI AND LIVERIGHT 

1918 



Copyright, 1918 
BY BONI & LIVERIGHT. INO. 



First Printing October, 1918 

Second Printing December, 1918 



IOAN STACK 




CONTENTS 

PAGE 

KARMA . . . 11 

A GHOST . 59 

THE FIRST MUEZZIN, BILAL .... 70 

CHINA AND THE WESTERN WORLD . 110 



300 



EDITOR S NOTE 

THE stories and articles by Lafcadio 
Hearn in this volume are now collected 
in book form for the first time. They 
rank with his best work. The opening story 
"Karma" is the most personal product from 
Hearn s pen, as he rarely took the public into 
his confidence. No doubt the ideal love de 
scribed in this great tale was an experience of 
his own. The story originally appeared in 
Lippincott s Magazine for May, 1890. 

"A Ghost" a beautiful prose-poem ap 
peared in Harper s Magazine for Decem 
ber, 1889. 

"Bilal" was a work of great labor and love. 
In his letters to H. E. Krehbiel he makes nu 
merous references to "Bilal." It appeared in 
the New Orleans Times-Democrat in 1884. 
The sketch was considered lost to the world. 
I inquired from Mr. Krehbiel about it; he dis- 

5 



6 EDITOR s NOTE 

covered it in a scrap-book which he kindly 
placed at my disposal. 

"China and the Western World" appeared 
in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1896; this 
article shows a keen insight into international 
relations and is particularly timely to-day. 

I wish to thank Captain Mitchell McDonald 
of the United States Navy, Hearn s friend and 
literary executor, for permission to reprint 
"Karma." I also wish to thank in behalf of 
Captain McDonald, Harper Brothers for per 
mission to include "A Ghost" in the present 
volume, and the Atlantic Monthly Publishing 
Company for permission to include "China and 
the Western World." 

ALBERT MORDELL. 



KARMA 



WITH all her exceptional mental 
training, there was an almost 
childish ingenuousness in her 
every word and act, a simplicity and direct 
ness of manner that invited every worthy con 
fidence: yet he had never presumed to praise 
her. Behind that radiant girlishness, natural 
to her life as azure to sky, he knew some settled 
power, some forceful intelligence to which a 
compliment would seem a rudeness. And, 
coerced to plainest frankness by his very sense 
of her personality, he found that it needed no 
little courage to make his declaration. For 
weeks he had attempted in vain to devise some 
way of softening the difficulty by prelim 
inaries, of giving some turn to conversation 
that might help him to approach the matter 

by gentle degrees. But she remained always 

11 



12 KARMA 

so invulnerable to suggestion, so strangely 
impregnable in her maidenly self-posses 
sion! . . . To many lovers thus ill at ease, in 
tuition tells the advantage of being alone with 
the adored girl somewhere beyond the shadow 
of walls, in some solitude where Nature soft 
ens hearts with her silence and her loveliness 
and perpetual prompting of what is tender and 
true, a park, a wood, an umbraged lane. But 
to her, Nature and silence seemed to give 
larger power to awe him; the splendid light 
itself seemed to ally with her against him. He 
lived near enough to be often with her; and 
they walked much together on quiet beautiful 
country-roads ; and he never could find courage 
to do more than admire her by stealth, while 
conversing on subjects totally foreign to his 
thoughts. But each time more and more her 
charm bewildered him : the secret of ideal grace 
seemed to live in her, that something in every 
motion and poise which is like melody made 
visible, which makes you think you hear 
music when you see it. 

With the passing of time his embarrassment 



KARMA 13 

only grew. Sometimes he would even find it 
impossible to maintain a sensible conversa 
tion, conscious of nothing but his idolatry; 
answering questions vaguely, or not at all. . . . 
And at such a moment of his confusion, one 
day, as they were returning from a walk to 
her home, she turned near the little gate, and, 
looking into his face with her archest smile, 
exclaimed : 

"Well, what is it? Tell me all about 
it. . . ." 

II 

Who does not know that luminous hour of 
Love s illusion, when the woman beloved seems 
not a woman, never of earth, never shaped of 
the same gross substance forming man, but 
a creature apart, unique, born of some finer, 
subtler, pearlier life? In her the lover no 
longer beholds the real : she has become to him 
so wonderful that he cannot guard his secret, 
that he must speak of her so as to betray him 
self, that he feels anger when questioned 
friends declare their inability to see those mar- 



KARMA 



vels which he discerns in her. And then, with 
this exquisite delirium of the senses, mysterious 
above aught else in the all-circling mystery of 
life; with this wondrous bewitchment, sung 
of since song found voice, yet ever uninter- 
pretable save as the working magic of that 
Will wherefrom, as ether-dartings from a sun- 
burning, are souls thrilled out; with the 
astonishment of woman s charm thus made 
divine, the miracle of her grace and purity of 
being, there comes to the lover a cruel sense 
of his own unworthiness. . . . What are you, 
O man ! poisoned with passions and knowledge 
of evil, that you should think to mingle the 
lucid stream of her life with the turbid current 
of your own? Were it less than sacrilege to 
dream of it? All limpid and fleckless the azure 
of her thought: would you make it gray? 
darken it? call into it the cloudings that 
scathe with fire? . . . What are you, that she 
should make you her chosen of all men, ac 
cept her fate from you? . . . What are you, 
that she should ever caress you, suffer you to 
touch her, to learn her thought, to seek the in- 



KARMA 15 



finite in her eyes, to know the sweet warm soft 
shock of her kiss? 

Yet the illusion of her in those hours of deli 
cious madness when all the veins burn with 
thirst of sacrifice for her sake ; the illusion of 
her during all the tense, fiery, magnetic draw 
ing of your life to hers with insensate longing 
to absorb it utterly and be therein impossibly 
absorbed, to blend with it, to die for it: that 
illusion, however seeming-celestial, is less beau 
tiful, infinitely less admirable, than the com 
plex reality of her worth, if she be indeed of 
the finer, rarer type of womanhood, if she be 
indeed one of those marvelously-specialized 
human flowers that bloom only in the higher 
zones of aspirational being, even at the verge 
of God s snow-line. . . . Have you ever 
thought what she truly is, this perfumed 
chalice-blossom stored with all sweetness of 
humanity? have you ever dreamed what she 
is worth? 

. . . For all the myriads of the ages have 
wrought to the making of her. -ZEons of strug- 



16 KARMA 

gle and blood and tears are the price of her. 
And in that she is good, because of the soul- 
sweetness of her, is she not the utmost yet- 
possible expression of divinity working 
through man? . . . Think you what her sweet 
ness means, the free beauty of her mind, 
the tenderness of her, the sensitive exquisite- 
ness of her being! It signifies so much more 
than she . . . ! It means the whole history of 
love striving against hate, aspiration against 
pain, truth against ignorance, sympathy 
against pitilessness. She, the soul of her! 
is the ripened passion-flower of the triumph. 
All the heroisms, the martyrdoms, the immola 
tions of self, all strong soarings of will 
through fire and blood to God since humanity 
began, conspired to kindle the flame of her 
higher life. 

And yet, perhaps, she is willing to be yours ! 

Viewlessly your being has become slowly 
interorbed with hers; each life is secretly 
seeking union with the other through inter 
weaving of wishes unconfessed. Within her 



KARMA 17 



charming head are thoughts and dreams and 
beliefs about you. Something shadowy, an 
emanation of you, an illusion, has entered 
into that limpid life, and tinted all its thinking, 
as clearest water is tinted by one touch of eosin, 
and flushes through with rose-color of dawn. 
Her blood has learned of you in the blind sweet 
pink chambers of her life, quickens its throb 
bing at the echo of your step, at the sound of 
your voice . . . even at the remembrance of 
your face. In sleep she speaks to you, to 
your Eidolon, to the shadow of you apotheo 
sized by the wondrous mirroring of her girl s- 
love. Her wishes are of you; her plans are 
shapen for you : some thought you uttered has 
been utilized in that secret splendid architec 
ture of faith being builded within her dainty 
brain. Was it real enough, strong enough, 
flawless enough to serve for so holy a use? 
or was it sleazy and false, ready to yield at 
the first unlooked-for pressure, and bring down 
with its breaking all the charming gracious 
fabric innocently confided to its support? 
"Have I the generous skill to make her 



18 KARMA 



happy? . . . Have I the methods of wealth to 
keep want far from her? . . . Have I the 
force to wrestle with the world for her, and 
win? . . . Am I strong enough to protect her 
from all harm? . . . Shall I be able to provide 
for her and for her children in all things, should 
death come suddenly to take me away?" . . . 
Are these all the honest questions that you ask 
yourself? And having asked, and found the 
power to cry out Yes to every asking, do you 
think you have asked enough? . . . Nay! such 
questions are babble to other questions which 
selfishness or ignorance may have prevented 
you from asking, but which it remains your 
duty to demand: your duty to her, your duty 
to the future, your duty to mankind, your 
duty to the Supreme Father of all life and 
love. 

. . . For what purpose was she formed? 
. . . Surely to be loved. . . . But for what 
purpose loved? Ah! never for yours alone! 

Only for the divine purpose came she into 
being, this Love-Kindler, foam-born out of 



KARMA 19 



life s sea-bitterness under the lashing of all the 
Winds of pain. And through her, as through 
each so-far-perfected form, the eternal Will is 
striving to bring souls out of Night into the 
splendor of that time when the veil between 
divine and human shall have been taken away. 

In her beauty is the resurrection of the fair 
est past; in her youth, the perfection of the 
present; in her girl-dreams, the promise of 
the To-Be. . . . Million lives have been con 
sumed that hers should be made admirable; 
countless minds have planned and toiled and 
agonized that thought might reach a higher 
and purer power in her delicate brain; count 
less hearts have been burned out by suffering 
that hers might pulse for joy; innumerable 
eyes have lost their light that hers might be 
filled with witchery; innumerable lips have 
prayed for life that hers might be kissed. . . . 

And can you dare to love her without ghostly 
fear? without one thought of all the hopes, 
strivings, sacrifices, sufferings which created 
her? without terror of your weird responsi 
bility to the past and its dead pains, to all 



20 KARMA 



those vanished who labored that she might see 
the light? Numberless they may have been; 
yet how unspeakably vaster the multitude of 
possibilities involved by her single slender ex 
istence! Not to the sacrificial past alone are 
you responsible, but to the mysterious To- 
Come also and much more, and to that Un 
knowable likewise, working within and beyond 
all time, that Will which is Goodness. . . ." 
Through her young heart throbs rosily the 
whole God-Future: its love, its faith, its hope 
are seeking there to quicken, all flower-wise 
folded up in the bud of her exquisite life. . . . 

in 

. . . She did not appear surprised when he 
uttered his wish: she only became a little seri 
ous, and met his gaze without one sign of shy 
ness, as she made answer: 

"I do not yet know. ... I am not sure 
you love me." 

"Oh, could you but try me! what would 
I not do! . . ." 

Placid as sculpture her face remained, while 



KARMA 21 



her fine silky-shadowed eyes observed, as with 
a curious doubting sympathy, the passionate 
eagerness of his look. 

"But I do not approve of those words," 
she said. "If I thought you meant all that is 
in them, I might not like you." 

"Why?" he queried, in surprise. 

"Because there are so many things one 
should not do for anybody. . . . Would you 
do what you suspected or knew to be wrong for 
the purpose of pleasing me?" 

He was afraid to answer at once; but she 
read his thought in the quick hot blush that fol 
lowed it, and the blush pleased her more than 
his words. 

"I do not really know," she resumed, after 
a moment s silence, moving, as she spoke, to 
pluck a flower from the neighboring hedge, 
"I do not know yet whether I ought to allow 
myself to like you." 

. . . Her expression of doubt made him 
happy, suddenly, wildly happy. His heart 
filled full almost to breaking with the delight 
of her words : yet he could imagine nothing to 



22 KARMA 



say or do. He feared this strange girl, 
feared her as much as he loved her. . . . For 
fully a minute she played with the flower in 
silence, and that minute seemed to him very 
long. The flower photographed itself upon his 
brain with a vividness that remained undimin- 
ished to the day of his death. It was a purple 
aster. . . . 

"Let me tell you," she continued at last, 
looking straight into his eyes with her clear 
keen sky-gray frankness, "let me tell you 
what to do. . . . Go home now : then, as soon 
as you feel able to do it properly, write out 
for me a short history of your life; just write 
down everything you feel you would not like 
me to know. Write it, and send it. . . ." 

"And then?" he asked, as she paused a 
little. 

"And then I shall tell you whether I will 
marry you," she finished, resolutely. . . . 
"Now, good-by!" 

"But," he persisted, clinging almost des 
perately to the slender hand extended, "you 
will believe me . , ?" 



KARMA 23 

"How believe you? . . . If I did not think 
I could believe you," she answered, surprised 
into sternness, and at once withdrawing her 
hand, "I should already have told you very 
plainly, No!" 

"Only that I love you," he explained. 

She only smiled, and repeated, 

-"Good-by!" 

IV 

. . . "Write out for me a short history of 
your life; . . . write down everything you feel 
you would not like me to know. . . " 

So easy a task it seemed that he hurried 
homeward filled with the impulse to do it at 
once, wondering at the length of the way in 
his impatience to begin. . . . " Then I shall tell 
you whether I will marry you. . . " Some 
thing joyous filled his whole being with light 
ness and force, the elixir of hope! He 
thought of the duty imposed on him as almost 
pleasurable, without knowing why. . . . Per 
haps because in reviewing our own faults we 
are wont to compassionate ourselves as victims 



24 KARMA 



of circumstances, and to betray our weaknesses 
to a friend is therefore to invite the consola 
tion of sympathy with our own self-pity. . . . 

But this eagerness was of the moment only, 
the moment of nervous reaction succeeding 
suspense, before he had yet time to think. In 
a little while it passed away under the influ 
ence of a growing conviction that the under 
taking was serious enough to decide his whole 
life. A single phrase might lose him incom 
parably more than he had gained, might even 
condemn him irrevocably. And the indulgent 
manner of her own words recurred to him as 
a gentle caution against impulsiveness: "As 
soon as you feel able to do it property" 

And ere reaching home he had ceased to feel 
at all confident. Unexpectedly, one after 
another, there had recurred to him certain in 
cidents of his career as a young man which 
could not be written down with ease. The sim 
ple recollection of them came with a little sharp 
shock : a young man s follies, of course, but fol 
lies that could not be recorded without ex 
treme care of expression. . . . 



KARMA 25 



. . . "Everything you feel you would not 
like me to know. . . " Surely she could not 
have understood the full possible significance 
of her command! Neither could she suppose, 
unless most strangely innocent, that men were 
good like women! . . . But what if she could 
and did suppose it? In that event, the faint 
est reference to certain passages of his life 
must cause her cruel surprise. . . . "Every 
thing you feel you would not like me to 
know. . . " All or nothing! 

And he found himself almost startled by this 
first definite comprehension of the duty to be 
performed, the problems to be solved, the 
delicate subtile severity of that moral test he 
had so lightly welcomed as a relief from love s 
incertitude. 



To make a rough draft of all that ought to 
be written, and then amend, refine, compress, 
correct, and recopy, had first appeared to him 
the readiest way of obeying her wishes. But 



26 KARMA 



subsequent reflection led him to believe that 
such a method involved temptation to vanity 
of style, conceit of phrase, general insincerity 
of expression. With his freshly-acquired right 
to the hope of winning her, there began to stir 
and expand within him a sense of gratitude un 
speakable to the giver, and a new courage of 
trustfulness likewise, which momentarily con 
quered his doubts. No : it would be more loyal 
to write down each fact as it came to memory, 
simply, bravely, candidly, and send her the 
original record in its plain spontaneous sin 
cerity. . . . For a little while he felt himself 
exalted with zeal of frankness, with high re 
solve to master his sensitiveness, to overrule 
any secret wish to appear better than he was. 
... But after having remained more than 
an hour at his desk, he found this second cour 
age of purpose also fail him. The record of 
his childhood and early youth, even the de 
tailed narrative of his first struggle in the 
world of adult effort, with a heart still fresh, 
timid, loving, bewildered by the great stir 
ring about and beyond it, like some cage-born 



KARMA 27 



creature loosed in a wood, all this had not 
been difficult to write. There was nothing in 
it that he could not feel willing she should 
know. But thereafter the course of his duty 
seemed fraught with peril; and all his former 
doubts and fears came thronging back to haunt 
him. It was not going to prove so easy to make 
as he had for one foolish moment presumed to 
believe, this confession of sins! . . . 

And the dismay of difficulties unforeseen, 
the fear of making known to her, even by inti 
mation, matters which he had so often re 
counted to friends without a thought of shame, 
began to excite within him an unfamiliar 
indefinable feeling of moral bewilderment. 
How strangely, how violently such incidents 
shifted their color when brought, even by 
fancy, into the atmosphere of luminous, pas 
sionless purity which enveloped her! Could 
it be possible that he had never before looked 
at them save in artificial light, under the de 
lusive glare of some factitious morality? 

. . . "Everything you feel you would not 
like me to know. . . " Yet why falter? 



28 KARMA 



Surely the sweet command itself implied the 
promise of all possible pardon! . . . And, 
after all, the only feasible way of obeying it 
would be that which he had thought of at the 
outset, to set everything down bluntly, and 
then reshape the whole, ameliorate the form. 

. . . But even thus the task exacted more 
painful thinking than he had been able to fore 
see. So many impressions had become blurred 
or effaced in his remembrance! there were 
links missing between incidents; there were 
memories of acts without recollection of prece 
dents and impulses, without record of those 
circumstances which alone could mitigate their 
aspect of perversity. . . . Yes, it was true 
that he did not wish to appear any better than 
he was ; but, in her eyes, at least, he dare not 
suffer himself to seem worse. . . . Slowly and 
carefully in the pauses of his nervous pacing 
up and down the room for hours, he elabo 
rated another page ... a page and a half, 
of letter-paper. Then he read over all that he 
had written. 

His face burned at the mere thought of those 



KARMA 29 



lines being seen by her. "Never!" he cried out 
aloud to himself, "never could I send her 
that!" ... It would have to be modified to 
tally modified in some way. Yet to change it 
enough, without insincerity, without posi 
tive untruthfulness, seemed almost impossi 
ble. And this was what he had thought him 
self able to do immediately! . . . Could she 
have divined that it would not be easy to do, 
when she had said, so slowly and distinctly 
in that soft penetrating voice of hers, "As 
soon as you feel able 3 ? . . . 

. . . Darkness found him still at his desk; 
and the task did not seem to him even fairly 
begun: all its difficulties appeared to multiply 
and to make more and more confusion in his 
mind the longer he thought about them. He 
lighted his lamp, and worked on, hour after 
hour, struggling with the stony hardness of 
statements which no skill of honest verbal 
chemistry could soften, trying to remodel 
sentences already rewritten a score of times. 
, . . It was long past midnight when he rose 



30 KARMA 

from his desk overweary, and resigned his writ 
ing to seek repose, utterly astounded at the 
result of this strange obligation to testify 
against himself in the secret high court of 
honor, to estimate the moral value of his life 
by the simple measure of one sweet girl s idea 
of goodness. . . . 

VI 

He laid himself down to rest; but the cool 
peace of sleep would not come: his thought, 
heated to pain by all the emotions of the day, 
still burned on, flaming and smouldering by 
turns. Sometimes he saw her eyes, her smile 
fancied he could hear her voice; then his 
unfinished manuscript seemed always to rise 
up magnified between them, like a great 
white written curtain wavering soundlessly, 
with ominous distortions of meaning in every 
undulation. Then he would try to review all 
that he had penned, only to remember involun 
tary errors or to detect insincerities compelled 
by the vain effort to make some compromise 
between absolute frankness and positive de- 



KARMA 31 



ceit, until his thought would drift back, un 
directed by any purpose, into the past. But 
always, sooner or later, he would find himself 
sharply recalled as by a sudden fear to the 
remembrance of the present, of her, of her 
last words, and the white nightmare of his 
unfinished confession. 

. . . Repeatedly he strove to quell this men 
tal agitation, to win back internal calm by rea 
soning with that once more self -asserting con 
science, now recognizably aggressive, which 
had been so long dumb that he believed it ap 
peased when it was only sullen, reduced to 
silence by some false and subtile casuistry, but 
never conciliated. He sought to find excuses, 
apologies, explanations for his faults, mar 
shaling in memory all mitigating circum 
stances of each yielding to guilty impulse, 
endeavoring to convince himself of the insig 
nificance of an act by optimistic judgment of 
its consequences. Inexperience was so blind; 
youth could delude so cruelly ! . . . And yet 
were not many men, men like him, made 
wiser and better by their early follies, stronger 



32 KARMA 

by their weaknesses? souls tempered into self- 
mastery through error and regret, as steel 
through fire and water? . . . Was he not of 
these? Might she not so absolve him, suffer 
him to love her? Dare he not hope that she 
would pardon him all that he could fully for 
give himself? and surely there was nothing 
he could not forgive himself . . . except 

Except . . . / Ah! there he had been 
more than weak, more than foolish, worse than 
selfish ! . . .In that instance at least, conscience 
had confuted all argument, scorned all con 
solation. It was not an error : it was crime, 
unmistakable wickedness. No studied elimina 
tion of details could make it otherwise appear 
in that which he had to write. He had known 
that fault so well for what it was that he had 
trained his mind never to dwell upon it, dis 
ciplined his recollection to avoid it. ... And 
with the burning memory of it, there suddenly 
revived other kindred remembrances of shame 
and pain: things before forgotten, because of 
his long effort to efface from the mental chart 
of his life, a whole zone of years. But now, 



KARMA 33 

every marking thus obliterated, all the reefs 
and shoals and drifting wrecks of old storm- 
spaces, had risen into visibility again. . . . 
Never, never could he tell her of these ! . . . 

Then he must lose her, lose her irrevocably! 
And losing her, what could life be worth to 
him? To lose her would be to lose himself, 
his higher self, all the nobility of that new 
being into which his love for her had lifted him 
up. True it was that she had ever seemed 
placed by her loftier nature beyond his reach ; 
that he had entered into the pure repose 
about her, feeling as an intruder, as one hav 
ing wandered unbidden with raiment blood- 
besprinkled into some seraphic peace, and 
trembling for the moment of banishment, yet 
with unhallowed feet held fast by strangest 
spell of bliss. . . . And nevertheless was she 
not all in all his complement, light to his 
shadowing, snow to his fire, strength to his 
weakness? a nature evolved with marvelous 
appositeness for union with his own? Not that 
he could presume to deem himself thus worthy, 



34 KARMA 



but that she might render him so much more 
worthy by loving him! . . . To lose her? . . . 
All that his aspiration had ever imaged of ideal 
human goodness, all that his heart had ever 
hungered for, responded to her own dear name! 
nay! before her he found himself dazzled as 
by divinity, so transcendently were all his 
dreams surpassed. . . . To lose her? He 
alone, out of the thousands destined to seek in 
vain, the myriads deluded by hope of win 
ning the Woman never to be known, he only 
had been fated to find his ideal. Had he then 
found her only to lose her forever? 

"Everything you feel you would not like 
me to know" . . . Did she could she sus 
pect there were incidents of his life which he 
dared not write? Had she simply decided to 
checkmate his wooing by forcing him to accept 
a sort of moral chess-game of which she had 
foreseen every possible move from the begin 
ning? . . . The pitiable suspicion perished in 
a moment; but there sprang up at once in the 
place of it his first impulse to positive insincer- 



KARMA 35 



ity. Could he not deceive her? might he not 
dissemble ? Over and over again he asked him 
self the question, justifying and condemn 
ing his weakness by turns ; and each time her 
words flashed back to him: "Would you do 
what you thought or felt to be wrong to please 
me?" . . . "Yes, I would!" he once passion 
ately cried out in answer; and then felt him 
self blush again in the dark for the cowardice 
of the acknowledgment. ... But even though 
he would, he knew that he could not. Even 
were he to write a lie, he could not meet her 
and maintain it, with her eyes upon his face: 
they had uttermost power over him power as 
of life and death, those fine gray sweet mes 
meric eyes! 

. . . Then what was he to do? Confess him 
self a criminal by praying her to forego the 
test after having begged her to prove him? . . . 
Ask her ask Truth s own Soul! to take him 
to herself with that black falsehood in his life? 
. . . Write her all, and die? . . . Write 
nothing, and disappear forever from the world 
to which she belonged? . . . 



36 KARMA 



VII 

Yet why this intensifying dread, like the 
presage of a great pain? . . . Why had he al 
ways feared that slight girl even while loving 
her? feared her unreasoningly, like a super 
natural being, measuring his every thought in 
the strange restraint of her presence? . . . 
How imperfect his love, if perfect love casteth 
out fear! Imperfect by so much as his own 
nature was imperfect; but he had loved less 
perfectly with never a thought of fear. . . . 
By what occult power could she make him thus 
afraid? Perhaps it was less her simple beauty, 
her totally artless grace, which made her un 
like all other women, than the quiet settled con 
sciousness of this secret force. Assuredly 
those fine gray eyes were never lowered before 
living gaze: she seemed as one who might look 
God in the face. . . . Men would qualify such 
sense of power as hers, "strength of character" ; 
but the vague term signified nothing beyond 
the recognition of the power as a fact. Was 



KARMA 37 



the fact itself uninterpretable? a mystery 
like the mystery of life? 

VIII 

. . . But imperceptibly, all self -questioning 
weakened and ceased. Weariness began to 
flood his thought, like some gray silent ris 
ing tide, spreading and drowning. Ideas 
slowly floated up, half-formed, soft and 
cold. . . . Then darkness, and a light in the 
darkness that illumined her, and the sense of 
some strange interior unknown to him. 

He saw her in that filmy light, imponderably 
poised, with ghostliest grace made visible 
through some white vapor of veils ; the gloss 
iness of her arms uplifted for the braiding 
of her hair, seeming the radiance of some sub 
stance impossible, like luminous ivory. And 
this soft light that orbed and bathed her, held 
some odorous charm, thin souls of flowers, 
faint, faint perfume of dream-blossoms. And 
he knew that she was robing for her wedding 
with him. 

He stood beside her: the soft spheral light 



38 KARMA 

touched him/ . . . All around them was a 
great pleasant whispering, the whispering of 
many friends assembled. He looked into the 
penumbra beyond her, and saw smiling faces 
that he knew. Some were of the dead; but 
it seemed right they should be there. Would 
they smile thus would they whisper so kindly 
if they knew . . .? 

And there arose within him a weird interior 
urging to tell all; and that knowledge of self- 
unworthiness which had haunted him in other 
hours, suddenly returned upon him with the 
enormity of a nightmare, irresistible, appall 
ing, like a sense of infinite crime. Then he 
knew that he must tell her all. 

And he began to speak to confess to her 
each hidden blemish of his life, passionately 
watching her face, feeling for her power to 
forgive, fearfully seeking to learn if her pure 
hate of evil might exceed the measure of her 
sound sweet human love. . . . Yet now she 
seemed not human: all transfigured she had be 
come! And those white shapes enfolding her 
were surely never bridal veils, but vapory 



KARMA 39 



wings that rose above her golden head, and 
swept down curving to her feet. 

. . . Angel! but with a woman s heart! 
. . . For she only smiled at his words, at his 
fears, with compassionate lovingness, with 
tenderness as of maternal indulgence for the 
follies of a child. ... Ah! but all his follies 
had not been trivial; there were others she 
never could forgive. . . . 

But still she listened, smiling as one hear 
ing nothing new, with sympathy of strange 
foreknowledge, all the while with supplest 
slender arms uplifted, weaving her marvelous 
hair. 

And he knew that all those there assembled 
heard his every syllable ; yet he could not but 
speak on, charging himself with crimes he 
had never wrought, calumniating his life, 
even as victims of inquisitorial torture shrieked 
out self -accusation of impossible sins. But al 
ways, always she laughed forgiveness, and 
those in the circling shadow likewise ; and he 
heard them commending him, commending 



40 KARMA 



his sacrifice, his sincerity, his love of her: in 
finitely indulgent for him. 

Yet the more they praised him, the greater 
became his fear of making one last avowal, 
of uttering that which was the simple truth. 
For a weird doubt seized upon him, a doubt 
of their meaning; and with the growing of it, 
all seemed to treacherously change. . . . And 
the faces of the dead were sinister; the mur 
muring hushed : even she no longer smiled. . . . 

He would have whispered it to her alone; 
but ever as he sought to lower his voice, more 
piercing it seemed to sound, cutting through 
the stillness with frightful audibility, like the 
sibilation of a possessing spirit. . . . And 
then, in mad despair, ceasing to hope for se 
crecy, he uttered it recklessly, vociferated it, 
reiterated it, crashed it into their hearing 
with the violence of a blasphemy. 



All vanished! there was only darkness 
about him, the darkness of real night. . . . 
Still trembling with the terror of his dream he 



KARMA 41 



heard his own heart beat, and some slow dis 
tant steeple-bell strike out the hour of four. 

IX 

Not through that restless night alone, but 
through many nights succeeding to weariest 
days of self-questioning and self-recording, 
conscience unrelentingly revenged every past 
repudiation of its counsel. Day after day, he 
would tear up a certain page and begin it 
afresh, but each time only to hear that vin 
dictive inner voice make protest, deny his 
right to any palliating word. And when 
everything else had been written, the inex 
orable Censor still maintained, still refused to 
attenuate, the self-proscription penned upon 
that page. Neither by finest analysis of mo 
tives and circumstances converging to the 
fault, nor by any possible deduction out of 
consequences, could the blackness of the fact 
be diminished: the great blot of it, spreading 
either way, strangely discolored the whole. 
. . . Without that page his manuscript could 
offer at the very worst only a record of follies 



42 KARMA 



hurtful to none so much as to himself; with 
it, read through the smirch of it, no other 
error avowed could seem innocuous enough to 
demand her absolution. 

And the days wheeled away, filing off by 
weeks; and a new anxiety began to shape 
for him. The mere prolongation of his silence 
was betraying him. Already she might have 
divined his moral cowardice, and decided 
against him. Before this imminent menace of 
what he feared most, he found himself finally 
terrified to a resolve, as one leaps into flood 
from fire. He turned one morning to his man 
uscript for the decisive time, re-read once more 
the ever-scored page, feverishly copied it, 
folded it up with the rest, enveloped and ad 
dressed the whole ; and then, feeling the inevi 
table danger of another moment s hesitation, 
he hurried out and dropped the manuscript into 
the nearest letter-box. 



Then he became appalled at what he had 
done. . . . Seldom does the whole potential 



KARMA 43 



meaning of a doubtful act consent to reveal 
itself while the act is yet only contemplated; 
and that sudden expansion of significance 
which it assumes immediately upon accomplish 
ment, may form the most painful astonishment 
of a lifetime. . . . 

Oh! the subtle protean treachery of words 
on paper! words that, only spoken, seemed 
so harmless; that once embodied and coiled 
in writing, change nature and develop teeth 
to gnaw the brain that gave them visible form! 
The viewless fluttering spoken word is thrice 
plead for: by the tone which is the heart of it, 
and its best excuse for being, by the look 
which accompanies it, by the circumstance 
which evokes it. But incarnate it with a single 
quivering dash of the pen, and lo! the soul 
less, voiceless, gelid impersonality of a reptile. 
Still, you are so far conscious only of its chill 
ing ugliness ; you do not know its dumb cru 
elty: it is feigning innocuousness because its 
life is yet at your mercy, because it has not 
ceased to be your slave. The price of its manu 
mission is a postage-stamp. Release it, and it 



44 KARMA 

will writhe through all your soul to tear and to 
envenom. Then you will be powerless to pre 
vail against it: freedom will have given it the 
invulnerability of air ! 

. . . And words that might have been spared 
in sentences that should have been reconsid 
ered, with what multiformity of ghastliness 
they now swarmed back to madden him, bit 
ing into memory! How had he failed to dis 
cern their whole evil capability, to under 
stand, while it was not yet too late, their sin 
ister power of shifting color according to po 
sition, according even to the eye that looked 
upon them? Under what hue would they re 
veal themselves to her? . . . And not one 
could now, or ever again, be changed. He had 
flung his missive into the machinery of gov 
ernment; and already, doubtless, by steam and 
iron, it was being whirled to its destination! 

Yes ! there was still a forlorn hope ! What 
if he should telegraph to have the manuscript 
returned unopened? . . . But, again, what 
would she infer from such a message? ... A 



KARMA 45 



new confusion of doubts and fears and desper 
ate conflicting impulses followed. But the 
dread of her inference yielded at last to the 
vividly terrible menace of lines that he had 
written, ever becoming more frightfully vis 
ible in remembrance, visions that left him 
soul-steeped in a fire-agony of shame! . . . 
He rushed out into the street, hurried to the 
telegraph-office. As he entered it, he glanced 
almost instinctively at the mockingly placid 
face of the clock, and started, with a sensa 
tion at his heart as of falling in dreams. . . . 
Time often passes with a rapidity that seems 
malevolent when the emotions are in turmoil. 
... It was too late to telegraph. The envel 
ope had already, in all likelihood, been opened 
by her own hands! 

XI 

It was done, forever done! . . . He had 
cast the die of his own fate. And the absolute 
conviction of his further helplessness restored 
him to comparative calm, subdued that pas 
sion of emotional pain which it had seemed to 



46 KARMA 



him that he could endure no longer and 
live. . . . 

Could she forgive him? Might she not be 
merciful? Might she not have some such in 
tuition of the nature of human weakness as 
would impel her to hold him pardonable in 
view of the contrition he had so earnestly ex 
pressed? And might he not place some hope 
in her strange capacity of independent judg 
ment, of estimating character and action by 
standards wholly at variance with common 
opinion? 

Perhaps. . . . But in her sublime indiffer 
ence to conventional beliefs, there was always 
manifest a moral confidence steady as the steel 
of a surgeon. . . . And there came to him the 
first vague perception of why he feared her, 
of what he feared in her: a penetrative dynamic 
moral power that he felt without comprehend 
ing. . . . The idea of that power applied to 
the analysis of his confession, brought down 
his heart again. 

There were three only three fearful things 
she might do: simply condemn him by her si- 



KARMA 47 



lence ; write him her refusal ; or summon him to 
hear from her own lips that all was over. And 
the last possibility seemed the most to be dread 
ed. Why? . . . Was it because of an intui 
tion that he might hear something more terri 
ble than her "No"? . . . He remembered 
strange hours of his life when the reality of an 
occurrence feared had proven infinitely more 
painful than the imagining, though fancy 
had been forewarned and strained to prepare 
him for the very worst. The imagined worst 
had never been the worst: there were fathom 
less abysses of worse behind it. 

And the simple word, "Come," solitary 
and imperative, in a note received two days 
later, suddenly thickened and darkened within 
him this indefinite fear of an unimaginable 
worse. So feels the prisoner, long waiting for 
his doom, when the hammering has ceased to 
echo in the night, and the iron doors grate 
open to gray dawn, and the Mask says, 
"Come!" 



48 KARMA 



XII 

... As he opened the door of the apart 
ment in which they had been wont to meet, and 
the faint familiar fragrance that seemed a part 
of her life, smote softly to his brain, he saw 
her there, already risen, as one who knew his 
footstep, to take from some locked drawer an 
envelope he instantly recognized. The mere 
deliberate swift manner of the act prepared 
him, before he could see her face, for the ab 
sence of the sweet smile with which she had 
always greeted him. She neither asked him to 
be seated, nor approached to offer him her 
hand, but walked directly to the hearth where 
a bright wood fire was leaping. 

"Do you wish me to burn this?" she asked, 
with the missive in her hand, and her eyes flash 
ing to his face. Her voice had the ring of 
steel! 

"Yes," he responded, almost in a whisper. 

. . . Only one moment he saw her eyes, 
for he turned away his own; but that single 
strong glance seemed to flame cold into his life 



KARMA 49 



like some divine lightning, incinerating the 
uttermost atom of his hope, consuming the 
last thin wrapping of his pride, like a garment 
of straw. For the first time he knew himself 
spiritually stripped before a human gaze; 
and with that knowledge outvanished in shame 
all the weakness of his passion, all the sense- 
hunger that is love s superstition. He stood 
before her as before God, morally naked as 
a soul in painted dreams of the Judgment 
Day. . . . 

She tossed the written paper to the fire, and 
watched it light up with a little flapping sound ; 
while he stood by, fearing what her next word 
might be. As the flame sank, an air-current 
wafted and whirled the weightless ash up out 
of sight. ... A moment passed, and it came 
crumbling down again, by flakes, that fluttered 
back like moths into the blaze. 

"You say the woman is dead?" she ques 
tioned at last, in a very quiet voice, still look 
ing in the fire. 



50 KARMA 

He knew at once to which page of his con 
fession she referred, and made answer: 

"It is almost five years since she died." 

-"And the child?" 

"The boy is well." 

"And . . . your . . . friend?" She ut 
tered the words with a slow, strange emphasis, 
as of resolve to master some repulsion. 

"He is still there, in the same place." 

Then turning to him suddenly, she ex 
claimed, with a change of tone cold and keen 
as a knife : 

"And when you wrote me that,, you had 
really forced yourself to believe I might con 
done the infamy of it! . . ." 

He attempted no response, so terribly he 
felt himself judged. He turned his face away. 

"Assuredly you had some such hope," she 
resumed; "otherwise you could not have sent 
me that paper. . . . Then by what moral 
standard did you measure me? was it by your 
own? . . . Certainly your imagination must 
have placed me somewhere below the level of 
honest humanity, below the common moral 



KARMA 51 



watermark! . . . Conceive yourself judged 
by the world I mean the real world, the 
world that works and suffers ; the great moral 
mass of truthful, simple, earnest people mak 
ing human society! Would you dare to ask 
their judgment of your sin? Try to imagine 
the result ; for by even so easy a test you can 
immediately make some estimate of the char 
acter of what you confessed to me, as a proof 
of your affection! ..." 

Under the scorn of her speech he writhed 
without reply. And kindled by it, as fire by 
a lens of ice, there began to burn within him 
a sense of shame to which all his previous pain 
was nothingness, an anguish so incomparable 
that he wondered at his power to live. . . . 
For there are moments of weirdest agony pos 
sible in the history of natures that have not 
learned the highest lesson of existence, 
strange lightning-glimpses of self-ability to 
suffer, astonishments of moral perception 
suddenly expanded beyond all limit precon 
ceived, like immense awakenings from some 
old dreaming, some state of soul-sleep long mis- 



52 KARMA 



taken for truth of life. ... So sometimes, to 
unripened generous hearts, flash the first fear 
ful certitudes of an ethical law stronger than 
doubt or dogma, the supreme morality at 
once within and without all creeds, beyond and 
above all skepticisms. He was of those for 
whom its revelation comes never save through 
pain, as certain tardy fruits are sweetened by 
frost; she was of those born into goodness, 
inheriting truth as a divine instinct. And by 
that instinct she knew him as it had not been 
given him to know himself. . . . 

"You think me cruel," she resumed, after 
a brief silence. "Oh, no! I am not cruel; I 
am not unjust. I have made allowances. I 
wished you to come and see me because in every 
line of your avowal I found evidence that you 
did not know the meaning of what you wrote, 
that even your shame was merely in 
stinctive, that you had no manly sense of the 
exceptional nature of your sin. And I do not 
intend to leave you in the belief that so deadly 
a wrong can be dismissed, least of all by 
yourself, as a mere folly, something to be 



KARMA 53 

thought about as little as possible. For the 
intrinsic vileness of it is in no manner dimin 
ished, either by your cheap remorse or by your 
incapacity to understand it except as a painful 
error. My friend, there are errors which na 
ture s God never fails to punish as crimes. 
Sometimes the criminal may escape the pen 
alty; but some one else must bear it. Much 
that is classed as sin by the different codes of 
different creeds, may not be sin at all. But 
transcendent sin, sin that remains sin forever 
in all human concepts of right and wrong, sin 
that is a denial of all the social wisdom gained 
by human experience; for such sin there is 
no pardon, but atonement only. And that sin 
is yours; and God will surely exact an expia 
tion." 

"Is it not enough to lose you?" he sobbed, 
turning at last his gaze, all fevered by de 
spair, to seek her face. 

"By no means!" she answered, with terri 
ble composure. "That is no expiation! But 
what may prove at best a partial expiation, I 
now demand of you. I demand it in God s 



54 KARMA 



name. I demand it in your own behalf. I 
demand it also as my right . . . My right! 
mine! for you have wronged me also by the 
consequences of that crime, O my friend! 
and you owe me the reparation; and I demand 
it of you yes ! to the last drop of the dregs 
of the bitterness of it! . . " 

Her merciless calm had passed: she now 
spoke with passion, and the force of her pas 
sion appalled him. Never before had he seen 
her face flushed by anger. 

"You will go, my friend, to that man 
whom you wronged, that man who still lives 
and loves under the delusion of your undying 
lie, and you will tell him frankly, plainly, 
without reserve, what you have dared to con 
fess to me. You will ask him for that child, 
that you may devote yourself to your own 
duty; and you will also ask how you may best 
make some reparation. Place your fortune, 
your abilities, your life, at that man s disposal. 
Even should he wish to kill you, you will have 
no right to resist. But I would rather, a 
thousand times rather you should find death at 



KARMA 55 

his hands, than to know that the man I might 
have loved could perpetrate so black a crime, 
and lack the moral courage to make expiation. 
... Oh ! do not let me feel I have been totally 
deceived in you! prove to me that you are 
only a criminal, and not a coward, that you 
are only weak, not utterly base. . . . But do 
not flatter yourself with the belief that you 
have anything to gain : I am not asking a fa 
vor; I am simply demanding a right." 

For one moment he remained stunned by her 
sentence as by a thunder-bolt surpassing all 
possible expectation: the next, he blanched to 
the whiteness of a dead man. She saw him 
pale, as though shocked by the sudden vision 
of a great peril, and watched him fearfully, 
wondering, doubting. Would he refuse to 
right himself in her eyes, in God s eyes? 
must she despise him utterly? But no! his 
color came back with a strong flush that made 
her heart leap. 

"I will do it," He made answer, in a voice 
of quiet resolve. 
"Then go!" she said, with no change of 



56 KARMA 



tone. Her face betrayed no gladness. ... A 
moment more, and he had passed from her 
presence, and she had not suffered herself to 
touch his vainly outstretched hand. 

XIII 

And a year passed. 

. . . She knew he had kept his word, knew 
he had obeyed her in all things. None of her 
secret fears had been realized. He had totally 
changed his manner of life, was living, self- 
exiled, in a distant city with his boy. He had 
written often to her, pleading passionate let 
ters which were never answered. Was it that 
she doubted him still? or only that she doubt 
ed her own heart? He could not guess the 
truth. He feared and hoped and waited ; and 
season followed season. 

IThen one day she received a letter from him, 
bearing a post-mark that startled her, because 
it revealed him so near, a letter praying only 
to be allowed to see her, while passing through 
the suburb where she lived. 

Another morning brought him the surprise 



KARMA 57 



of her reply. He kissed her name below the 
happy words: "You may." 

XIV 

... "I have brought him to you," he said; 
"I thought you might wish it. . . ." 

She did not seem to hear, so intently was 
she looking at the boy, whose black soft eyes, 
beautiful as a fawn s, returned all timidly her 
clear, gray gaze. And from those shy dark 
orbs there seemed to look out upon her the soul 
of a dead woman, and a dead woman s plead 
ing, and a dead woman s pain, and the beauty 
and the frailty and the sorrow that had been, 
until her own soul, luminous and pure and 
strong, made silent answer: "Be never fear 
ful, O thou poor lost one! only by excess of 
love thy sin was: rest thou in thy peace!" . . . 
And something of heaven s own light, like a soft 
ness of summer skies, made all divine her smile, 
as she knelt to put her arms about the boy and 
kiss him, so that he wondered at the sweetness 
of her. 

And the father, wondering more, hid his 



58 KARMA 



face as he sat there, and sobbing remained, un 
til he knew her light hand upon his head, caress 
ing him also, and heard her voice thrill to him 
with tenderness incomprehensible : 

"Suffering is strength, my beloved! suf 
fering is knowledge, illumination, the flame 
that purifies! Suffer and be strong. Never 
can you be happy: the evil you have wrought 
must always bring its pain. But that pain, 
dearest, I will help you to bear, and the 
burden that is atonement I will aid you to en 
dure; I will shield your weakness; I will 
love your boy. ..." 

For the first time their lips touched. . . . 
She had become again the Angel of his dream. 



A GHOST 



PERHAPS the man who never wanders 
away from the place of his birth may 
pass all his life without knowing ghosts ; 
but the nomad is more than likely to make their 
acquaintance. I refer to the civilized nomad, 
whose wanderings are not prompted by hope 
of gain, nor determined by pleasure, but sim 
ply compelled by certain necessities of his be 
ing, the man whose inner secret nature is 
totally at variance with the stable conditions of 
a society to which he belongs only by accident. 
However intellectually trained, he must al 
ways remain the slave of singular impulses 
which have no rational source, and which will 
often amaze him no less by their mastering 
power than by their continuous savage oppo 
sition to his every material interest. . . . 
These may, perhaps, be traced back to some 

59 



60 KARMA 



ancestral habit, be explained by self-evident 
hereditary tendencies. Or perhaps they may 
not, in which event the victim can only sur 
mise himself the Imago of some pre-existent 
larval aspiration the full development of de 
sires long dormant in a chain of more limited 
lives. . . . 

Assuredly the nomadic impulses differ in 
every member of the class, take infinite va 
riety from individual sensitiveness to environ 
ment : the line of least resistance for one being 
that of greatest resistance for another; no 
two courses of true nomadism can ever be 
wholly the same. Diversified of necessity both 
impulse and direction, even as human nature 
is diversified. Never since consciousness of 
time began were two beings born who pos 
sessed exactly the same quality of voice, the 
same precise degree of nervous impressibility, 
or, in brief, the same combination of those 
viewless force-storing molecules which shape 
and poise themselves in sentient substance. 
Vain, therefore, all striving to particularize the 
curious psychology of such existences: at the 



A GHOST 61 



very utmost it is possible only to describe such 
impulses and perceptions of nomadism as lie 
within the very small range of one s own ob 
servation. And whatever in these be strictly 
personal can have little interest or value except 
in so far as it holds something in common with 
the great general experience of restless lives. 
To such experience may belong, I think, one 
ultimate result of all those irrational partings, 
self -wreckings, sudden isolations, abrupt 
severances from all attachment, which form the 
history of the nomad . . . the knowledge that 
a strange silence is ever deepening and ex 
panding about one s life, and that in that si 
lence there are ghosts. 

ii 

... Oh! the first vague charm, the first 
sunny illusion of some fair city, when vistas 
of unknown streets all seem leading to the re 
alization of a hope you dare not even whisper ; 
when even the shadows look beautiful, and 
strange facades appear to smile good omen 
through light of gold! And those first win- 



62 KARMA 



ning relations with men, while you are still a 
stranger, and only the better and the brighter 
side of their nature is turned to you ! . . . All 
is yet a delightful, luminous indefiniteness 
sensation of streets and of men, like some 
beautifully tinted photograph slightly out of 
focus. . . . 

Then the slow solid sharpening of details all 
about you, thrusting through illusion and dis 
pelling it, growing keener and harder day by 
day, through long dull seasons, while your feet 
learn to remember all asperities of pavements, 
and your eyes all physiognomy of buildings 
and of persons, failures of masonry, fur 
rowed lines of pain. Thereafter only the ach 
ing of monotony intolerable, and the hatred 
of sameness grown dismal, and dread of the 
merciless, inevitable, daily and hourly repe 
tition of things; while those impulses of un 
rest, which are Nature s urgings through that 
ancestral experience which lives in each one of 
us, outcries of sea and peak and sky to man, 
ever make wilder appeal. . . . Strong friend 
ships may have been formed; but there finally 



A GHOST 63 



comes a day when even these can give no con 
solation for the pain of monotony, and you 
feel that in order to live you must decide, 
regardless of result, to shake forever from 
your feet the familiar dust of that place. . . . 

And, nevertheless, in the hour of departure 
you feel a pang. As train or steamer bears 
you away from the city and its myriad asso 
ciations, the old illusive impression will quiver 
back about you for a moment, not as if to 
mock the expectation of the past, but softly, 
touchingly, as if pleading to you to stay; and 
such a sadness, such a tenderness may come to 
you, as one knows after reconciliation with a 
friend misapprehended and unjustly judged. 
. . . But you will never more see those streets, 
except in dreams. 

Through sleep only they will open again be 
fore you, steeped in the illusive vagueness of 
the first long-past day, peopled only by 
friends outreaching to you. Soundlessly you 
will tread those shadowy pavements many 
times, to knock in thought, perhaps, at doors 
which the dead will open to you. . . . But with 



64 KARMA 



the passing of years all becomes dim so dim 
that even asleep you know tis only a ghost- 
city, with streets going to nowhere. And fi 
nally whatever is left of it becomes confused and 
blended with cloudy memories of other cities, 
one endless bewilderment of filmy architec 
ture in which nothing is distinctly recognizable, 
though the whole gives the sensation of hav 
ing been seen before . . . ever so long ago. 

Meantime, in the coure of wanderings more 
or less aimless, there has slowly grown upon 
you a suspicion of being haunted, so fre 
quently does a certain hazy presence intrude 
itself upon the visual memory. This, however, 
appears to gain rather than to lose in definite- 
ness : with each return its visibility seems to in 
crease. . . . And the suspicion that you may 
be haunted gradually develops into a certainty. 

ill 

You are haunted, whether your way lie 
through the brown gloom of London winter, 
or the azure splendor of an equatorial day, 



A GHOST 65 



whether your steps be tracked in snows, or in 
the burning black sand of a tropic beach, - 
whether you rest beneath the swart shade of 
Northern pines, or under spidery umbrages of 
palm: you are haunted ever and everywhere 
by a certain gentle presence. There is noth 
ing fearsome in this haunting . . . the gentlest 
face . . . the kindliest voice oddly familiar 
and distinct, though feeble as the hum of a 
bee. . . . 

But it tantalizes, this haunting, like those 
sudden surprises of sensation mihin us, though 
seemingly not of us, which some dreamers have 
sought to interpret as inherited remembrances, 
recollections of pre-existence. . . . Vainly 
you ask yourself: "Whose voice? whose 
face?" It is neither young nor old, the Face: 
it has a vapory indefinableness that leaves it 
a riddle; its diaphaneity reveals no particu 
lar tint; perhaps you may not even be quite 
sure whether it has a beard. But its expres 
sion is always gracious, passionless, smiling 
like the smiling of unknown friends in dreams, 
with infinite indulgence for any folly, even a 



66 KARMA 



dream-folly. . . . Except in that you cannot 
permanently banish it, the presence offers no 
positive resistance to your will: it accepts each 
caprice with obedience; it meets your every 
whim with angelic patience. It is never criti 
cal, never makes plaint even by a look, 
never proves irksome: yet you cannot ignore 
it, because of a certain queer power it pos 
sesses to make something stir and quiver in 
your heart, like an old vague sweet regret, 
something buried alive which will not die. . . . 
And so often does this happen that desire to 
solve the riddle becomes a pain, that you fi 
nally find yourself making supplication to the 
Presence, addressing to it questions which 
it will never answer directly, but only by a 
smile or by words having no relation to the 
asking, words enigmatic, which make mys 
terious agitation in old forsaken fields of mem 
ory . . . even as a wind betimes, over wide 
wastes of marsh, sets all the grasses whisper 
ing about nothing. But you will question on, 
untiringly, through the nights and days of 
years : 



A GHOST 67 



"Who are you? what are you? what is 
this weird relation that you bear to me? All 
you say to me I feel that I have heard before 
but where? but when? By what name am I 
to call you, since you will answer to none 
that I remember? Surely you do not live: yet 
I know the sleeping-places of all my dead, 
and yours I do not know ! Neither are you any 
dream; for dreams distort and change; and 
you, you are ever the same. Nor are you any 
hallucination; for all my senses are still vivid 
and strong. . . . This only I know beyond 
doubt, that you are of the Past: you belong 
to memory but to the memory of what dead 
suns? . . ." 

Then, some day or night, unexpectedly, there 
comes to you at least, with a soft swift tin 
gling shock as of fingers invisible, the knowl 
edge that the Face is not the memory of any 
one face, but a multiple image formed of the 
traits of many dear faces, superimposed by 
remembrance, and interblended by affection 
into one ghostly personality, infinitely sym- 



68 KARMA 

pathetic, phantasmally beautiful: a Composite 
of recollections! And the Voice is the echo 
of no one voice, but the echoing of many voices, 
molten into a single utterance, a single im 
possible tone, thin through remoteness of 
time, but inexpressibly caressing. 

IV 

Thou most gentle Composite! thou name 
less and exquisite Unreality, thrilled into sem 
blance of being from out the sum of all lost 
sympathies! thou Ghost of all dear vanished 
things . . . with thy vain appeal of eyes that 
looked for my coming, and vague faint plead 
ing of voices against oblivion, and thin elec 
tric touch of buried hands, . . . must thou 
pass away forever with my passing, even as 
the Shadow that I cast, O thou Shadowing of 
Souls? . . . 

I am not sure. . . . For there comes to me 
this dream, that if aught in human life hold 
power to pass like a swerved sunray through 
interstellar spaces, into the infinite mystery 
r . . to send one sweet strong vibration through 



A GHOST 69 



immemorial Time . . . might not some lu 
minous future be peopled with such as thou? 
. . . And in so far as that which makes for us 
the subtlest charm of being can lend one choral 
note to the Symphony of the Unknowable Pur 
pose, in so much might there not endure also 
to greet thee, another Composite One, em 
bodying, indeed, the comeliness of many lives, 
yet keeping likewise some visible memory of 
all that may have been gracious in this thy 
friend . , ? 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 



"BILAL" 

If all that worship Thee to-day 
Should suddenly be swept away, 
And not a Muezzin left to cry 
Through the silence of the sky, 
"God is Great!" there still would be 
Clouds of witnesses for Thee 
On the land and in the sea. . . . 
Aye! and if these, too, were fled, 
And the earth itself were dead, 
Greater would remain on high; 
For all the planets in the sky, 
Suns that burn till day has flown, 
Stars that are with night restored. 
Are Thy dervishes, O Lord, 
Wheeling round Thy golden Throne! 

EDWIN ARNOLD. 



THE Traveler slumbering for the first 
time within the walls of an Oriental 
city, and in the vicinity of a minaret, 
can scarcely fail to be impressed by the solemn 

70 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 71 

beauty of the Mohammedan Call to Prayer. 
If he have worthily prepared himself, by the 
study of books and of languages, for the ex 
perience of Eastern travel, he will probably 
have learned by heart the words of the sacred 
summons, and will recognize their syllables in 
the sonorous chant of the Muezzin, while the 
rose-colored light of an Egyptian or Syrian 
dawn expands its flush to the stars. Four 
times more will he hear that voice ere morning 
again illuminates the east: under the white 
blaze of noon; at the sunset hour, when the 
west is fervid with incandescent gold and ver 
milion; in the long after-glow of orange and 
emerald fires; and, still later, when a million 
astral lamps have been lighted in the vast and 
violet dome of God s everlasting mosque. Per 
haps the last time he may distinguish, in the 
termination of the chant, words new and mys 
terious to his ear; and should he question his 
dragoman, as did Gerard de Nerval* re 
garding their meaning, he would doubtless ob- 



* Le premier fois que j entendis la voix lente et sereine du 
muezzin, au coucher du Soleii, je me sentis pris d une indicible 



72 KARMA 



tain a similar interpretation: "O ye that are 
about to sleep, commend your souls to Him 
who never sleeps!" Sublime exhortation! re 
calling the words of that Throne-verse which 
jewelsmiths of the Orient engrave upon agates 
and upon rubies, "Drowsiness cometh not to 
Him, nor sleep/ And if the interpreter 
should know something of the hagiology of 
Islam, he might further relate that the first 
Muezzin, the first singer of the Adzan, was the 
sainted servant of Mahomet, even that Bilali- 
bin-Rabah whose tomb is yet pointed out to 
travelers at Damascus. 

Now Bilal was an African black, an Abys 
sinian, famed for his fortitude as a confessor, 
for his zeal in the faith of the Prophet, and 
for the marvelous melody of his voice, whose 
echoes have been caught up and prolonged and 
multiplied by all the muezzins of Islam, 
through the passing of more than twelve hun 
dred years. Bilal sang before the idea of the 

melancholic, "Qu est-ce qu il dit?" demandai-je au drogman. 
"La Allah ila Allah! . . . II n y a d autre Dieu que Dieu!" 
"Je connais cette formula; mais ensuite?" "O vous qui allez 
dormir, recommendez vos ames a Celui qui ne dort jamais!" 
Voyage en Orient "Le Drogman Abdullah." 



THE FIKST MUEZZIN 73 

first minaret had been conceived, before blind 
men were selected to chant the Adzan, lest from 
the great height of the muezzin towers others 
might gaze upon the level roofs of the city, and 
behold sights forbidden to Moslem eyes. To 
day innumerable minarets point to heaven: 
even the oases of the Sahara have their muez 
zin-towers, sometimes built in ignorance of 
the plumb-line, and so contorted that they seem 
to writhe, like those at Ouargla which Victor 
Largeau saw in 1877. And the words chanted 
by all the muezzins of the Moslem world, 
whether from the barbaric brick structures 
which rise above "The Tombs of the Desert," 
or from the fairy minarets of the exquisite 
mosque at Agra, are the words first sung by 
the mighty voice of Bilal. 

Even at the present day many special quali 
fications are required of him who would sing 
the Adzan: he must be learned in the Koran: 
his name must be without reproach; his voice 
must be clear, suave and sonorous, his diction 
precise and pure. But in earlier ages of Islam, 
while the traditional memory of Bilal s voice 



74 KARMA 



was strong in the minds of the faithful, extra 
ordinary vocal powers may have been required 
of those appointed to the office of muezzin. 
Moslih-Eddin Sadi, the far-famed Persian 
poet, relates in his Gulistan more than one 
singular anecdote illustrating the ideas of his 
day in regard to the selection of muezzins and 
Koran-readers. . . . "Some one, in the 
Mosque of Sand jar," he tells us, "used to 
make the Call to prayer with good intent, yet 
with a voice repugnant to all that heard it. 
And the Chief of the mosque was a just emir, 
whose every action was good. Accordingly he 
sought to avoid giving a wound to the heart 
of that man. He spake to him thus, saying: 
*O sir! there are old muezzins attached unto 
this temple, to each one of whom is allotted 
a salary of five dinars, and verily I will give 
thee ten dinars to betake thyself to another 
place. The man agreed thereunto and went 
his way. But after a certain time he returned 
to the emir, and said to him: *O my lord! 
truly thou hast done me an injustice by in 
ducing me to leave this monastery for ten 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 75 

dinars! At the place to which I went they 
have offered me twenty dinars to go elsewhere, 
and I refuse! Then the emir smiled and 
made answer: Take heed thou accept them 
not; for they will surely agree to pay thee 
even so much as fifty dinars! " Chap. IV; 
Upon the Advantage of Silence. 

Not less amusingly significant is the anec 
dote which follows in the same portion of the 
book, anecdote which will be more fully ap 
preciated, doubtless, when we state that the old 
Arabian manner of reading the Koran ranks 
perhaps first among all preserved styles of re 
ligious cantillation : "A man who had a dis 
agreeable voice was reading the Koran aloud. 
A sensible man, passing by, asked of the 
reader: What is thy salary? He answered: 
Nothing. Then demanded the other, 
* Wherefore dost thou take so much pains? 
The man responded: *I read for the love of 
God. Then said the other: *O, for the love 
of God, do not read! " 

Son of an Abyssinian slave-girl, Bilal began 
life as a slave. 



76 KARMA 

Little seems to be known of his earlier years. 

He was very dark, "with negro-features 
and bushy hair," Sir William Muir tells us, 
upon the authority of Arabian writers ; he was 
also very tall, and gaunt as a camel; not 
comely to look upon, but vigorous and sinewy. 
Among the slaves of Mecca the first preaching 
of Mahomet took deep effect: to the hearts 
of those strangers and bondsmen in a strange 
land of bondage, the idea of a Universal Father 
must have been a balm of consolation. Bilal 
would seem to have been the first convert of 
his race, inasmuch as the Prophet was wont to 
speak of him as "the first-fruits of Abyssinia." 
Perhaps the young slave had obtained from his 
dark mother such rude notions of that Chris 
tianity implanted in Abyssinia during the 
fourth century, as might have prepared his 
mind to accept the monotheism of Islam. 

But when the period of persecution com 
menced, it was upon those converted slaves that 
the wrath of the idolatrous Koreish fell most 
heavily. Among the Arabs it had been, from 
time immemorial, a chivalric duty to protect 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 77 

one s own kindred at the risk even of life ; and 
the shedding of Arab blood by Arab hands in 
time of peace never failed to provoke such re 
prisals as often entailed a long war of ven 
detta. By reason of this salutary social law, 
Mahomet and his free Arab converts felt them 
selves comparatively secure from dangerous 
violence; but the unprotected slaves who had 
embraced the new faith were cruelly beaten, 
often menaced with death, and tortured by 
naked exposure to the blistering sun. Under 
such suffering, to which the torments of hun 
ger and thirst were superadded, the tempta 
tions of cool water and palatable food and 
shady rest proved too much for the courage of 
the victims: one by one they uttered, with their 
lips at least, the prescribed malediction upon 
their Prophet, and the idolatrous oath by Lat 
and Ozza. Afterwards, many of them wept 
bitterly for their recantation. But Mahomet 
gave ample consolation to the poor renegades ; 
and for their sake that special exemption for 
reluctant apostasy was provided in the Koran: 
"Whosoever denieth GOD after that he hath 



78 KARMA 



believed, EXCEPTING HIM WHO is FORCIBLY 

COMPELLED THERETO, HIS HEART REMAINING 
STEADFAST IN THE FAITH OH SUCh TCSteth the 

wrath of God." Sura XVI, 108. 

Bilal alone never apostatized: the agony of 
blows, the fiery pains of thirst, the long expo 
sure to the sun upon the scorching gravel of 
the Valley of Mecca, all failed to bend his 
iron will ; and to the demands of his persecutors 
he invariably answered, Ahad! Ahad: "One, 
one only God!" This episode of his confessor- 
ship has been chosen by the Poet Farid Uddin 
Attar as the text of a pious admonition con 
tained in the superb invocation of the Mantic 
Uttair: "Bilal received upon his feeble body 
many blows with clubs of wood and thongs of 
leather: his blood flowed in abundance beneath 
the strokes, yet never did he cease to cry out, 
God is one, God is the only God! " 

It happened one day, while the poor Abys 
sinian was being thus tormented, that a small, 
lithe, slightly built man, with handsome aqui 
line features and a singularly high forehead, 
suddenly appeared among the spectators of 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 79 

Bilal s fortitude and suffering. This slender 
little man was the merchant Abdallah, son of 
Othman Abu Cahafa, but better known to 
students of Moslem history as Abu Bekr, fa 
mous as the bosom friend of the Prophet, his 
comrade in the Fight, and his companion in 
that famous cavern over whose entrance fond 
tradition avers that spiders wove a miraculous 
veil of webs to hide the fugitives, Abu Bekr, 
also called Al Siddick, "the True," "father of 
the virgin," father of Mahomet s future wife 
Ayesha, and destined to succeed him in the 
Khalifate. Already he had expended the 
greater part of a fortune of forty thousand dir- 
hems in purchasing the freedom of slaves per 
secuted because of their conversion to Islam. 
These were mostly women or weaklings. "O 
my son!" Abu Cahafa was wont to say to him, 
"I see that thou freest weak women; but if 
thou wert to free strong men, they would stand 
by thee, and repel harm from thee." "Nay, 
father!" would Abu Bekr reply; "I desire 
only those things which are of God!" And the 
Traditionists record that by reason of this 



80 KARMA 



pious squandering of his wealth, Al Siddick at 
last found himself reduced to wear a coarse 
garment of goat s hair, "pinned together at 
his breast with a wooden skewer." 

Abu Bekr did not long remain a silent wit 
ness of BilaFs resolution: he negotiated upon 
the spot for the purchase of the slave, and suc 
ceeded in obtaining him from his owners 
"Umayyah-b-Khalaf and Ubayy-b-Khalaf"- 
f or a cloak and ten pieces of money. Little did 
any of the spectators of that bargaining imag 
ine the day would ever come when Umayyah 
and his son might vainly beg mercy from the 
slave to whom they had shown no mercy. Ten 
years later, after the furious battle of Bedr, it 
was BilaTs turn; his keen eye singled out his 
former owners from among the multitude of 
Koreishite prisoners ; and it was his grim satis 
faction to have them slain before his face, 
for the faith of Islam did not enjoin the re 
turning of good for evil. 

Now Bilal was the first really valuable slave 
redeemed by Abu Bekr, who immediately after 
the purchase had set him free, "for the love of 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 81 

God." Bilal was a powerful man; the feeble 
ness spoken of by the Persian poet must only 
be understood as referring to the weakness of 
human nature by contrast with spiritual 
strength. Calumniators were not slow to de 
clare that the Abyssinian had been bought free 
for purely selfish motives ; a report apt to find 
credence in a community where the devout 
merchant had long been known as a shrewd 
speculator and a hard bargainer. Mahomet 
wrathfully rebuked this malicious gossip; and 
it is traditional that his reproof is embodied in 
the Ninetieth-and-second Sura of the Koran, 
entitled THE NIGHT, comprising that part 
of its text from the opening line, "By the 
Night when it covereih" to the close of the 
words, "Verily, your endeavor is different!" 


Thus it happened that Bilal obtained his 
manumission, to become the devoted servant 
of Mahomet, and to perform a great part in 
the expanding history of Islam. There is a 
legend that, after the Flight of the Prophet, 
he and others of the faithful temporarily re- 



82 KARMA 



maining in Mecca, were again persecuted by 
the Koreish; but this account is totally dis 
credited by the best modern authorities upon 
the history of Mohammedanism. We next 
hear of Bilal at Medina, in the character of 
The First Muezzin. 

II 

During the infancy of Mohammedanism, 
when the faithful ones dwelt in the immediate 
vicinity of their prophet s home, the Adzdn was 
unknown: the simpler cry: To public prayer! 
being easily heard by all. It was not until 
after the building of the first mosque at Me 
dina, and after Mahomet had changed the 
Kibla, or the direction toward which the wor 
shipers turned their faces from Jerusalem 
to Mecca and its Kaaba, that the Adzan was 
established. But Jerusalem retains a large 
place in the Moslem legend and remains dear 
to Moslem faith; for hath it not been re 
corded in the Traditions that among the 
greater signs of the Last Hour, shall be the 
coming of "Jesus the son of Mary" to Jeru- 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 83 

salem even at the moment of morning prayer, 
when the Mosque of Omar will be lighted by 
the shining of His face, and He shall take the 
place of the awe-stricken Imam, and shall con 
found all those that call themselves Christians 
by uttering in mighty tones the great confes 
sion of Islam: Aschaduan na Mohammed 
rasoul Allah! 

The idea of the Adzan was obtained in a 
most singular way. After the building of that 
Mosque of Mahomet, which, despite the hum 
bleness of its material, really formed the model 
for Saracenic architecture, it soon became evi 
dent that the old manner of summoning the 
congregation to worship was unsuited to the 
new conditions, and utterly devoid of that so 
lemnity which ought to characterize all public 
performance of religious duty. At first the 
Prophet bethought him to have a trumpet 
made; but having removed the Kibla from 
Jerusalem he could ill persuade himself to 
adopt an instrument used by the Jews in cer 
tain ceremonial observances. Then he thought 
of having a bell rung at certain regular hours ; 



84 KARMA 



but there was no one in Medina capable of 
making such a bell as he desired, and he had 
almost fixed his choice upon a wooden gong, 
when it came to pass that a certain citizen of 
Medina dreamed a strange dream. 

It seemed to him that he beheld, passing 
through the moonlit street before his dwelling, 
a stranger uncommonly tall, clad in green rai 
ment, and carrying in his hand a large and 
beautiful bell. And it seemed to the sleeper 
also, that, having approached the tall stranger, 
he asked: "Wilt thou sell me thy bell?" and 
that the tall man smilingly returned: "Tell 
me for what purpose thou seekest to buy it." 
"Verily," answered the dreamer in his dream, 
"it is for our Lord Mahomet that I wish to 
obtain it, that he may therewith summon the 
faithful to prayer." 

"Nay!" said the stranger, seeming to grow 
taller as he spake, "I will teach thee a better 
way than that! Let a crier cry aloud, even 
thus. ..." And in a voice so deep, so won 
derful, so superhumanly sonorous, so super- 
naturally sweet that a great and holy fear 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 85 

came upon the listener, he chanted the Adzdn 
of Islam, even as it is chanted to-day, from 
the western coast of Africa to the eastern boun 
dary of Hindostan: 

"God is Great! 
"God is Great! 

"I bear witness there is no other God but God! 
"I bear witness that Mahomet is the Prophet 
of God! 

"Come unto Prayer! 
"Come unto Salvation! 

"God is Great! 
"There is no other God but God!" 

. . . Awakening with the vibrant melody of 
that marvelous voice still in his ears, the good 
Moslem hastened to the Prophet with the story 
of his dream. Mahomet received him as one 
bearing a revelation from heaven; and, re 
membering the uncommon vocal powers of his 
devoted Bilal, bade the Abyssinian to sound 
the Call to Prayer, even as the words thereof 
had been revealed to the dreamer. It was yet 



86 KARMA 



deep night: ere dawn the First Muezzin had 
learned the duties of his new office, and at the 
earliest blush of day, the slumberers of Medina 
were aroused by the far-echoing and magnifi 
cent voice of the Abyssinian, chanting the 
Adzan from the summit of a lofty dwelling 
hard by the Mosque. . . . Does not the open 
ing chapter in the history of the graceful Min 
aret that architectural feature to which, 
above all others, the picturesqueness of Moslem 
cities is most largely due, rightly begin with 
BilaTs ascent to the starlit housetop in Medina, 
twelve hundred years ago? 

And during all those centuries Islam has 
known no day in which the cry of the Muezzin 
has not gone up to God. Still the chanting 
of the Adzan times the passing of the hours 
for the populations of innumerable cities ;* and 
it is among the Traditions that it shall also 
signal the approach of the last hour, the end of 

* It is rarely indeed that such an irregularity occurs as might 
have been suggested in the beautiful lines of Sadi: 

"The Muezzin has lifted up his voice before the time: he 
knoweth not how much of the night is passed ! . . . Ask thou 
of mine eyes how long the night, for sleep hath not visited 
mine eye-lids even for one brief moment." Gulistan. 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 87 

time, when the last Imam Mahdi, the Anti 
christ of Moslem belief, shall announce his com 
ing by singing the Call in so mighty a voice 
that the sound will roll around the world. 

The summons to prayer has ever been obeyed 
with a scrupulous punctuality that evokes the 
surprise and admiration of travelers; and this 
well known Moslem fidelity to religious duty 
has, more than once in the history of Islam, 
been cruelly taken advantage of. It was at 
Nishapoor, the city beloved of the Perfumer 
of Souls, that Attar by whom Bilal has been 
sung of in "The Language of Birds," that the 
Adzan was perhaps first chanted for a treach 
erous end. During the eighth year of the 
seventh century, the city was utterly destroyed 
by the hordes of Ghengis Kjhan. In their 
role of exterminators the Tartars ever observed 
one practice unparalleled for sinister cruelty 
and cunning. This was, after having with 
drawn from a wasted place, to suddenly return 
thither a few days later, so as to surprise any 
survivors who might have chanced to escape 
the fury of fire and sword, or such as might 



88 KARMA 



have returned to search for valued objects 
among the smouldering ruins. Returning thus 
to Nishapoor the Mongol leader caused the 
Adzan to be sounded; and by this brutal de 
vice it is said that many were lured from their 
secure refuges to slaughter. Well might a 
Persian historian say of those hordes : "Their 
aim was the destruction of the human race and 
the ruin of the world, not the desire of do 
minion or of plunder." 

in 

In the luminous atmosphere of tradition, 
the voice of Bilal vibrates for us like the 
voice of the Stranger in Green Raiment, su- 
perhumanly, paradisaically. After the lapse 
of so many hundred years it were difficult in 
deed to determine the precise character of the 
African s voice, or to particularize the indu 
bitable merits of his chant. But if any ra 
tional inference whatever may be drawn from 
the highly florid evidence of the many tradi 
tions concerning him, we have a right to sup 
pose that BilaTs voice was a baritone of ex- 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 89 

traordinary range and volume, in strong con 
trast to the shrill and effeminate Arabian 
tenor. There is reason to doubt whether any 
of the singers famous in the annals of the pre- 
Islamic age, or "period of Ignorance" 
Djaheliah belonged to that race so effec 
tively characterized by a French traveler as 
un peuple criard. As M. le Docteur Perron 
tells us in that delicious book Les Femmes 
Arabes (published at Algiers in 1858), most 
of them were slaves; and nearly all the slaves 
held by the Arabs before the advent of Ma 
homet were Abyssinians or negroes. It is 
quite probable that those especially celebrated 
female singers, Youmad and Youad, sur- 
named the Djerradah Ad, or Crickets of the 
Adides, and some of whose compositions are 
still extant, were Abyssinian girls. They 
were owned by an Arab of the Beni Ad, Ab- 
dallah, son of Djoudan, concerning whom 
various beautiful traditions have been pre 
served. In almost all periods of Arabian his 
tory, mestizos, black freedmen, or the children 
of African slaves, found occasion to distinguish 



90 KARMA 



themselves as poets, artists or musicians. One 
of those swarthy singers, whom the Arabs 
termed by reason of their color, "The Ravens," 
occupied so high a place that his songs are 
classed with the best productions of the best 
era of Arabian poetry, and one of the immor 
tal mohallakats, or "Suspended Poems," bears 
his name: Antarah. Khoufaf, the warrior- 
poet and cousin of the famous Khaysa (one 
of the greatest female singers of the desert) 
was a quadroon. Chanfare, another Raven, 
a poet of no little merit, singly declared war 
against the whole tribe of the Benou-Abs who 
had killed his father-in-law for no other rea 
son than that he dared to bestow his daugh 
ter s hand upon the son of a slave. Chanfara 
swore to kill a hundred men of the tribe; 
ninety-nine fell beneath his hand, before he 
was hunted down and slaughtered like a wild 
beast; long afterward, one of the Benou- 
Abs, trampling upon the bleaching skull of the 
poet, lacerated his naked foot and died of the 
wound, so that the oath of Chanfara did not 
fail of accomplishment. Mahomet used often 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 91 

to regret that he had not lived in the time of 
Antarah, less, probably, because he admired 
the poetry of the half-breed nomad, than be 
cause he recognized the value to his own cause 
of such a warrior-singer, who could have ral 
lied all the freedmen of the desert about the 
standard of a Prophet who preached equality. 
The spirit of Islam gradually suppressed the 
beautiful poetry of the desert, "warmly- 
colored as the nature of that region, ardent as 
its sands, burning as its sun;" but although 
the Ravens no longer composed mohallakats, 
they continued to sing. No small number of 
the celebrated musicians who flourished dur 
ing the first three centuries of Islam * were 
half-breeds or blacks. Said-ibn-Mousadjih, 
whose goods were confiscated by order of the 
Caliph Abd-el Melik on the ground that by 
the charm of his singing he had excited the 
sons of the aristocracy to ruin themselves in 
giving him presents, was a negro of Mecca, t 

* See Caussin de Perceval: "Notices Anecdotiques sur les 
principaux Musiciens Arabes." 

t Said, however, went to Damascus, obtained an audience 
of the Caliph, and in lieu of pleading his case in words, sang 
one of his best compositions. On hearing him the Caliph re- 



92 KARMA 



Abou Mahdjan Nossayb, son of the negro poet 
Rebah, was honored by many governors and 
caliphs from the day of Abd-el-Melik to the 
time of Hisham; Yezid II one day filled his 
mouth with fine pearls. Abou Abbad Mabed, 
prince of singers in his day, charmed three 
Caliphs in succession. Yezid fainted with de 
light at hearing the negro sing; the succeed 
ing Caliph once made him a gift of 12,000 
pieces of gold ($33,600) : and Walid II, in 
whose palace he died, led the funeral cortege 
accompanied by his royal brother, both at 
tired in robes of mourning. The singer Sal- 
lamah el-Zarka, "the Brunette," who re 
ceived for a single kiss two pearls worth 40,000 
drachmas, was probably a quadroon girl. 
Sallamah, or Sellamat-el-Cass, of Medina, and 
Habbaba, her companion, were pretty half- 
breeds of Medina. The story of Caliph 
Yezid s love for the latter, and his death for 
grief at her loss, is one of the most touching 
narratives in Arabian history. Ample proof 

stored the confiscated property, loaded the singer with gifts, 
and even declared he could excuse those who ruined themselves 
for the pleasure of hearing so mighty a singer. 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 93 

that the voices of black slaves and their method 
of singing possessed a peculiar charm for their 
Moslem masters may be found in the works of 
most celebrated Arabian and even Persian 
authors. Ismail ibn-Djami of Mecca, the 
greatest singer of the golden Age of Islam, 
once paid a negress four dirhems to teach him 
a curious air that he heard her sing while car 
rying a water jar upon her head. Afterward 
he sang the same air for Haroun el-Raschid, 
who declared he had never heard anything so 
original before, and paid the artist 4,000 
pieces of gold ($11,200) as a reward, to 
gether with a house luxuriously furnished, two 
men-servants and two pretty girl-slaves. Sadi 
the Persian poet has related sundry instances 
which show that negro-singers were still highly 
prized at a later day. The following anecdote 
is told in that portion of his Gulistan entitled 
"On the Manners of Dervishes;" and the 
poet relates it as a personal experience: 

. . . "Once, voyaging to Hedjaz, a band of 
sensible youths were my friendly companions. 
Sometimes they murmured to themselves, and 



94 KARMA 



repeated certain mystic verses. And there was 
one with us, a Devotee, who disapproved the 
conduct of Dervishes, having indeed no knowl 
edge of their suffering. Now when we had 
arrived at the Palmtree of the children of 
Helial, a young negro-boy came forth from an 
Arab encampment, and lifted up such a voice 
as might even have called down the birds of 
heaven. And I saw the camel of the Devotee 
become excited; it cast its rider to the ground, 
and took its way to the desert. O Sheikh! I 
cried, the voice of that child hath made im 
pression even upon an animal, and yet hath 
made no impression upon thee. 

It has been a custom among the Arabs, from 
prehistoric times, to encourage camels on the 
march by the chanting of verses ; and Gentius, 
commenting upon this fact in his quaint Latin 
translation of the Gulistan (Amsterdam, 
1654), relates a still more extraordinary anec 
dote : 

. . . "An author of much weight recounts 
that he himself, while traveling in the Arabian 
deserts, was once received at a house whose 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 95 

proprietor had just lost all his camels, and 
that a little negro-slave came to him, and 
prayed him, saying: *O traveler, thou wilt 
not displease my master by interceding with 
him for the pardon of my fault. When they 
were at table, therefore, the traveler said: I 
will not partake of any nourishment until thou 
shalt have pardoned this slave his offense. 
Then the master said: This slave is a rascal; 
he hath lost all my riches and reduced me to 
desperate straits . . . this slave is gifted with 
a most sweet voice ; and having made him con 
ductor of my camels, he so excited them to ex 
ertion by the charm of his singing that in one 
day they made a three days journey; but upon 
being relieved of their loads at the end of the 
voyage, they all died. Nevertheless in consid 
eration of the hospitality I have accorded thee, 
I will remit the punishment which the slave 
deserves. 

Another proof of the high esteem which 
singers proficient in this sort of chanting en 
joyed in the Orient is afforded by an anecdote 
concerning the Caliph Al-Mansour, quoted in 



96 KARMA 



Jalal uddin s history: "Salem, the camel- 
driver, once drove Al-Mansour s camel, sing 
ing to it ; and Al-Mansour was so excited with 
delight that he nearly fell from the animal, 
and he rewarded him with half a dirhem. The 
man said: I drove Hisham; and he rewarded 
me with ten thousand. "... 

It is beyond doubt, therefore, that during 
the pre-Islamic era and for more than a cen 
tury afterward, the musicians of the Arabians 
were chiefly slaves and generally half-breeds 
or blacks;* that these dark slaves often pos 
sessed phenomenal voices, and rose to high dis 
tinction by their skill in musical improvisation. 
We have no just reason to doubt that Bilal 
may have been a really wonderful singer, and 
that the traditions regarding his vocal pre-emi 
nence may have been founded upon fact. It 
remains to be considered whether he really es 
tablished the method of chanting still followed 
by muezzins; and whether he improvised the 
first Adzan music, or simply sang according to 
the teaching of his master Mahomet. 

* See Femmes Arabes, p. 467. 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 97 

First of all, it must be remembered that not 
withstanding their musical sensibility, music 
among the ancient Arabs scarcely rose above 
the grade of vocal improvisation, sometimes 
resembling the modern Corsican voceri, more 
generally being a sort of psalmody, "variegated 
and embroidered" according to the caprice of 
the singer and the effect he desired to pro 
duce, the utterance of each word being ac 
companied with an infinity of vocal flourishes, 
floritures, trills, modulations so that to chant 
a cantilene of only three stanzas sometimes re 
quired as many hours of artistic exertion. This 
tendency survives among Modern Arabs 
"What traveler in Egypt," asks Perron, "has 
not heard these two words sung over and over 
again for half an hour at a time, or even more, 
-Laleily?O my Night?" It is possible, 
nevertheless, that even in the time of Mahomet 
three distinct varieties of melody were recog 
nized by Arabian musicians : 

First, that which was called Straight: a 
solemn or heroic style, suitable either for the 



98 KARMA 



chants of warriors or the songs of cameleers ; 
Second, That which was called Modulated 
or Composite, consisting of very many differ 
ent movements or effects of voice and tones ; 
Third, That which was known as The 
Light or Quick "affecting and stirring hearts, 
moving and troubling even serious minds." 

As a slave, and therefore at times, no doubt, 
a conductor of camels, Bilal may have been ac 
customed to chant in the measure called 
Straight; but as an African it is likely that the 
natural musical feeling of his race may have 
found utterance at other hours in melody of a 
less severe description, such as the Arabs 
would have classed as Modulated. He should 
accordingly have been well able to improvise 
the melody of the Adzdn, nor is it unreasonable 
to suppose that he did. Music heard in dreams 
is much less easily retained in the memory than 
are other incidents of slumber; the reader is 
doubtless familiar with the story of Tartini s 
Trille del Diavolo. It is hard to believe that 
the melody of the Adzdn as chanted by the 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 99 

stranger in Green Raiment could have been 
so perfectly memorized by the dreamer as to be 
communicated to another person. On the 
other hand, it is not at all incredible that Bilal, 
upon being taught the words, sang them in his 
own wild African way, and that Mahomet ap 
proved the melody, just as he is known to 
have approved BilaTs subsequent addition to 
the revealed Adzdn of the words "Prayer is 
better than sleep." Mahomet would have been 
likely to approve any improvisation; for so 
highly did he esteem the Abyssinian that he 
was wont to ask his advice in matters of the 
greatest importance, and that although two 
other muezzins were subsequently appointed, 
they were never permitted to exercise their 
calling when it was possible for Bilal to per 
form that duty. On the whole we have good 
reason to believe that the melody of the Call 
to Prayer was really improvised by Bilal and 
that he chanted it with those singularities of 
modulation and weirdness of feeling still char 
acteristic of African melody. 



100 KARMA 



IV 

During the lifetime of the Prophet, Bilal 
continued to be his constant attendant. Im 
mediately after chanting the Call to Prayer, 
Bilal would always arouse Mahomet with 
a pious ejaculation; and when the congre 
gation had assembled within the Mosque, all 
eyes were fixed upon the African who stood 
in the front row, and whose genuflexions 
and prostrations were studiously imitated 
by the rest. It is still the duty of the muez 
zin to mingle his chant with that of the 
officiating Imam, to whom he occupies such a 
relation as that of the Christian deacon to the 
priest or minister. But as Islam grew in 
power, BilaTs position greatly increased in im 
portance, and far weightier duties were as 
signed to him: in addition to his stewardship 
of Mahomet s household, he held the office of 
treasurer of the Prophet, receiving and keep 
ing in trust all the revenues of the khalifate. 
When Mahomet made his triumphal entry into 
Mecca, it was Bilal who received the keys of 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 101 

the Kabba; and it was Bilal who first chanted 
the Adzdn from the summit of that now world- 
famous temple. It was Bilal who summoned 
Medina to prayer, when the princes came from 
the far-off land of Hadramaut "out of desire 
to embrace Islam." It was Bilal who chanted 
the Adzdn when the cavaliers of Islam camped 
in the desert to prepare for battle with the 
idolaters. Some sinister traditions of his sav 
age zeal after the battles of Bedr and Kheibar 
reveal an unrelenting hatred to the enemies of 
his benefactor; but these passages of his life 
need not be here detailed. It is more pleasant 
to remember that when Mahomet made his last 
pilgrimage to Mecca, the faithful black walked 
at his side to shade him with a rude screen 
from the noonday sun. Perhaps during that 
sultry journey over the glaring sand of the 
Holy Valley, Bilal might have found himself 
treading the very spot where he and his 
fellow-slaves had once been tortured by the 
Koreish. . . . 

But after the death of Mahomet other 
muezzins summoned the faithful of Medina to 



102 KARMA 



prayer. The wonderful voice was hushed; for 
Bilal made known his resolve never to sing the 
Adzdn again. How long after the accession 
of Abu Bekr, Bilal remained in the City of the 
Prophet is uncertain ; but we know that he was 
more highly honored by the faithful than ever 
before, and that he possessed influence enough 
to obtain a freeborn Arab wife for his black 
brother a remarkable condescension upon the 
part of a race whose noblest tribes are still 
distinguished by the surname El H rar, or, 
"The Thoroughbreds." Even after the death 
of Abu Bekr, Bilal seemed to have exercised 
various important functions. When the aus 
terely just Omar resolved to disgrace and su 
persede the "Sword of God," it was Bilal who 
removed Khaled s helmet, and bound the war 
rior s hands before the assembly in the Mosque 
of Hims, exclaiming in his puissant voice: 
"Thus and thus the Commander of the Faith 
ful hath said." . . . But after this episode we 
hear little of Bilal until the visit of Omar to 
Syria. Thither the old man had followed the 
army; and, having been granted land near Da- 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 103 

mascus, had retired altogether from public 
life. 

Most of the Companions were dead; Abu 
Bekr and Khaled had followed their Prophet 
to Paradise, together with a great host of those 
who had fought the first battles of Islam; and 
the new generation was not like unto the old. 
The primitive and praiseworthy simplicity of 
the Bedouin tribes had almost disappeared 
from Arab life; strange Asiatic luxuries 
were being bought and sold in the cities of the 
desert; and the riches of Persia poured into 
Medina like a veritable inundation of gold, 
until Omar lifted up his voice and wept, say 
ing "Verily I foresee that the riches which 
the Lord hath bestowed upon us will become a 
spring of worldliness and envy, and in the end, 
a calamity unto my people!" The faith Bilal 
had suffered for, the faith that had so long 
been unable to extend itself beyond the se 
cluded quarter Abu Talib, had now imposed 
its supreme law upon Arabia, Syria, Palestine, 
Persia; and ere the venerable muezzin should 
for the last time commend his soul to Him 



104 KARMA 

Who never sleeps, the lands of Africa were to 
be added to the conquests of Islam; and the 
Call to Prayer was soon to be obeyed by na 
tions of worshipers, from the confines of In 
dia even to the Atlantic shore. Already horse 
men of the Arabian deserts had appeared be 
fore the gates of Cabul; and a son of Bilal 
might have lived to see the Empire of the 
Prophet s successors extending over the 
greater portion of the earth s temperate zone, 
from east to west two hundred days jour 
ney. How must the fervent faith of the old 
man have been strengthened by the vast spec 
tacle of Moslem power even in the eighteenth 
year of the Hegira ! 

After the death of Mahomet Bilal ceased to 
sing the Adzdn; the voice that had summoned 
the Prophet of God to the house of prayer 
ought not, he piously fancied, to be heard after 
the departure of his master. Yet, in his Syrian 
home, how often must he not have been prayed 
to chant the words as he first chanted them 
from that starlit housetop in the Holy City, 
and how often compelled to deny the petitions 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 105 

of those who revered him as a saint and would 
perhaps have sacrificed all their goods to have 
heard him but once lift up his voice in musical 
prayer! . . . But when Omar visited Damas 
cus the chiefs of the people besought him that, 
as Commander of the Faithful, he should ask 
Bilal to sing the Call in honor of the event; 
and the old man consented to do so for the last 
time. 

The religious enthusiasm of the youth of 
Islam in those early years of the faith almost 
knew no bounds; and the announcement that 
Bilal would sing the Adzdn must have en 
kindled such pious delight, such feverish ex 
altation among the people of that rose-scented 
city as we could find no parallel for in Chris 
tian history save in the period of the Cru 
saders. To hear Bilal must have seemed to 
many as sacred a privilege as to have heard 
the voice of the Prophet himself, the proudest 
episode of a lifetime, the one incident of all 
others to be related in long after-years to chil 
dren and to grandchildren. Some there may 
have been whom the occasion inspired with 



106 KARMA 

feelings no loftier than curiosity ; but the large 
majority of those who thronged to listen in 
silent expectancy for the Allah-hu-akbar, must 
have experienced emotions too deep to be ever 
forgotten. The records of the event, at least, 
fully justify this belief; for when, after mo 
ments of tremulous waiting, the grand voice 
of the aged African rolled out amid the hush, 
with the old beloved words, the old famil 
iar tones still deep and clear, Omar and all 
those about him wept aloud, and tears streamed 
down every warrior-face, and the last long 
notes of the chant were lost in a tempest of 
sobbing. 

What student of musical history would not 
wish to know how Bilal sang that last Adzdn? 
or to hear the words chanted precisely as the 
first Muezzin chanted them? Needless to say 
that wish is absolutely impossible to realize. 
Utterly ignorant of the art of preserving mu 
sic by written characters, the early Arabian 
melodists trusted to memory alone for the con 
servation of favorite airs or methods of can- 
tillation; and we shall never be able to deter- 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 107 

mine whether BilaTs improvisation has or has 
not been wholly lost. Nothing is left us but 
the privilege of a theory. Still, the theory may 
afford some consolation to the musical roman 
ticists. We have some good reason to believe 
that melodies may be preserved by memory 
alone through more than a thousand years; 
there is even some ground for the supposition 
that certain Hebrew melodies have been trans 
mitted unchanged through generations from 
the days of Solomon even to our own. Con 
servatism of religious tradition and practice 
was never less potent among the Arabs than 
among the Hebrews; the melody of the first 
Adzdn might have had as fair a chance of be 
ing preserved as the religious melodies of 
Israel. It is at least barely possible that in 
the modern Adzdn chant, some fragment of 
Bilal s cantillation may be retained, all the 
more so inasmuch as the words of the Call to 
Prayer have not been changed. Egypt, above 
all countries, conquered by the Moslem ar 
mies while Bilal was yet alive, Egypt, the 
Land of Changelessness, might have retained 



108 KARMA 

the traditional memory of the chant as first 
chanted in the second decade of the Hegira, 
by muezzins who had heard Bilal. And it 
would indeed be pleasant to believe that Bilal 
himself sang the Adzdn somewhat as Villoteau 
heard it sung in modern Egypt, with syllables 
of the name of God wrought into arabesques 
of tones and fragments of tones so strangely 
impressive to Occidental ears: 

The singer heard by Villoteau sang more 
artistically, more ornately, than that muezzin 
whose chant has been preserved for us by Lane, 
and may be found in his Account of the Mod 
ern Egyptians. Moreover, as a music-loving 
friend points out to me, the cadences of the sec 
ond part in Lane s version all end on the second 
of the minor scale <J~f"~ instead of the 
tonic tfo * as is natural, thus giving 
an impression of a chant suspended, unfinished. 
One might prefer to believe that Bilal sang 
after the manner of the singer heard by Villo 
teau, with all those Saracenic floritures, those 
fractions of tones that seem so nearly allied to 
the weird melodies of African improvisation, 



THE FIRST MUEZZIN 109 

And still there is a pathetic and beautiful sol 
emnity in the other and simpler chant, whose 
singular cadences seem to hold a pious inti 
mation of the suggestion of the duty of wor 
ship, eternally beginning, yet never terminat 
ing, of the prayer that may indeed be sus 
pended, yet never finished, of the adoration 
that may pause but never end not even 
when the last muezzin shall have uttered the 
last call to prayer, and the last mosque shall 
have closed its gates forever, and the spider 
shall weave her ghostly tapestries unmolested, 
within the deserted sanctuary of the Kaaba. 



CHINA AND THE WESTERN 
WORLD 

A RETROSPECT AND A PROSPECT 



WHILE crossing any of the great 
oceans by steamer, and watching 
the dance of the waves that lift and 
swing the vessel, you sometimes become con 
scious of under movements much larger than 
those of the visible swells, motion of surgings 
too broad to be perceived from deck. Over 
these unseen billowings the ship advances by 
long ascents and descents. If you carefully 
watch the visible waves, you will find that each 
one repeats the same phenomenon upon a very 
small scale. The smooth flanks of every swell 
are being rapidly traversed by currents of little 
waves, or ripples, running up and down. This 
surface-rippling is complicated to such a degree 

that it can be accurately noted only by the 

HO 



CHINA AND THE WESTERN WORLD 111 

help of instantaneous photography. But it is 
so interesting to watch that if you once begin 
to observe it, you will presently forget all 
about the dimension and power of the real 
wave, the huge underswell over which the 
foaming and the rippling play. 

In the study of those great events which are 
the surges of contemporaneous history, that 
which corresponds to the currents and coun 
ter currents on the wave surface is apt to oc 
cupy public attention much more than the 
deeper under motion. All the confusion of 
details and theories furnished by official re 
ports, by local observation and feeling, by the 
enterprise of trained newspaper correspond 
ents, may have special value for some future 
historian; but, like the ripples and the foam 
on the flanks of a wave, it covers from ordi 
nary view that mightier motion which really 
made the event. Surges which break thrones 
or wreck civilizations are seldom considered in 
themselves at the moment of their passing. 
The sociologist may divine; but the average 
reader will overlook the profounder meaning 



112 KARMA 

of the movement, because his attention is oc 
cupied with surface aspects. 

The foreign press-comments upon the war 
between Japan and China have furnished 
many illustrations of this tendency to study 
the ripples of an event. Probably no good 
history of that war no history based upon 
familiarity with complete records, and upon a 
thorough knowledge of the social and political 
conditions of the Far East anterior to 1893 
can be written for at least another fifty 
years. Even the causes of the war have not 
yet been made fully known ; we have only offi 
cial declarations (which leave immense scope 
for imagination) and a host of conflicting 
theories. One theory is that Japan, feeling 
the necessity of opening her territories to for 
eign trade, and fearing that China might take 
advantage of the revision of the treaties to 
flood the country with Chinese emigrants, de 
clared war for the purpose of being able to 
exclude China from the privileges to be ac 
corded to Western nations. Another theory 
is that war was declared because ever since 



CHINA AND THE WESTERN WOULD 113 

1882, when Li-Hung-Chang presented his 
Emperor with a memorial about plans for the 
"invasion of Japan," China had been prepar 
ing for an attack upon her progressive neigh 
bor. A third theory is that Japan declared 
war in order to divert national feeling into less 
dangerous channels than those along which it 
had begun to flow. A fourth is that the dec 
laration of war was designed to strengthen 
the hands of certain statesmen by creating a 
military revival. A fifth is that Japan 
planned the conquest of China merely to dis 
play her own military force. And there have 
been multitudes of other theories, some of 
them astonishingly ingenious and incredible; 
but it is safe to say that no single theory yet 
offered contains the truth. Nevertheless, it 
has been altogether on the strength of such 
theories that Japan s action in declaring war 
has been criticised; and many of the criticisms 
have been characterized by extraordinary in 
justice.* 

Especially those made by a portion of the London press. 
How little the real condition of Japan was known up to the 
time of the war may be inferred from the fact that a leading 



114 KARMA 



Now, the critics of Japanese motives and 
morals have been in the position of persons 
studying only the currents and cross-currents 
upon the surface of a swell. For the ideas of 
statesmen, the diplomacy of ministers, the 
vague rumors suffered to escape from cabinet 
councils, the official utterances, the official cor 
respondence, the preparations, the proclama 
tions, all were but the superficial manifesta 
tions of the fact. The fact itself was that the 
vast tidal wave of Occidental civilization, roll 
ing round the world, had lifted Japan and 
hurled her against China, with the result that 
the Chinese Empire is now a hopeless wreck. 
The deep, irresistible, underlying forces that 
set the war in motion were from the Occident; 
and this unquestionable fact once recognized, 
all criticisms of Japan from the moral stand 
point become absurdly hypocritical. Another 
indubitable fact worth considering is that only 
by doing what no Western power would have 
liked to attempt single-handed has Japan ob- 

English journal declared ten thousand Chinese troops could 
easily conquer Japan because of the absence of national feeling 
in the latter country I 



CHINA AND THE WESTERN WORLD 115 

tained the recognition of her rights and of her 
place among nations. She tore away that 
military scarecrow of Western manufacture 
which China had purchased at so great a cost, 
and exposed the enormous impotence which it 
had so long shielded. 

II 

The spectacle of the power of Japan and 
the helplessness of China startled the West 
ern world like the discovery of a danger. 
It was evident that the Japan of 1894 could 
execute without difficulty the famous menace 
uttered by Hideyoshi in the fourteenth cen 
tury: ff l mil assemble a mighty host, and, 
invading the country of the great Ming, I 
will fill with the hoar frost from my sword, 
the whole sky over the four hundred pro 
vinces." The idea of a China dominated by 
Japan at once presented itself to English 
journalists. It would be quite possible, they 
declared, for Japan to annex China, since the 
subjugation of the country would require lit 
tle more than the overthrow of an effete 



116 KARMA 

dynasty and the suppression of a few feeble 
revolts. Thus China had been conquered by 
a Tartar tribe; she could be subdued much 
more quickly by the perfectly disciplined arm 
ies of Japan. The people would soon submit 
to any rulers able to enforce law and order, 
while not interfering too much in matters of 
ancient custom and belief. Understanding 
the Chinese better than any Aryan conquerors 
could do, the Japanese would be able to make 
China the most formidable of military em 
pires ; and they might even undertake to realize 
the ancient Japanese prediction that the Sun s 
Succession was destined to rule the earth. On 
this subject the St. James Gazette was par 
ticularly eloquent; and a few of its observa 
tions are worth quoting, as showing the fancies 
excited in some English minds by the first 
news of the Japanese triumphs : 

"The Japanese dynasty would make no 
startling changes; China would still be China, 
but it would be Japanned China. An army 
and a navy, an organization by land and sea, 
would grow up under the hand of the Mikado. 






CHINA AND THE WESTERN WORLD 117 

In ten or fifteen years time a Chino-Japanese 
government would have an army of two mil 
lions of men armed with European weapons. 
In twenty-five years the available force might 
be five times as great, and the first couple of 
millions could be mobilized as quickly, let us 
say, as the armies of Russia. If such a power 
chose to start on a career of conquest, what 
could resist? Nothing at present in Asia, not 
even Russia, could stand against it, and it 
might knock at the door of Europe. The 
combined Western powers might resist the 
first shock,- might overcome the first five mil 
lions of Chinese riflemen and Tartar cavalry; 
but behind that would come other five millions, 
army after army, until Europe itself was ex 
hausted and its resources drained. If this 
seems a wild dream, consider what a Japan- 
governed China would be. Think what the 
Chinese are; think of their powers of silent en 
durance under suffering and cruelty; think of 
their frugality ; think of their patient persever 
ance, their slow, dogged persistence, their reck 
lessness of life. Fancy this people ruled by a 



118 KARMA 



nation of born organizers, who, half allied to 
them, would understand their temperament 
and their habits. The Oriental, with his 
power of retaining health under conditions un 
der which no European could live, with his sav 
age daring when roused, with his inborn cun 
ning, lacks only the superior knowledge of 
civilization to be the equal of the European in 
warfare as well as in industry. In England 
we do not realize that in a Japanese dynasty 
such a civilization would exist: we have not 
yet learned to look upon the Mikado as a civ 
ilized monarch, as we look upon the Czar. Yet 
such he is, undoubtedly. And under him the 
dreams of the supremacy of the yellow race 
in Europe, Asia, and even Africa, to which 
Dr. Pearson and others have given expression, 
would be no longer mere nightmares. Instead 
of speculating as to whether England or Ger 
many or Russia is to be the next world s ruler, 
we might have to learn that Japan was on its 
way to that position." 

The reference to Dr. Pearson shows, as we 
shall see hereafter, that his views had not been 



CHINA AND THE WESTERN WORLD 119 

carefully studied by the writer. But the pos 
sibilities suggested by the Gazette may be said 
to have really existed, presupposing non-inter 
ference by Western powers. Interference 
was, of course, inevitable; but the danger 
imagined from Japan reappears in another 
form as a result of the interference. China 
under a Russian domination would be quite as 
dangerous to the Occident as under a Japa 
nese domination. Russia is probably a better 
military organizer than Japan, and would 
scarcely be more scrupulous in the exploita 
tion of Chinese military resources. If the 
Japanese believe that their dynasty will yet 
hold universal sway, not less do Russians be 
lieve that the dominion of their Czar is to 
spread over the whole world. For the West 
ern powers to allow Russia to subjugate 
China would be even more dangerous than to 
suffer Japan to rule it. But while it would 
have been easy to prevent the annexation of 
China by Japan, it will not be easy to prevent 
the same thing from being done by Russia. 
A host of unpleasant political problems have 



120 KARMA 



thus been brought into existence by the late 
war. What is to be done with China, now 
practically at the mercy of Russia? Is her 
vast territory* to be divided among several 
Western powers, as Russia desires? Is her 
empire to be repropped and maintained, like 
that of Turkey, so as to preserve peace? No 
body can answer such questions just now. 
Nothing is even tolerably certain except that 
China must yield to Western pressure, and 
that she will be industrially exploited to the ut 
termost, sooner or later. Meanwhile, she re 
mains a source of peril, the possible cause of 
a tremendous conflict. 

Momentous as all this may seem, the new 
political questions stirred up by the fall of 
China from her position as the greatest of Far- 
Eastern nations are really surface questions. 
The most serious problem created by the late 
war is much broader and deeper. No inter 
national war or any other possible happening 
is likely to prevent the domination of China by 
some form of Occidental civilization ; and when 



CHINA AND THE WESTERN WORLD 121 

this becomes an accomplished fact we shall be 
face to face with the real danger of which Dr. 
Pearson s book was the prediction. All fu 
ture civilization may be affected by such dom 
ination ; and even the fate of the Western races 
may be decided by it. The great. Chinese puz 
zle to come is neither political nor military; it 
cannot be solved either by statecraft or by ar 
mies; it can be decided only by the operation 
of natural laws, among which that of physio 
logical economy will probably be the chief. 
But just as English critics of the late war ig 
nored the real cause of that war, the huge west 
ward surge of forces that compelled it, so do 
they now ignore the fact that the same war has 
set in motion forces of another order which 
may change the whole future history of man 
kind. 

in 

The Far-Eastern question of most impor 
tance was first offered for English socio 
logical consideration in Dr. Pearson s won 
derful volume, National Life and Character, 



122 KARMA 



published about three years ago.* While 
reading a number of criticisms upon it, I 
was struck by the fact that a majority of the 
reviewers had failed to notice the most impor 
tant portions of the argument. The rude shock 
given by the book to the Western pride of 
race, to the English sense of stability in espe 
cial, to that absolute self-confidence which con 
stantly impels us to the extension of territory, 
the creation of new colonies, the development 
of new resources reached by force, without any 
suspicion that all this aggrandizement may 
bring its own penalty, provoked a state of mind 
unfavorable to impartial reflection. The idea 
that the white races and their civilization might 
perish, in competition with a race and a civ 
ilization long regarded as semi-barbarous, 
needed in England some philosophical pa 
tience to examine. Abroad the conditions 
were otherwise. Far-seeing men, who had 
passed the better part of their lives in China, 

*By Macmillan & Co. In the Revue Bleue and other 
French periodicals some phases of the question had been pre 
viously treated by able writers, but in so different a manner 
that the whole of Dr. Pearson s work appears as a totally orig 
inal presentation of the subject. 



CHINA AND THE WESTERN WORLD 123 

found nothing atrocious in Dr. Pearson s book. 
It only expressed, with uncommon vigor and 
breadth of argument, ideas which their own 
long experience in the Far East had slowly 
forced upon them. But of such ideas, it was 
the one that most impressed the Englishman 
in China which least impressed the Englishman 
in London. A partial reason may have been 
that Dr. Pearson s arguments in 1893 ap 
peared to deal with contingencies incalculably 
remote. But what seemed extremely remote 
in 1893 has ceased to seem remote since the 
victories of Japan. The fate of China as an 
empire can scarcely now be called a matter 
of doubt, although the methods by which it is 
to be decided will continue to afford food for 
political speculation. China must pass under 
the domination of Western civilization; and 
this simple fact will create the danger to which 
Dr. Pearson called attention. 

It is true that the author of National Life 
and Character did consider the possibility of 
a military awakening of China ; but he also ex 
pressed his belief that it was the least likely 



124 KARMA 



of events, and could hardly be brought about 
except through the prior conversion of all 
China to the warrior-creed of Islam. Recent 
events have proved the soundness of this be 
lief; for the war exposed a condition of offi 
cial cowardice and corruption worse than had 
ever been imagined, a condition which could 
not fail to paralyze any attempt to rouse the 
race out of lethargy. With the close of the 
campaign the world felt convinced that no 
military regeneration of China was possible 
under the present dynasty. Spasmodic at 
tempts at revolution followed; but some of 
these exhausted themselves in the murder of 
a few foreign missionaries and in foolish at 
tacks upon mission stations, with the usual con 
sequences of Christian retaliation, execu 
tions and big indemnities; and other upris 
ings, even in the Mohammedan districts, have 
failed to accomplish anything beyond local 
disorder., Nothing like a general revolution 
now appears possible. Without it the reign 
ing dynasty cannot be overthrown except by 
foreign power; and under that dynasty there 



CHINA AND THE WESTERN WORLD 125 

is not even the ghost of a chance for military 
reforms. Indeed, it is doubtful if the West 
ern powers would now permit China to make 
herself as strong as she was imagined to be 
only two years ago. In her present state she 
will have to obey those powers. She will have 
to submit to their discipline within her own 
borders, but not to such discipline as would 
enable her to create formidable armies. Never 
theless, it is just that kind of discipline which 
she will have to learn that is most likely to 
make her dangerous. The future danger from 
China will be industrial, and mil begin with 
the time that she passes under Occidental 
domination. 

TV 

For the benefit of those who have not read 
his book, it may be well to reproduce some of 
Dr. Pearson s opinions about this peril, and 
also to say a few words about the delusion, or 
superstition, which opposes them. This de 
lusion is that all weaker peoples are destined to 
make way for the great colonizing white races, 



126 KARMA 



leaving the latter sole masters of the habitable 
world. This flattering belief is without any 
better foundation in fact than the extermina 
tion of some nomadic and some savage peoples 
of a very low order of capacity. Such ex 
tinctions have been comparatively recent, and 
for that reason undue importance may have 
been attached to them. Older history pre 
sents us with facts of a totally different char 
acter, with numerous instances of the subjuga 
tion of the civilized by the savage, and of the 
destruction of a civilization by barbarian force. 
It would also be well to remember that the 
most advanced of existing races is very far 
from being the highest race that has ever ex 
isted. One race, at least, has disappeared 
which was immensely superior, both physically 
and morally, to the English people of to-day.