The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea
Page 20
“In Buddha’s name,” the Queen cried, “why are you here?”
“Majesty,” Il-han gasped, and threw himself before them, “I came to see if you were hurt.”
“Your wife was here first,” the Queen said, “and I sent her home again under guard. If I am to die, I die alone.”
“You will not die alone,” the King said.
Before he could speak another word, the doors burst open and the Chinese soldiers swarmed in, carrying foreign guns and short Chinese swords. At the sight of them in such number, Japanese soldiers fled, leaping through windows and crashing through doors. Hundreds of Chinese followed them as they struggled to get to the Japanese warship that was in the harbor, but the Chinese cut them down until few indeed reached the safety of their ship. Then in fury the Chinese fell upon the wives and children of all Japanese in the city and cut them to pieces, too, and threw the parts into the water surrounding the ship.
So violent was the battle that even the British left their quarters and ran to the Americans for safety, and in that whole city only the American flag still waved in the wintry wind. Inside the Embassy the Americans took counsel, for they believed that they too would be attacked in the senseless frenzy of the mob, and they planned that if the mob broke through the gates and tore down the flag, only the lady Foote could save them. She alone was well loved by the people, for all knew how she had persuaded the Queen not to kill the families of those who had rebelled against her, and how she had done this by reminding the Queen of her own gods. If the mob broke in, therefore, it was planned that the lady Foote would sit in a chair in the middle of an empty room with all the valuable documents beside her, and she would ask the people to spare her and for her sake all her fellow citizens. This Il-han did not know until afterwards, when George Foulk told him. For in the end the mob did not enter the American Embassy, and the flag continued to wave above its walls.
While this was going on Il-han remained with the King and the Queen, for by now they were surrounded by the Chinese, and Il-han stayed with them until the city was quiet. When the Queen rose to return to her own palace he knelt before her and said nothing until she spoke.
“Lift your head,” she commanded, and he lifted his head.
“Get to your feet,” she said, and he rose to his feet.
She gave him a long steady look.
“There will be another time,” she said. “Watch for it—and come earlier to save me.”
“Yes, Majesty,” he said.
He waited until she was gone, and then he turned to the King, preparing once more to kneel but the King stopped him with lifted hand.
“Here is sorrow,” he said, “when a kingdom comes between a man and his wife.”
He dropped his hand then and bowed his head, and Il-han knew himself dismissed.
When Il-han reached his own gate, it was barred as though for siege. He beat upon the gate and he waited but there was no answer.
“Beat again with me,” he commanded his servant.
They beat four-handed, raising such clatter that doors opened along the street and neighbors put out their heads. When they saw what was going on, they shut their doors again in haste.
In such times every small sign was of significance, and Il-han felt his heart grow cold with fear. Had some vengeance been wreaked upon his family by unknown enemies? Enemies he knew he had for he had been friend first to the Queen and then to the King, and in his double duty doubtless he had made enemies on both sides. He was casting about in his mind to know what he could do, when suddenly the gate opened a crack and the gateman looked out. When he saw who was there he beckoned to Il-han to come in, but he held the door so that only he and the servant could enter and then he barred the gate again.
“What is this?” Il-han asked.
He looked about as he spoke. Silence was everywhere. The usual bustle of servants, the shouts and laughter of his children, and Sunia’s voice of welcome, all were gone.
“Master,” the gateman whispered. “We had warning just before sunset that this house would be attacked in the night.”
“Warning?” Il-han exclaimed. “How did it come?”
“The tutor told our mistress,” the man replied. “He was away all day, after you left, and he came in at noon and he told.”
“But why?”
The man shook his head. “I know nothing. Only my mistress bade us make all haste to leave and under her command we put clothing and food into boxes and baskets and as soon as darkness fell all went to the country except me. She bade me stay here until you came and to saddle your horse ready. I have saddled the two horses for I am to go with you.”
Il-han was astounded and somewhat vexed. “How can I leave the city at this time? All is in confusion and I do not know at what moment I shall be sent for at court.”
The servant interrupted. “Master, these questions can be answered when you are with our mistress again. Now we must leave, for who knows what lies ahead? You could be seized at any moment. You must retire now to your grass roof, otherwise you will lose your life, and if the Queen is angry with you, your family, too, will die. Who knows whether she will listen a second time to the American woman?”
When Il-han still hesitated, the servant began to weep silently but Il-han would not allow such pleading.
“Do not distract me with tears,” he said sternly. “I have more to consider at this moment than my own life or even the lives of my sons.”
Upon this the servant sobbed aloud. “And can you serve if you are dead? Your father stood here even as you do. I was only a boy but I stood beside him. But he was wise—he chose to retire to his grass roof and live and protest, rather than to let his voice be silenced in death.”
“My father?” Il-han exclaimed.
“Go to his house,” the servant said. “Search his books and you will find what he was. You never knew him.”
Why this moved Il-han he himself did not know, but he bowed his head in assent and the man went to the stables and led out the two horses, saddled and ready. Il-han held in his restless horse until he heard the gate of his house barred behind him and then he galloped into the night.
It was soon after midnight when he drew rein before the wooden gate set into the earthen wall which surrounded the farmhouse where his father had lived for so many years, alone except for his few old servants some of whom still lived here and would until they died. The ancient gateman sat outside on the stone step, staring into the darkness and huddled in his padded jacket. The night wind blew chill and the moon was dark when Il-han came down from his horse and the old man wakened and lit his paper lantern and held it up.
“It is your master,” Il-han’s manservant told him.
“We are waiting for you,” the old man said, coughing in the night wind.
With this he opened the gate, and Il-han strode into the courtyard. The sound of the horses’ feet told Sunia that Il-han had come and she opened the door of the house and he saw her there, her head lifted, the candles burning in the room behind her. He entered and closed the door.
“I thought you would never come,” she said.
“The road was endless,” he replied. “Tell me what happened.”
Before she could reply they heard a knock on the inner door, and she called entrance and the tutor came in.
For the first time Il-han saw this man was no longer young.
He came in, not shy or hesitating, and he looked Il-han full in the face.
“Sir,” he said, “shall I speak now or shall I wait until you are bathed and have eaten and rested?”
“How can I rest or bathe or eat when I know nothing of what has happened?” Il-han replied.
“Can anyone hear us?” Sunia asked, her voice low.
“I have my men on guard,” the tutor said.
“Your men!” Il-han exclaimed. “Who are you?”
The tutor motioned to Il-han to be seated, and Il-han sat down on the floor cushion at the table in the center of the room. He was sud
denly very weary, and he braced himself for whatever news he must hear. When he sat, Sunia sat also, and he gestured to the tutor to be seated. Had he been only the tutor he would not have dared to seat himself, but now he did and face to face with Il-han who had been his master, the tutor spoke.
“I do not know whether you have heard that a new revolution is growing everywhere like fire in the wild grass. Yet it is so. The landfolk are ready to rise up in every village and on every field. They can no longer suffer what they are suffering nor will they any more pay with their life and their strength for what is being forced upon them.”
A dark foreboding fell upon Il-han. “I suppose you mean the Tonghak.”
“Only a name for being in despair, sir,” the tutor said. “I must tell you that it was I who gave your household warning. I am grateful to you for sheltering me all these years in your house, as your father sheltered mine. Now I must warn you that the turmoil has only begun. The landfolk have lost hope. They have come together under the Tonghak banner and no one can foretell what they will do.”
“Tonghak!” Il-han cried. “Are you a Tonghak?”
“I am,” the young man said. He stepped back and folded his arms and looked straight into Il-han’s eyes.
“I cannot understand this,” Il-han exclaimed. “You have had ease and courtesy in my house. None has oppressed you or watched you. Why do you join with those Tonghak rebels?”
“Sir,” the man said, “I am a patriot. I take my place with our people. And who knows them better than you do, sir? The landfolk are the ones who pay for everything. They only are the taxed, for we have no industries such as you say the western nations have. Here all taxes fall upon the land. When the King wants money for these new ventures of his, the new army, the post office, the trips abroad, such as the one you made, not to speak of the diplomats and the delegations, the new machines he wants to buy, where does the King get the money? He taxes the landfolk! And as if this were not enough, who pays for the corruption inside the Court? And outside as well, for every petty magistrate has his little court, and the Queen has her relatives and her favorites, and who pays—who pays? The countryfolk who till the land, even the land they cannot own, which they can neither buy nor sell because it belongs to some great landlord, and he does not pay the tax, oh no, it is the lowly peasant who only rents the land who pays the tax! Sir, does your conscience never stab you in the heart?”
Il-han stared at the tutor as though he saw a madman. “Am I to blame?” he demanded.
“You are to blame,” the tutor said, his voice and his face very stern. “You are to blame because you do not know. You do not allow yourself to know. You traveled through the country for many months, did you not, and you saw nothing except mountain and valley and sea and people moving like puppets. Have you ever heard of a Russian named Tolstoy?”
“I know no Russians,” Il-han said.
“Tolstoy was a man like you, a landowner,” the tutor went on. “Yet his conscience woke. He saw his people, the people whom he owned because they belonged on his land, and when he saw them he understood that they were human beings and he began to suffer. Sir, you must suffer! It is for this that I have saved you.”
Il-han could not swallow such talk. It was enough for him to be amazed that the meek young man who he had thought was only a scholar, employed to teach his elder son, now showed himself a stranger.
“How have you saved me?” he demanded.
“I saved you as my father saved your father,” the tutor replied. “When angry people were about to kill your father in his time, my father persuaded them to let him retire to this grass roof.”
“My father was a good man,” Il-han said.
The tutor was relentless. “A good man, but he did not lift his voice when others were evil. And you too, you are a good man, but you do not lift your voice. You have access to the King and to the Queen but you have not raised your voice for your people.”
Il-han returned look for look. “What would you have me say?”
For the first time the man’s black eyes wavered. “I do not know.”
He waited a moment, biting his lip. Then he lifted his eyes again to Il-han’s eyes. “For that, too, I blame you. It is you who should know, and because you should know, because you must know, I have saved your life and the lives of your family. Today, in the congress of the Tonghak, I stood up and declared that among those who are to die you must not be killed. You—you are not to die! But I swore by my own life that you would be brave enough, when you knew, to speak against the corruption of the government, and against the taxes heavy as death, and the pushing men from Japan who are bringing their cheap goods here for our folk to buy because there are no other goods. And above all, you must speak bravely against the Japanese tricksters who by one means and another are buying land from the landowners because the landfolk can no longer pay even the taxes on their harvests.”
These words fell upon Il-han like blows from an iron cleaver. For a while he could not reply, and indeed for so long that the tutor could not endure the silence and he cried out again.
“I tell you, it is only for this that I have saved you and your sons!”
To which Il-han again after a long silence could only answer with deep sighs and few words.
“Tonight I must rest,” he said.
“But tomorrow?” the tutor insisted.
“Tomorrow I will think,” Il-han promised.
The tutor rose then and bowed and went away, and suddenly Il-han was so weary that he could only look at Sunia, begging for her help.
“You need not speak a word,” she said. “Your bath is hot, your supper is waiting and then you must sleep.”
He rose. “You who understand—” He felt her hand slip into his and hand in hand they went toward the rooms she had prepared for their life.
“What shall I call you?” he asked the tutor.
It was noon of the next day when he summoned the man to come to him alone. He had not yet seen his sons, and he had told Sunia that he would not until he had spoken again with the tutor. His older son was old enough to have been shaped by his tutor beyond knowledge, and he must know not only what the tutor had to say further but also what he was. It seemed to him, after his sleepless night, that all his years until now had been meaningless. He had lived at the beck of the Queen and the call of the King, conceiving this to be his duty. Even his long journeys into his own country and then into the foreign countries had been in service of the truebone royal house, rather than for the sake of the people. Was it indeed true that people and rulers must be separate? When he served one, must it mean that he did not serve the other?
“I can no longer think of you as my son’s tutor,” Il-han said when the tutor came again into his presence. “You are someone I do not know. Your surname is Choi but what is your name?”
“Sung-ho,” the man replied. He smiled half ruefully. “I wish I could call myself after the great Ta-san of the past, but I am not worthy. I must continue merely to use the name my father raised for me when I went to school.”
“Perhaps you will make a great name of it,” Il-han said.
Sung-ho only smiled again.
“I have a question to ask,” Il-han went on.
“Ask what you will,” Sung-ho replied.
Il-han saw how confident the man was, how bright his look, how straight his carriage. He sat on his cushion without diffidence, eager and ready.
“Is it you who have shaped my elder son so that he prefers to live here in the country under this grass roof rather than in the city?”
“Inevitably I have shaped him,” Sung-ho replied. “At first it was only that the city was hot in summer while here it is always cool. But as I shaped him, I shaped myself. Had I not spent summers here with your father under this grass roof I might never have come to know the landfolk.”
“Are the people on my land Tonghak?” Il-han asked.
“They are,” Sung-ho replied. “At least all who are young.”
“No,” Sung-ho said sturdily. “It means that we look to you to speak for us.”
Il-han was somewhat confounded at this. Was he then in duress? He poured two bowls of tea, so that he could have time to think, and he handed one to Sung-ho, but not with both hands as he would to an equal. To his surprise, Sung-ho also took the bowl with one hand, and not with both hands as he must from his superior.
Il-han went on. “Tonghak is a dumping pot for all sorts of rascals and rebels, debtors who will not pay their debts, thieves who will not pay their taxes.”
Sung-ho did not yield one whit. “You know very well how common people insist upon tricks and conjurings from those whom they love and admire, and who they think can protect them, and is it just to demand that every Tonghak be free from corruption when the yangban themselves are corrupt?”
It was Il-han who must yield. “I cannot deny it,” he said.
At this Sung-ho softened his voice. “I exempt you always from the corruption of your kind. I know you to be an honest man, and I swore this in order to save your life.”
Il-han laughed. “You will not allow me to forget that I owe you my life!”
“I will not allow you to forget,” Sung-ho agreed, and he did not laugh.
Before Il-han could proceed, he heard the voices of his two sons, one shouting in anger, the other wailing in pain. Both he and Sung-ho leaped to their feet, but the door burst open and Il-han saw his elder son walking toward him and dragging something behind him. This something was nothing else than his sobbing younger son, bound hand and foot with rope. In his right hand the elder son held a dagger-shaped stick of bamboo.
“What are you doing?” Il-han shouted and seized his elder son while Sung-ho lifted the younger child to his feet and pulled away the rope. Without stopping to inquire why his elder son had been so cruel, Il-han lifted his hand and slapped him first on one cheek and then on the other, and this so hard that the boy’s head turned left and right and left and right. Now it was the elder one who began to roar loud sobs.