“No,” I said. “I’ve come to hear about your ghosts. I’m interested in them.”
“There are plenty of them here,” he murmured; “the house is full of them. Sit down!”
I obeyed, and the Russian Jew went back to his spiders and left me alone with the Chinaman.
It was a dirty, sordid, ill-ventilated place, reeking with a dozen different odours, and suggestive of vermin ad libitum, and diseases of an Oriental origin and unspeakable nature. A curtain was drawn across one end of the room, and noticing that my eyes wandered off in that direction, King Ho got up and pulled aside the drapery. Two wooden berths, one above the other, were discovered; the top one was empty, and the lower occupied by a corpse-like Chinaman, who was lying on his side, facing us, with absolutely no expression in his eyes or mouth. He might have been dead the best part of a week.
“He’s away in the rice fields of his native home,” King Ho said, “talking to his wife and playing with his children. He goes there every night at this time”—and he glanced at the big, round, wooden clock hanging on the wall.
“You mean he is dreaming,” I said.
“No, I don’t,” King Ho retorted. “I mean he’s there—his spirit, his intelligence is there. That thing you are looking at is only his material body. He, and I, and others we know, don’t set much value on that, we can get out of it so easily. It’s the immaterial self we esteem.”
Then, seeing I was interested, he resumed his chair, and stretching out his long, thin, yellow hand, he touched me on the arm.
“Listen,” he said, “we, Chinamen, who come from the fields and mountains, and grow up in close touch with Nature, can concentrate. From our infancy upwards we think deeply. We think of the sky, the stars, the sun, the moon, the mighty Hoang Ho River and the vast range of the Pelings. We think of them in a sense quite different from the sense in which you Londoners would think of them. You would regard them as so many objects only—sky and land-marks. We think of them as spirits that can act as magnets to our spirits—as intelligences akin to ourselves, that can, when once we become thoroughly acquainted with them, draw us to them. The Pelings live just as much as you and I live—you might pull down their body, that great, elevated frame you style the mountains, just as you might overturn that bench; but the real, the spiritual Pelings would still remain. When once you grasp the idea that all Nature lives—that everything, even to the chairs and tables, have immaterial representatives, then you will begin to understand the principle of the concentration we practise. You must see the Pelings, the Hoang-Ho, the rice fields, not as they would appear to the man in the street here, here in London, Piccadilly, but as we, who live near them and know them, see them—as figures that can see and hear, figures with intelligence, expression—intense expression in their eyes. When you see them like that, you will get to love them, and, when you love them, you will unconsciously concentrate on them, as you do on all things that you love. Your love will not be in vain, it will be reciprocated, and the love that reciprocates yours will, as a magnet, draw you—you—your immaterial ego—your true self—towards it. Now you begin to understand, I can tell by your face. The Chinaman—the Chinaman of the plains and hills—like myself, thinks—he knows Nature, and when he leaves China and comes over here, he concentrates until he hears the voice of that Nature calling to him; and when he hears it, his spirit is gently freed from his material body, and borne silently and instantaneously to his home.
“Now, he can think best when he can get some at least of the conditions of his native surroundings—and the most important of them is silence. Not silence such as you may understand it, but the silence of the conscious, inanimate hills, and rivers, and plains—and the only way to procure it is through opium—the opium I supply. Hence he comes here, takes it, and lies over yonder, and thinks, till he hears the call and his spirit is released.”