The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  “No, Majesty,” Sunia said.

  The Queen put her palms to her cheeks in distraction. “I wish he did,” she murmured. “I wish I had not to bear all these changes alone.”

  Sunia took courage. “Does not the King …”

  “Oh, say nothing of the King,” the Queen said impatiently, and let her hands fall. “When do we meet, he and I? If I am summoned you may be sure it is not for communication.”

  She looked for a long moment at Sunia. “Do you know,” she said, “I lived for many days in the poor grass-roofed house of a poet. He and his wife, the two of them, lived there with me and they hid me. But I saw how they lived. They were friends, he and she. When I was in the small secret room where I was hid, I could hear them talking together and laughing. Such small things they talked about, as where the gray cat had hidden her kittens, or whether a certain wild bird had returned from beyond the southern seas, and whether the next day they could buy a bit of meat for dinner. And then he read her the poem he had written that day and she listened and said it was the most beautiful poem he had yet written. And at night they lay down to sleep together in the same bed—”

  She turned her head away, she pressed Sunia’s hand between both hers. “And why I tell you all this, I do not know. It is very silly. Return to your children’s father. Tell him not to hasten himself. I will wait patiently until his filial duties are finished. Tell him I will make no move meanwhile.”

  She rose, smiled at Sunia, released the hand she held. Then her two women came to her, and leaning upon their arms again she left the audience room.

  “Well?” Il-han asked when Sunia returned.

  He was in the garden with his two sons, although until a short while ago he had been in the room of the dead where his father lay. He had examined the handiwork of the priest and then he had seated himself alone for some time with his father. According to custom, when a meal was served to the household, food must also be brought here to the dead, and only when the head servant came in with the bowls on a tray had Il-han left his father to go in search of his sons. They were still in the garden with tutor and nurse, and they had made friends with the monkey, laughing over his antics and feeding him with peanuts the nurse shelled as fast as she could.

  Il-han had only finished saying to the tutor that the time had come when the younger son should also be under his care, to which the tutor had replied that he felt the younger should be under the care of another than himself.

  “This elder son,” he was saying, “is of such a nature, so brilliant and so strong, that he takes my whole strength. Your younger son, sir, is different, and I fear that I am not able to teach and nurture two such different—”

  At this moment Sunia had come to the door of the house and Il-han left the tutor’s words hanging and went to her at once. They entered the house together and he drew the wall screens shut as he spoke.

  “Well,” she replied, “I have seen the Queen.”

  “But did you give her my message?”

  “Of course I did,” she replied, “and she tells you not to make haste, but to fulfill your filial duties and she will wait patiently until your return.”

  “Is that all?”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. What should she say? It was not all. She could say that the Queen was even more beautiful than she had remembered, she could say that the Queen behaved to her as though they were sisters, she could say—she could say nothing.

  “That is all,” she said. Now she paused to look at him between half-closed lids.

  “Why do you look at me like that?” he demanded.

  She smiled. “How am I looking?”

  “As if you were not telling me something,” he said bluntly.

  When she only went on smiling, he turned away from her impatiently. “It is impossible for women to stop pretending or imagining or something or other. You delight in puzzling me!”

  And with that he strode out of the room.

  On the day before his father’s burial he went to the site of the grave, since it was his duty to be present while the grave was marked and dug. The site was outside the city wall, for it was against the law for any to be buried inside the city wall of the capital. The day was warm with spring, indeed a day for life and not for death. He rode his horse ahead of his servant, who sat on a smaller horse behind him. The cherry trees were coming into blossom, their soft white and pink a mass of delicate color against the gray of the mountain rock. People were stirring from their houses, the children running about with bare arms slipped out of their padded winter garments. Old men sat in the sun smoking their pipes, and old women crouched close to the earth, searching for the early green weeds to cook with bits of flesh or fowl and to eat with the day’s rice.

  The city’s most skilled geomancer had chosen the site for the grave and was waiting for him. Il-han rode across the valley and halfway up a low hill, and there in a sheltered cove open to the sun, he found the man already marking the grave. With him were the gravediggers. Il-han dismounted and after suitable greeting he examined every view and aspect and then gave permission for the grave to be dug. While this solemn work was in process, he stood looking out over the city, a great city, a vast huddle of the houses of the poor, the palaces of the royal family and the noble clans, these set in parks of pine and blossoming cherry. Here in the capital were the extremes of his country and his people. How long could such division continue, while outer peoples threatened? How could he compel his people to realize their folly? Only the closest union inside the country could fend off foreign attack. His troubled mind searched again for answers to the question, eternal and dangerous, and he reviewed the dangers. He heaved a sigh as deep as his soul and was glad that his father was dead. Yet of what use was death? His two sons were alive and must meet the future he dreaded, and how could he help them except by somehow preserving for them their country, whole and independent? “Sir,” the geomancer said. “Will you approve?” He turned and walked toward the grave and looked into it. The earth was scanty, and rocks had been heaved out of it to make the pit and piled until the grave was rimmed with such rocks. To one side were the two gravestones upon which were already carved the high qualities of his father as poet and patriot, one to be buried at the foot of the grave and the other to be set up for the eternal future.

  “You have done well,” Il-han told the geomancer.

  There remained now only to wait for the mourners who were to bring food offerings to the spirit of the mountain, who was now to receive the body of his father, and Il-han waited until he saw the procession coming on foot from among the rocks. The bowls of food were then set forth in proper arrangement and the rites were concluded. There remained but one more duty, and it was to declare to his dead father that the grave was ready for his body, which he did as soon as he returned to his father’s house. In the presence of his father’s dead body he made declaration.

  On the morning of the seventh day, his servant reported to Il-han that the shelters had been built near the grave, the funeral bier was made, and this because the family was too high to use a rented bier, the banners were complete, and all was ready for the funeral. To this Il-han made no answer except to incline his head in acknowledgment. He had kept himself apart from his family during these days, and alone he had returned to the library of his father’s house, dressed every day in mourning and eating only a little coarse food, while he studied the Buddhist scriptures and the Confucian classics in order that his soul and mind might be purified. He had so continued thus throughout the days until the hour came for the funeral procession to assemble.

  In the late afternoon of this seventh day all gathered together in readiness to proceed to the mountain. Twilight was near, the suitable time between day and night when his father’s spirit would not be disturbed. In his place as the son and master of mourning, Il-han viewed the procession as it formed. He was content with what had been done. The procession then set forth. At its head were the torchmen, who held great torches made o
f brushwood branches bound together. These were lighted and were dragged along the ground, firing as they went a trail of lively sparks. Now and again the men lifted the torches and whirled them in flames about their heads and then dropped them again to the earth. Next came the lantern bearers in two lines, carrying lanterns of ironwork covered with the best silk in red and blue colors, and after those came a banner bearer on foot, carrying in both hands a banner of silk on which was written the name of the illustrious dead and the many honors he had accumulated in his lifetime.

  In the center of the procession was the shrine, carried by bearers, and in the shrine, which was made of the finest wood, carved in detail, was set the spirit tablet. On both sides and following the shrine were the women mourners, and after them other lantern bearers whose duty it was to illuminate the catafalque itself, borne by a host of bearers chanting a mournful tune to keep their feet in step. Since the dead had been a man of honor and wealth, a bell ringer walked in front, ringing his bell as he went, and around the catafalque on all sides were banner bearers carrying the banners sent by those who wished to honor the dead. Behind the catafalque Il-han rode in a sedan chair carried by bearers, and behind him in other chairs were Sunia and his sons and the lesser relatives and mourners.

  Slowly the long procession went its way through the streets, the people stopping to stare and to follow, and thus they approached the Water Mouth Gate, which was the gate for the dead. The first darkness had fallen when at last they reached the mountain and there they stopped for the night in the shelters that had been raised for this purpose. They slept in rude beds, but Il-han could not sleep. He lay down and got up again, many times, and at last he walked outside in the cold night air. The moon shone so clear that the whole world seemed to lie before him, as still in sleep as the dead.

  Though it is in the course of nature that a son live longer than his father, yet a deep and solemn mood fell upon him as he realized that from now on, until he himself lay dead, he was responsible to his generation for the conduct of affairs inside his house and beyond its walls to the nation and even beyond to the world. An age had ended with his father, an age when his nation had chosen to be hermit, seeking only to hide itself from the surrounding nations and so to live in peace. Yet there could be no peace now, when foreign ships were sailing toward them across foreign seas, and quarrel rising between a new and young Japan and an old and dying dynasty in China. And what of the giant toward the north? He turned himself to the north, and there above the sharp and pointed peak of the mountain, above that solid rock, he saw the northern star, at this moment as red as blood.

  In the morning, Il-han roused the procession and they went on and upward to the site. All was ready there, and with due ceremony the coffin was placed upon transverse poles and covered with a wide length of white cloth, while the geomancer stood near, a compass in his hand to make sure the position was exact. Had there been more sons, these sons would have lowered the coffin, but since there was only Il-han, others helped him at the task. The empty grave, cleansed of all evil vapors and plaguing spirits, now received its owner, while incense burned and women faced the east and the mourners wailed their formal wails of sorrow. Now Il-han, with the help of the men, slowly filled the grave with earth. Deeply as he had felt his father’s death, this was the moment of most acute sorrow. The clods fell upon the coffin with sad dull thuds and he heard his sons scream in fear. Yet he did not turn his head nor speak to comfort them until the task was done.

  Then he stood on the first terrace below the grave, and facing it in his clear strong voice he announced to the spirit of the mountain that the dead was now buried in its rock and soil. For a moment he stood, carving into his memory the scene he surveyed. His father’s grave lay on the warm southern slope of the mountain, on a leveled place, the dug earth raised about it in a bank so that the grave itself lay in the hollow of a crescent. Here at its foot the earth was terraced down to the slope of the mountain and here he stood, saying in his heart the long farewell to his father. There remained but one more task and it was to appoint a caretaker for the grave. For this he summoned the chief steward, who accepted the charge with a deep bow and folded hands.

  Thus the day ended and with his family and his retinue Il-han returned to his own house.

  When the days of this mourning were over, Il-han asked audience of the King and not the Queen. During the long quiet hours of isolation which respect for his father demanded, he had considered carefully his duty. Without the title or high office desired neither by his father nor himself, independent as they had always been in wealth and family, he could refuse the obligations of position, and yet he had the right to approach the rulers when he had advice to give. So long as his father lived, he had not presumed to approach the King and he maintained his access to the Queen. Now, however, he had by death come into his father’s place, and it was fitting that he should first approach the King.

  He made known his wish by courier, and the King set an appointed time for private audience. It was at dawn on the seventh day of the seventh month of that moon year. The season was summer. At the set hour Il-han entered his palanquin and was borne to the palace, his servant riding on horse before him to announce his arrival at the gates.

  King Kojong, the twenty-sixth monarch of the dynasty of Yi, was still in the prime of his manhood. His mother, Queen Cho, and his father, the Regent, Tae-wen-gun, were early separated in spirit and mind and fact, and he had grown up in the vacuum which existed between them. Each was strong, his father with a male aggressive will and his mother with a deep feminine immobility. He had been played upon by both and had therefore grown slowly to maturity. There were times when he still struggled against these conflicting influences, to which had been added a third, his marriage to a beautiful girl of the powerful house of Min.

  His secret taste in women was for small soft yielding childlike females. Instead he was tied to a strong willful woman who seemed never to have been a child. Yet she fascinated him, that part of him which was still boy, the boy whom he tried so constantly to ignore, to destroy, to eliminate from himself, and who he yet feared was his essential being. There was no one to whom he could talk about himself. For while there were the conflicts in him, these secret influences dividing him and distracting him, he understood very well that he was at the mercy also of the conflicts outside him.

  He was not an ignorant king. As a child he had been schooled in Confucianism and Buddhism, and in the history of his country. Of the West he knew little, for his father, the Regent, had but one purpose, which was to close the country and make it a hermit nation. Alas, he, the son and present King, knew that this was no longer possible. Incredible as it seemed, the persistent weapon of the West had been religion, a religion based, his father had taught him, upon superstition first proclaimed by a small local group of persons who called themselves Jews, who had killed a revolutionary among their own people, one named Jesus. The human race was always in turmoil from these revolutionaries, his father had maintained, and the Koreans had no need of importing foreign ones when they had plenty of their own. With this excuse, his father had approved the murder of all foreign priests who continued to penetrate into the country, in spite of doom. Now his father, the Regent, was imprisoned in China, and he, the King, could decide for himself what must be done. Certainly he must come to some understanding with his Queen, for she remained steadfastly loyal to China, refusing to realize that Japan was in the ascendency. They had quarreled over this matter only the night before. He had sent for her, an unusual circumstance, for they had long remained apart. Yet when she returned from her flight she had, he thought, changed for the better. She had come before him formally upon her arrival, and he found her gentler than she had been since their son was found to be of weak mind. She was still beautiful, and he thought he could detect in her manner some slight wish, or longing, or perhaps only the inclination of desire in a woman who knows her youth is nearly gone. Therefore he had invited her to dine with him alone last n
ight, with the thought that if her charm held, they might renew something of the past and she might conceive a son while there was yet time. He had subdued her more than once in the years when their passion had been strong, and it amazed him that something of that past still lived.

  The evening had nevertheless been spoiled. They had fallen into the old argument, and had parted early with formal bows and with mutual impatience, and after she was gone he had sent for a palace lady of pleasure.

  Now, the morning after, he heard the announcement that the son of his old friend and recently dead adviser waited for audience, and was ready to step into his father’s place. He knew Kim Il-han to be an adviser to the Queen, and he did not hurry himself. Let the man wait! It was fully two hours before he sent his chief chamberlain to the Hall of Waiting to say audience was granted. The delay would calm his subject’s possible arrogance, he told himself, and then, to mitigate or merely to confuse, he would himself be informal and friendly upon meeting.

  At high noon he strode into the audience hall and seated himself upon the throne, which here was scarcely more than an ornate chair, set low to the floor so that he could draw up his feet in the Japanese fashion. Instead, he sat down and crossed his knees in the western fashion. He had never seen a white man, but he was told that they sat on seats and let their legs hang or crossed their knees and he knew that subjects observed every detail of a monarch’s behavior, anxious to catch any straw in any wind.

  Il-han entered now and knelt before the King. He placed his hands together flat on the polished floor, thumb to thumb. Then he bent his head until his forehead touched his hands and waited.

  “You may stand,” the King said pleasantly.