The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  “I must take your word for what she is,” Yul-chun retorted. “It is not likely that I shall ever be able to judge for myself.”

  “Many men have also confided in her,” Liang replied. “She has been the confidante of prime ministers and kings. She listens, she keeps their confidence, she is partisan of none.”

  “I wish to meet this paragon,” Yul-chun said drily.

  For the first time Liang hesitated. “It would be easy enough,” he said slowly, “for she wants to meet you. She has heard of you, as who has not, and she has several times begged me to bring her here—it must be in secret, for she has the confidence even of the Governor-General—”

  Yul-chun felt a chill at the heart. How could such a woman be trusted?

  “There is one difficulty,” Liang was saying. “Sasha is in love with her.”

  Yul-chun cried out, “Sasha! Does she respond?”

  “She says no, but there is something of yes in the way she says it,” Liang replied thoughtfully. “Perhaps she feels something of both. Perhaps it is not love at all. Sasha is impetuous—importunate—very handsome—”

  Impetuous—importunate!

  “I see I do not know my own son,” Yul-chun said quietly.

  Silence fell between them. He yearned to discover whether Liang also loved this woman, but he could not ask again. The young man had such natural dignity, with all his ease and grace, that the elder man could not cross the delicate barrier between the generations.

  “Perhaps we should think of someone else. This young woman seems too complicated.”

  Liang laughed. “Ours are complicated times, Uncle! She is not simple, but nothing is simple. No, she is the only one, and I will bring you both together somehow.”

  He rose as he spoke, and whatever his inner mood, he appeared his usual benign self. The change had been only for a moment and he had restored himself. As for Liang, he bowed and left the room. At the same moment he heard a noise at the outer door, and Ippun’s voice scolding Sasha.

  “Little master—little master, you are too late! There is mud on your coat.”

  “I fell.” Sasha’s voice was thick.

  “You have been drinking,” Ippun scolded.

  “It is not your business to tell me!” Sasha shouted.

  Liang went to the door. Sasha was leaning on Ippun’s shoulder, unable to walk.

  “I will take care of him, Ippun,” Liang said. “See that the door is locked for the night. Make my uncle’s bed, and then go to your own.”

  He put Sasha’s arm about his neck and half carrying him, he led him to the room which was now Sasha’s own. Ippun had made it neat, she had spread the bed and lit the night lamp on the low table at the head of the bed—and had put a thermos of tea there and a bowl. Liang lowered his cousin to the bed and then poured the bowl half full of tea.

  “Drink this—it will help you.”

  Sasha obeyed without protest and still without protest he let Liang undress him to his undergarments. Then he threw himself down and slept while Liang covered him with the quilt.

  Liang sat in his usual seat in the theatre, in the middle of the fourth row. Somewhere in the shadows behind him he knew that Sasha was watching the performance, too. He had seen Sasha at the ticket window when he came in, but the crowd was dense and Sasha had not, he believed, seen him. He gazed intently now at the flying figure on the stage, Mariko in the closing scene. Her long sleeves waved like a bird’s wings and then whirled as she whirled, the slow rhythm quickening as she approached climax. Clever, clever these ancient dances, seeming religious, seeming reverent, and underneath the delicacy and the grace all the dark passion of mankind! And no one understood this better than Mariko. He had known her now for two years and still he had not fathomed her. She was a child of many races, the human emblem of mixed cultures, holding within herself the hostile drives of her ancestral past, brilliant and willful, lawless and tender, never to be trusted for the next emotion, the next impulse, the next decision to act, and yet she was deeply trustworthy because she could never be partisan. Such was Mariko. She would do nothing for a cause, of that he was sure, but she would do anything for him.

  She was closing the dance. Slowly, slowly the silken wings of her wide sleeves descended to the dying movements of the end. He caught her eyes, those startling eyes, shining and dark, and he knew that she was telling him that he was to come to her. Not to her dressing room—

  “Never come to my dressing room,” she had told him when they first met. “That is for everybody. Not for you!”

  He had not known what to make of her directness, her boldness he would have said, except that it was not bold, only exquisitely shy and childlike, and he said nothing because he did not know what to say.

  To his startled look she had replied. “We have no time, you and I. I must leave Seoul in twenty days, and I have never seen you before. There are only these twenty days. Then I fly to New York, London, Paris. I may never come back—who can tell? I thought I was safe in Peking because I have a Chinese godfather there, but when the Japanese came, the Chinese called me a spy. And in Tokyo I was nearly thrown into prison because I speak Chinese so well—I speak the language wherever I am. But I was never a spy. I cannot care enough about any country to be a spy. I dance. I am an artist. If I do anything else it is for a human being—not for a country. I belong to no country—and every country.”

  All this she had poured out in her soft hurried voice, stripping off her costume as she spoke, revealing a skin-tight undergarment which she slipped from her shoulders before she drew a western dress over her head. He might not have been there for all she cared, it seemed, or he might have been a woman, except from the instant their eyes met they shared the knowledge that she was woman and he was man.

  They had not met often since then. He had never made an advance toward her, nor she toward him. Yet when they were alone for the first time in her house, without invitation or hesitation they had embraced, though without words. They had never spoken of love but they were in the state of mutual love. To have put it into words would have been to enclose it and belittle it and define it.

  Once when he had visited a monastery on Kanghwa island, he had called upon the abbot, and they had fallen into deep conversation. He had listened while the abbot explained the mysteries of Buddhism, of which he was not ignorant, for he had studied well the books in his grandfather’s library. Of all religions he was most drawn to Buddhism, and yet he had no wish to become Buddhist. There again he refused definition. To belong to one was to deny himself the privilege of belonging to all.

  “And beyond this,” he had said when the abbot had finished, “there is the difficulty of Nirvana—the difficulty for me, at least. You tell me that Nirvana is the ultimate goal of the human spirit—or the soul, if you wish. But Nirvana is non-being, and I have no longing not to be. On the contrary, I long for all-being.”

  The abbot had replied, “You mistake the meaning of Nirvana. It is not non-being. True, it is the absence of pain, the absence of sin and wrongdoing, the absence of passion, and even of temptation, but not because of non-being. Not at all! On the contrary, it is that very all-being of which you speak. It is total awareness, total comprehension, total understanding, so that we do not need words to communicate. We simply know. We know because we are. Nothing is hidden from the mind and the spirit that dwell in Nirvana. The absence of suffering, of pain, of passion, of temptation itself, is the result of already knowing and therefore understanding, aware of all that exists in this eternity which we call time.”

  When the abbot spoke these words, Liang had felt a relief and release in himself, a complete peace pervading not only his mind but every part of his body. His muscles, his heart, his inner organs, all moved into a harmony which was peace. He had waited for many minutes while he assimilated this peace. Then he was ready to return to his life.

  “Thank you, Father,” he said to the abbot. “What you have said is true. I feel it in my whole being. Now I understand wh
at is meant by Nirvana. I shall know as I am known. Yet—and I hope that this will not hurt you—I do not wish to become a Buddhist.”

  “Why should you be Buddhist?” the abbot replied. “In Nirvana there is neither Buddhist nor any other division. These classifications are not needed when we reach the state of total awareness and total understanding. Go in peace.”

  With this the abbot had blessed him and Liang came down from the mountain and went home at once. The abbot’s words came back to him when he first saw Mariko alone. It was the evening after Japanese bombs had fallen on Pearl Harbor. He had had no intention of going to the theatre that night. The evening had been spent with others of his own age, young men from the university. They had argued and discussed the news, searching it over and over again to know what portent it held for Korea. He had been about to go back to his room in the hospital when darkness fell, and passing by the theatre on his way he had lingered, he did not know why, except that he was reluctant to return to his solitary room and was disinclined for study. His mind, usually calm, was still disturbed, for the attack on Pearl Harbor had been altogether unexpected and he had not been satisfied with the conclusions his fellow students had reached. Yet he could not reach his own. Restlessly, senselessly he had thought at the time, he had stopped at the theatre, and noticing that the beautiful dancer who had been treated at the hospital was to perform, he had bought a ticket and gone in.

  The place was half empty. People had stayed at home to ponder and to talk and to guess the future. He sat in the middle of the first row, close enough to catch the scent of Mariko’s robes as she danced, close enough to see her lovely face. She was small, her face oval and pale and her eyes large and glowing with exhilaration and joy in the dance. She was as light as a bird, her shoulders moving with every movement a separate grace and elegance, and this not only of the body but of her inner being. She had a rhythm of her own, expressed with elegance, and the master drummer followed rather than led. She appeared to stand still while she moved, and yet when she was still she seemed to move with inner exhilaration. Her performance that night had been the Fairy Dance, its story that of a fairy who was bathing in a lake when a woodcutter stole her clothes, so that she was compelled to marry him and live on earth. Liang had never seen it performed with such artistry, and watching her gossamer garments floating about her like mist, he forgot for a little while the tragedy of the day. And afterwards did what he had never done before. Driven it seemed by a spirit in his feet, he had gone backstage. Although usually her door was crowded, no one was there that night, and she had opened the door herself, still in her costume, and they had stood looking at each other.

  “Come in,” she said. “I saw you in the front row. It was for you I danced, after I saw you.”

  He came in and she closed the door.

  “I was not sure whether you saw me,” he said at last.

  “You know I did,” she said simply.

  “Now I know,” he had replied, and remembered what the abbot had told him. Total awareness, total understanding! This was what he and Mariko had, each of the other, from that first moment face to face.

  She was leaving the stage now, and he rose before the crowd filled the aisles and walked rapidly through the lobby. There he saw Sasha making his way to the stage door, but again Sasha did not see him. He left the theatre and walked westward past the Bando Hotel for ten blocks until he came to the gate of her house. The gateman let him in and he sat in the moonlit garden until she could arrive, although the night was chill. He did not like to enter her house until she came home, lest it seem a presumption that he was her lover.

  “Shall I bring your tea here, master?” the gateman asked.

  “If you will,” Liang replied with courtesy.

  What the two servants thought of his presence here he did not know or indeed care. He was scrupulous, leaving always within an hour after she reached home. The ritual was the same. She changed into Japanese or Chinese dress, as her mood was, preferring Chinese, and then she took a light supper which he might share or not as he pleased. They had never spent a night together, yet each knew that at some time this was inevitable although when it would be neither knew. They had discussed it only once and quietly, as they had discussed marriage, without conclusion. He supposed that in the past she had had lovers, but he was sure in the state of total awareness in which he lived, that she had no lovers now.

  He heard her car at the gate, a Rolls-Royce, and he put down his tea bowl and rose as she came into the gate, still in her theatre costume but a coat of Russian sable wrapped about her. When she saw him she came to him and took his hand between both her own.

  “I am late,” she said. “Sasha insisted on staying after the others were gone.”

  “Sasha!” he exclaimed. She dropped his hand and laughed uncertainly and without mirth.

  “It is cold in the garden tonight, is it not?”

  She spoke unexpectedly in English and he was aware that she was afraid.

  “Sasha has threatened to follow you,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  She linked her fingers in his and drew him with her toward the house. At the door her woman servant knelt to take off their shoes.

  “You told him he could not come?”

  “Of course. I told him I had a guest.”

  “And he asked if the guest were I?”

  “Yes, but I lied to him. I said it was Baron Tsushima.”

  She could lie as easily as a child and confess it in the same breath. He was puzzled, for he himself could not lie, and yet he understood the necessity of lies in her complicated life, where men continually pursued her, and he did not reply to this. They went into her sitting room, the wall screens were closed, the curtains drawn, and on the low table steam rose from silver dishes of food.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “and please sit down.”

  She drifted out of the room so gracefully that she seemed not to walk and he waited. A maidservant entered with a Japanese robe and took off his coat and helped him to slip into the robe. He sat down then, only to rise when a moment later she came in wearing a soft French negligee of green chiffon, the full skirt floating about her.

  “Ah, you are too polite,” she said, smiling. “Rising to meet me? It is only you who persist in such courtesies.”

  “Let me have my way,” he replied.

  They sat down on their floor cushions, opposite each other as usual, and were alone. The first moment was always the same. Each searched the other’s face. This, she said, was to learn what each was feeling, and what had passed since they last met. Then she put out her hands, palms upward and he clasped them. Into each palm he pressed his lips and as he did so, she took his palm, one after the other, and pressed her lips there.

  She drew back her hands after this and she laughed softly.

  “Now I know,” she said, “and all is well with me, too. Let us eat. I am hungry. The dance was difficult tonight. I felt there were too many people. They crowded onto the stage behind me. I have forbidden it, but still it happens. Then I feel caught between the crowds in front and the crowds behind.”

  “They love you,” he said gently.

  “Yes, they love me, but it means nothing to me,” she said quickly. “So much love—from nameless persons, none of whom I shall ever know!”

  A small silver pot filled with hot soup stood before each of them, and he poured the soup from hers into a silver cup, and then poured his own cup from his pot.

  “Better than hate,” he said.

  “Oh, I have had hate, too,” she retorted. “In Peking I saw a theatre full of people suddenly hate me. I had to escape for my life while they screamed after me that I was Japanese. You don’t hate the bit of Japanese in me?”

  “I hate nothing in you. I love everything in you,” he said gravely.

  A long moment hung between them, luminous and silent He broke it unwillingly.

  “Drink your soup while it is hot. Meanwhile I must tell you I have a duty tonight
. I have made a promise concerning you, which you are not compelled to keep.”

  She lifted her delicate eyebrows at this.

  “When you go to the United States next week,” he said, “I ask you to carry some messages.”

  “Yes?”

  “Of two kinds,” he went on. “My grandfather has a few American friends. And the missionaries we know have also relatives and friends. Our government-in-exile is there. You will take messages to them.”

  “Yes?”

  She held the silver cup in both hands, warming them, the delicate eyebrows still uplifted above eyes so glorious in size and shape and depth that he was all but stifled by the breath caught in his breast.

  “Please—” he said, his voice low. “Please do not look at me like that until I have finished!”

  She laughed sudden clear laughter and changed her look. That face of hers, so exquisite, so mobile, quivering and alive—he looked away and went on.

  “The purpose of these messages is to prepare everything here in our country for the coming of the Americans—and to prepare the Americans for us, when they come.”

  She put down her cup. “The Americans!”

  “They will come, I assure you. If there is any danger to you here, because of the messages, then stay away—stay in America or in France, wait until the victory when we have taken back our country. Then I shall arrange such a welcome for you as a queen would have. My grandfather loved a queen once, and my grandmother is jealous to this day. But no one knows that I have a queen of my own!”

  He looked up at her now. They leaned across the narrow table and kissed. She had taught him the kiss.

  “Touch my lips,” she had said to him suddenly one evening as they sat like this across the table.

  He had been stupid and only stared at her.

  “Like this,” she had insisted, and taking his hand she had kissed it.

  “But how your lips?” he had inquired.

  “With your lips,” she had whispered, and had pursed her lips into a waiting flower.