The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  Il-han stood, his eyes on the floor, and again he waited.

  “You may speak,” the King said in the same kind voice.

  Without raising his eyes, Il-han then spoke. “Majesty, I come as the son of my father, now deceased. I come, as he did, only as a private citizen, but as one responsible, with others, for the people, and therefore ready for service.”

  The King listened and then directed by a gesture of the hand that Il-han was to seat himself on the floor cushion before the throne.

  “Let us forget ceremony,” the King said when the ceremonies were finished. “I trust you because you are your father’s son. He was a wise man. He told me once that the three nations who surround us are like the balls a juggler must keep in the air and in motion, and we must be the juggler. Do you agree?”

  “Majesty, I would even add more such balls,” Il-han replied. “The western nations are eying us across the four seas. How many balls there will be for us to juggle, I cannot tell. But there will be more than three, and some may have to be cast aside.”

  The King uncrossed his legs impatiently and crossed them again. He did not wear his garments of state today, but about his neck was a heavy chain of jade pieces strung on gold. At the end was a jade circle, carved with the emblem of cranes under a pine tree, and with this emblem his right hand was now busy. He had a full underlip, a sign of his passionate nature, and he pinched it now between thumb and finger, in deep thought.

  “Will you accept office?” he asked at last. “Will you be, let us say, prime minister? Chancellor? What you will—”

  Il-han raised his eyes to meet the royal gaze and was startled by the boldness he saw. The King’s eyes were narrow, the corners sharp and the pupils very black under wide short black brows. They were not the eyes of a poet or a thinker but of a man accustomed to act. His hand, fingering the full lower lip, was dark and strong.

  “Majesty,” Il-han said, while he let his eyes fall again to the embroidered cranes and the pine tree on the King’s breast, “forgive me if I decline office. I wait for your command, day and night. I am your subject. But if I am more, I shall not be free to speak, to move, to report, to observe, to ask for audience, to be of use to you, I hope, as your own hand is useful, obedient to your brain and heart.”

  The King laughed. “What you mean is that you prefer not to owe me anything! Well, that is rare enough.”

  He clapped his hands and servants entered.

  “Bring us food and drink,” he commanded.

  While the servants obeyed, he went on, “Now, let us discuss the position of this jewel you call our country. I do not deceive myself as to why Li Hung-chang wishes us to receive an envoy from the United States. It is his weapon against Japan, who threatens war. In such a war we would be their point of departure for China. Tell me, what is the United States?”

  He put the question suddenly to Il-han, who was embarrassed because he did not know the answer.

  “Majesty, I shall have to inquire. I recollect that the sailors shipwrecked on our shores some fifteen years ago were Americans and I have heard that they were very savage. They molested our women, and our people, outraged, put them to death.”

  “Not immediately,” the King reminded him. “The sailors were at first only arrested. Then others came out from ships to rescue them, and these men seized their shipmates from us, and with them certain of our men, as hostages. It was only then that our outraged people attacked the ship, killed eight of the Americans, and captured the others and burned the ship—all of this deserved, I was told.”

  Here the King paused and thought awhile and Il-han was amazed to hear such detail.

  “Perhaps the truth does not matter now,” the King said at last, “but I may as well tell it to you. It was my father who commanded that the ship be attacked. He feared that it brought more Catholic priests to avenge the death of those whom he had ordered beheaded in earlier years. My father believes, has always believed, that western religions disturb the peace wherever they go. This he has observed from such foreign persons in China and in Japan and while he ruled he forbade all foreign priests to set foot on our shores, and if they did so secretly he had them killed. Alas, some of our own people have been beguiled by them, and have themselves become Christian. I will not speak of this.”

  Here he paused, and Il-han knew the King was reminded of that Kim ancestor of Il-han’s who had been killed because he was Catholic.

  “I have followed my father,” the King continued. “While I was very young I refused to see the American, surnamed Low, who arrived in our port with a fleet of ships. But today I do not know …”

  The servants brought the food now and set it on the table and stood by to serve. But the King sent them away again.

  “They stand there like images,” he complained to Il-han when they were gone, “but they are not images. Their eyes see, their ears hear, and their tongues carry tales. Proceed!”

  “Majesty, I am honored that you tell me your thoughts. I am your subject and I ought only to listen and not to speak.”

  “Speak,” the King commanded. “I am surrounded by men who will not speak. Sometimes I think everyone in the palace has cut out his tongue except the Queen. She has no fears! I daresay if Buddha himself were reincarnated here she would tell him how to behave and what to think.”

  The King spoke willfully, aware that this was no fit talk between himself and a subject and he enjoyed it the more for that reason.

  Il-han made a small smile and did not reply. Instead he went on thus:

  “Majesty, your father, the Regent, has done what he believed right in his time. For example, he resisted the Japanese as stoutly as he did all others. I must even say that he seemed at times to devise insults for them, hoping they would leave our shores. They did not leave. I beg you, Majesty, not to follow your father. I beg you to think for yourself, to decide for yourself what must be done to preserve our nation and our people. Of all the western peoples, the Americans seem the least vicious. They are young, they have no experience, and they know what it is to fight for independence for themselves. I have heard that over a hundred years ago they fought the country that ruled them, and won.”

  “What are you saying?” the King demanded.

  “I am saying that we must accept the Americans, as Li Hung-chang advises,” Il-han replied.

  The King clenched his fists and pounded the table so that the dishes jumped. “By a treaty which takes still more from us!” he shouted.

  “By a treaty,” Il-han agreed.

  The two men looked straight into each other’s eyes. It was the King who yielded. He got to his feet. “I can eat nothing,” he declared, and he turned his back on Il-han and strode from the room.

  How then could Il-han eat? He also rose, and putting on his outer garment, he went away. The servants saw him go and came into the empty room. The dishes of delicacies had not even been uncovered, and the servants took them to the kitchens and there with great relish and high laughter they ate the meats prepared for the King.

  In the night, when Il-han returned from the long conference with the King, he told Sunia that he had been offered a high post in government and that he had declined. He did not regret his refusal, yet he wondered if she, perhaps, being more simple than he by nature, or so he imagined, might secretly envy other women whose husbands were publicly known. He had a certain fame as a scholar, a thinker, one who did not fear to do what he liked or refuse to do what he disliked, but was this enough? When she replied, he perceived that he had been wrong, and again he marveled, as he had often before, how it is that a man can live with a woman and have sons by her and still know very little of what she is. For Sunia spoke at once when he finished what he had to tell.

  “You did very well to refuse a post,” she said.

  It was night and they lay on the floor mattresses. A candle burned on the low table at his side. The house was silent and beyond the drawn screens the night was dark. He had talked for a long time, and she had liste
ned.

  “Why do you say so?” he asked now.

  “For one reason,” she said. “You always forget small things. You are a great man, but only in great things. You speak to kings and queens as though you were their brother, but you do not know one servant in this house from another, except your own man. And I wonder sometimes if you would even know your sons, if you saw them in a crowd of children. Now you will have time to know your sons—and me, too, I daresay!”

  She broke off to laugh, and she had ready laughter, but he was surprised at what she had said.

  “You describe a very foolish fellow,” he complained, “and I think I am better than that.”

  She turned on her side then and leaned her head on her elbow and looked down into his rebellious face. “You are only foolish, I say, in small things. If you were clever in small ways you would be foolish in great ones and I am satisfied with what you are. More than that, I know very well that I am a fortunate woman, a lucky wife, a blessed mother.”

  “Now, now,” he said, laughing in turn. “You blame yourself too much. A woman gets what she deserves.”

  This banter went into sudden passion between them, he aroused by the sight of the lovely face so near, her eyes lustrous and dark in the candlelight. In this way he knew her very well, for when she was ready a peculiar fragrance came from her body. He had learned, but not easily, that while without this fragrance she could submit, it was without response, and then he was robbed of half his joy. While he was a bridegroom, a husband too young, he had not been able to restrain his passion, or suit its timing to hers, even though he cursed himself because, if he did not, they were further apart afterward. But with the fullness of manhood he learned, and he was rewarded. Better to have her whole, at her own time, than resisting when she was not.

  Now her fragrance came sweet and strong, and he held her long and close. When they drew apart, they were closer than ever before, and they lay in peace and silence, she thinking while he fell asleep.

  He woke after an hour or so and was thirsty and she poured a bowl of tea and then came out with what she had been thinking.

  “While we are in mourning, you can do nothing outside, and you must promise me to learn the difference between our two sons. I feel each is different from the other, each not ordinary, but I have not the wit to know what the difference is. This is the first thing I have to say.”

  He drank the tea and held his bowl for more.

  “Then there is a second? And a third, doubtless! When a man has a little time to be idle, be sure his wife will fill it for him.”

  She pretended to snatch the bowl away from him.

  “Dare to think I am like other wives!”

  “Fortunately you are not.” He was suddenly wide awake, relaxed, amused, and wondering whether, if he indulged her, her fragrance would flow again. She had changed her garments, he could see, and the odor was that of clean freshness.

  “You are to stop thinking your own private thoughts,” she retorted. “You are to listen to me, if you please! Il-han, I say you should know some of these Americans before you advise the King again. You are in a high, responsible place. You advise rulers. Yet how do you know if Americans are good or evil? What if you lead the King into wrongdoing and our people suffer because you know too little of what you are talking about?”

  This was the surprising woman. While he could have sworn she had no concern for anything beyond her household, she came forward with this simple wise conclusion. Unpleasant though it was to consider consorting with foreigners, what she had said was true. Chinese he knew, and Japanese, and a few Russians, but he knew almost no Americans.

  All inclination for renewed lovemaking ebbed out of him.

  “Go to sleep,” he told Sunia. “You have said enough to keep me awake the rest of the night and for many nights to come.” And he pinched out the flame of the candle between his thumb and forefinger.

  In these days of mourning for the one dead, Il-han devoted himself to the living. Each morning he sat near while the tutor taught his elder son and he was pleased by the boy’s quickness where he was interested and then displeased because where he had no interest he idled. Nevertheless he did not interfere and as the days passed he saw that the tutor understood the child well, and when the child looked away from his books he did not reproach him. Instead he bade the boy run in the garden or he gave him a brush and colored inks and let him paint a picture.

  “In a picture,” he told Il-han privately, “I discover the child’s hidden thoughts and feelings.”

  “What does he paint?” Il-han asked.

  The tutor was troubled. “He paints violence,” he said at last. “In this gentle and noble household your son paints a cat with a bird in its teeth, or a devil peering out from the bamboos, or a hawk with a mouse bleeding in its claws.”

  Il-han heard this with surprise. “No one has ever treated this child harshly. Why should he have such thoughts?”

  “I surmise that it comes from the times in which we live,” the tutor replied. “He hears of robbers in the city and of bandits in the mountains and he has asked me many times why the Queen was all but murdered, and he is aware of the quarrels among the noble clans. When he is in the country at your honored father’s house, as he has always wished to be in the summer, he makes friends with the sons of the farmers who till your lands, sir, and they are wild children. I try to keep him away from them, but he escapes me and I find him there in the village, his good clothes torn and dusty, and his face and hands as black as theirs. He is often rude to me then, and he uses coarse language that he has heard them use. Indeed, he has told me more than once that he wishes he were the son of a peasant, so that he could be free to run the streets and do what he likes.”

  This was grave news, and Il-han was pricked by his conscience. While he had been concerned with the Queen and the King, his son had found companionship among the ignorant and the poor. That very day, when the morning’s lessons were over and the noon meal eaten, he took his elder son by the hand and led him toward the bamboo grove.

  “Let us see whether the young shoots are ready to break through again,” he coaxed.

  The season was too early, he feared, but no, when they came into the shadows of the grove, the bamboos so thick together that the sunlight fell through in drops of light, they saw the earth was loosened by the uprising shoots. Here and there a pointed sheath of palest green, feathered at the tips, showed above the earth.

  “Do you remember,” Il-han asked his son, “how once you broke the shoots and killed the trees?”

  “You said they were only reeds—not trees.” The boy spoke willfully, but Il-han could see that he did remember. Still holding the boy’s hand he explained what he had said before.

  “You were too small to understand what I told you. Although they were only hollow reeds they were living, and they spring anew from old roots. I said that in our country the bamboo shoot is the symbol of the strong uprising spirit of a man. Perhaps the man is a great poet, or an artist, or perhaps he is a leader among the people, even a revolutionist. It is easy to crush these bamboo shoots. You could do it even when you were very small. It is easy to destroy but hard to create. Remember that, when you want to destroy something.”

  The boy was struggling to pull away his hand, but Il-han would not let him go until he had finished what he wanted to say. Now he loosed him and the boy, as soon as he felt himself free, ran swiftly away. Il-han looked after the flying slender figure, and was deeply troubled. From then on he kept watch of this son, and when he saw him push his younger brother, or tear down what the younger son had built of stones or small blocks of wood, he took the elder firmly by the hands and held his hands behind his back and reminded him again and again. “It is easy to destroy, but it is hard to create. Do not destroy what your brother creates.”

  Sunia observed this one day. “It is not enough merely not to destroy,” she said. “Why not help him to create something himself?”

  Again she had sa
id something to stir his mind, and Il-han thought of his ancestor Chong-ho, surnamed Kim, who was the first mapmaker. This ancestor, as a boy in the province of Kuang Hwang-hai, had been restless, too. He had wandered over mountains and beside rivers, and he began to wonder where the rivers had their sources, and how the mountains lay, and what the shape was of the winding coastlines, and how many islands were beyond.

  Il-han told his elder son one day of the mapmaker. “This ancestor of ours asked everyone where he could find a map of our country which would tell him all these things. There was no such map. He promised himself then that he would be a mapmaker when he grew up, and he studied every map he could find, traveling here and there to see whether the maps were true. They were not true. Mountains and rivers were in confusion and the shorelines were straight where they should be curved into bays and coves, and the sources of the rivers were only imagined. When he was a man he came here to Seoul and asked the rulers to help him, but no one cared for maps or knew their usefulness. He was discouraged but he did not give up. He traveled everywhere again, measuring and drawing pictures and writing down what he found, until he had made the first complete map of Korea. Then it had to be printed. Still no one helped him and he worked and saved and bought blocks of wood and carved the shape of the map upon them. He inked these blocks and stamped them on paper and there was the map! Alas, the King in those times only thought that our ancestor was helping some enemy, and he had the maps burned with the blocks of wood. But our ancestor had memorized the map, and then the King decided that he should be killed.

  The boy listened to this, and his face turned pale. “How did they kill him?”

  “Does it matter?” Il-han replied.

  “I want to know,” the boy insisted.

  “They cut off his head,” Il-han said shortly.

  The boy thought for a moment. Then he said in a cool voice, as though without interest, “There must have been much blood.”

  “Doubtless,” Il-han answered, “but that is not important. I tell the story because I want you to know of our ancestor, and how brave he was to create something so good and useful as a map, and how foolish it was to destroy him. Even the King was ignorant.”