Pearl Buck - The Living Reed

He had gone too far. The Queen rose, took three steps forward, drew a closed fan from her sleeve and struck twice, once on his right cheek and once on his left, as he knelt before her.

“Dare to speak!” she cried. “Was it not six years ago — only six, it is to remind you — that the Empress Tzu-hsi, my friend, forced Japan to make treaty with us and recognize us as equal with Japan? It is China, not the western nations, who saved us!”

Il-han could bear it no longer. He forgot that she was the Queen and no simple woman. He lifted his head and glared at her and he lifted his voice and shouted at her until his voice roared into the beams of the palace roof.

“That Treaty of Amity? Treaty of Amity — a joke! When the ambassador came with four hundred armed men to convince us! Japan was given special privileges here on our soil, and how can we depend now on China, when Japan has invaded Formosa, and even the Ryukyu Islands?”

The Queen shrieked in return. “Will you not understand? Small as we are, and weak in numbers, we can be attacked — attacked, absorbed — there are a hundred ways, if China is not our suzerain! We can only live in freedom and independence if we are in friendship with a powerful nation, and pray heaven it will never be Russia or Japan — no, nor America! — and therefore it must be China!”

At this Il-han was speechless and in his anger he did what no man had ever done before. He left the truebone royal presence without permission and turning his back on the Queen, he strode out of the palace, his head high and heart beating fit to burst.

… His father was waiting for him in the entrance hall at the gate of the palace. They walked out together, and he waited for his father to speak. How could he say, “The Queen wished to speak to me alone”? But his father was complacent. He walked with measured steps, his toes turned outward as an old scholar walks, a smile on his face.

Seeing that his father was not disposed to speech, Il-han kept silent, too. The day was fine and the people on the streets were enjoying the mildness of the autumn. Each such day was precious, for there could not be many now before the snows of winter fell. Over the low walls of the courtyards between the houses, or in front of gateways, the persimmon trees were bright with their golden fruit, and piles of persimmons were heaped on the ground, ready for market. Children ate until they were stuffed, their cheeks sticky with the sweet juice, and for once no one reproved them. It was impossible, moreover, to speak of important matters in these crowds of people.

“I will come to your house now and visit my grandsons,” his father said.

It was not usual for father and son to live separately, but Il-han lived in the Kim house in the city, that he might be near the palace, and his father preferred to live outside the city in the ancestral country home of the Kim clan. Here he could indulge his love for meeting his friends and making poems, subject only to the occasional summons from the royal family.

“I have only one grievance against your father,” his dying mother had once told Il-han. “He has never visited other women nor does he gamble, but he cannot live without his friends.”

It was true that these friends, themselves idle gentlemen and poetasters, gathered every day in his father’s house to remember together the glories of ancient Korea, to recount the events of her heroes, to recall how even the civilizing influence of Buddhism reached Japan only through Korea, to repeat that sundry monuments of art and culture now in Japan had been stolen from Korea — was not the beautiful long-faced image of the Kwan Yin in Nara sculptured in Korea, although what Japanese would acknowledge it! And from such raptures came poems, many poems, none of them, Il-han thought bitterly, of the slightest significance for these dangerous busy times.

Yet when he had complained in private to Sunia, she refused to agree with him.

“Not so,” she declared. “We must be reminded of these past glories, so that we know how worthy of love our country is and how noble our people are.”

He walked in silence with his father now along the stone-paved street until they entered the gate of Il-han’s home and there his father led the way to the main room while Il-han bade a servant bring the children to see their grandfather. “And invite their mother, also,” he called after the servant.

His father sat himself down on a floor cushion and a maidservant bustled in with tea and small cakes, and Il-han sat in the lower place, as a son should. In a few minutes Sunia entered with the children, the elder clinging to her hand and the younger in the arms of his nurse. She made the proper obeisance and watched while the elder son made his and the grandfather looked on with pride and dignity.

“Is it not time,” he said, “to set up a proper name for my elder grandson?”

“Will you choose a name, Most Honored?” Sunia said.

She sank gracefully to a floor cushion, well aware that in an ordinary household she would not have appeared so easily before her husband’s father, although it was true that here women were proud and never knelt before their husbands as women in Japan did, or had their feet bound small as Chinese women did, or their waists boxed in, as it was said that western women did. No, here husband and wife were equal in their places, nor were mothers browbeaten by their grown sons. In the royal palace, were the King to die and leave the heir too young to rule, the Queen Dowager ruled until the heir attained majority. Il-han, too, had accustomed Sunia to freedom, partly because he gave her respect as well as love and partly because he had heard that western women came and went as they wished. True, his mother, now dead, had talked much of the good and ancient times when women were neither seen nor heard, and she said often that she longed for the old custom of curfew when only at a certain hour could women walk freely through the streets. So severe was the custom in those days that if a man stole a secret look at the woman his head was cut off.

“And would you be willing to have my head cut off if I stole a look at Sunia?” Il-han had once inquired.

“I would have taught you better,” his doughty mother had retorted.

Sunia kept her own modest ways, however, and now in the presence of her husband and his father she held her head down and did not look up to either face. Meanwhile the grandfather considered the name he would choose.

“My elder grandson,” he said, at last, “is no usual child. He has a high spirit and a quick mind. These are signs of youth, but in him they are more. They are the qualities of his nature. Moreover, he was born in the spring. Therefore I will choose for him the name of Yul-chun, or Spring-of-the-Year.”

Il-han and Sunia exchanged a look, each making sure of the other’s approval, and then Il-han expressed what both felt.

“The name is suitable, Father, and we thank you.”

All would have gone well except that at this moment the newly named child saw a small mouse under a low table beside which his grandfather sat. Winter was near and the crickets, the spiders and mice crept into the house, seeking escape from the coming cold. Crickets and spiders were harmless but mice were dangerous, for people believed that if girl children played with mice they would never be able to cook rice properly. The women servants therefore always chased mice away, and the little boy, seeing the mouse as courageous as a lion under the table beside his grandfather, gave a loud scream and pointed at the creature with his tiny forefinger. What could they think except that he was pointing at his grandfather with a look of terror on his face?

The grandfather was dismayed, and Il-han was ashamed.