Pearl Buck - The Living Reed

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 night, 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.