Pearl Buck - The Living Reed

“See that you do not keep her awake with your chatter and make sure that she has chicken broth brewed with ginseng root.”

They bowed in silence, and he returned to the library where in a few minutes, as he knew, his second son would be presented to him. He knelt beside the great desk and then rose again, still too restless to read or write. Once more he walked to and fro across the tiled floor, across the squares of sunlight from the open doors. He turned his face to the sun. It fell upon him warmly and he welcomed the warmth. His white garments shone whiter, and he enjoyed the sense of light and cleanliness in which they wrapped him. He was fastidiously clean and Sunia saw to it that every morning he put on fresh white garments, the loose trousers bound at his ankles, the long white robe crossed from left to right on his breast. His ancestors were sun worshipers, and he had inherited from them his love of light. White was the sacred color, a symbol of brightness and of life. True, it was also the color of mourning. Yet so closely were death and life intertwined here in his troubled country that he could not think of one without realizing the other. This too was his inheritance, now given to his sons.

He paused on the thought and stared down at the pool of sunlight in which he stood. It occurred to him that he had not asked his elder son why he had been angry, so angry that he had rushed into the grove and broken the tender bamboo shoots. It was important to know why a son in this house should be angry. He clapped his hands and as a servant entered the room he took his place on the floor cushions behind the desk. Casually, as though he had no other interest, he spoke to the servant.

“Invite my son’s tutor to come here and for a short time take care of the child yourself. He is forbidden to enter the bamboo grove.”

He did not explain why the child was forbidden. In a house of many servants everything is already known. The servant bowed and backed out of the room and closed the door silently. He busied himself as he waited for the tutor, pouring water on the ink block and rubbing the stick of dried ink into a paste upon the wet block before brushing Chinese letters on the sheet of thick white paper, handmade from silk waste. He moistened his brush in the liquid ink and smoothed the fine hairs dexterously to a point. Then, the reed handle between two fingers and thumb, he held the brush poised above the paper. Four lines of a poem shaped in his brain to announce the birth of his second son. Ah, but what language should he use? If his father were to see the poem it must be written in the ancient Chinese.

“No true scholar can stoop to use hangul,” he declared whenever he saw what he called “the new way of writing.”

It was true that men liked to write in Chinese to show that they had received the education of a cultivated man. Sejong the Great himself had been a man learned in Chinese, but he had been also a wise ruler. A king, he had declared, if he is to govern well, must know what his people think and want, yet how can they write to their king if the letters they use are so difficult that years must be spent merely in learning them? That communication between himself and his subjects might be possible, he had then devised, with the help of many scholars, an alphabet so simple that it had no resemblance to the complex Chinese characters.

The book of Sejong’s life lay open now on the desk for Il-han had reflected much, of late, upon this noble king. Oh, that there were a ruler today as great as Sejong had been, one who, though he was the highest, could think of the low ones, the people, those who worked upon the land to produce food for all, who built houses for others to live in, those who only serve! Il-han himself, growing up the beloved and only son in a great house of the yangban class, had never thought of these folk. It was his own tutor, the father of his son’s tutor, who had first told him of the stir among the multitudes, the speechless revolt of the silent Sejong the Great had been well named. He was great enough to know that no ruler can ignore the discontent of his subjects, for discontent swells to anger and anger to explosion. Alas, again, where was such a man now? Was the young King ever to be strong enough?

The door slid open and his son’s tutor stood there, bowing, white robes spotless.

“Sir, forgive me for delay. I was in the bath.”

He bent low again and waited.

“Enter,” Il-han commanded. “And close the doors behind you.”

He did not rise, the man being his inferior in age and position, though the years between them were only three. His father had complained that the tutor was too young, but Il-han had persisted in keeping him, saying that his old tutor was too old, and he did not wish to entrust his son to a stranger whose forbears he did not know.

The young man came in and waited again.

“You are permitted to seat yourself,” Il-han said kindly.

The young man knelt opposite to him on a cushion before the low desk and looked down modestly. He was agitated, as Il-han could see and, he supposed, prepared for reproach because of the child’s destructive anger. Therefore he spoke mildly, aware of the anxiety on the sensitive youthful face which he now examined.

“I wish to consult you about my son,” Il-han began.

“If you please, sir,” the young man replied in a low voice.

“It is not a question of blame or punishment,” Il-han went on. “It is only that I must be told about my son. He is with you day and night and you understand his nature. Tell me — why should he be angry here in his own home?”

The young man lifted his eyes to the edge of the table. “He has fits of anger, sir. I do not know what causes them. They come like sudden storms at sea. All is as usual, we are without quarrel, and then with no warning, he throws his book on the floor and pushes me away.”

“Does he hate books?”

“No, sir.” The young man lifted his eyes a few inches higher so that now they rested on Il-han’s hands, folded on his desk. “He is very young, and I require nothing of him in the way of study. I read him a story from history, then a legend, a fairy tale, something to amuse him and please him so that he may understand the pleasure to be found in books and later will seek them for himself. This morning, for example, I was reading the story of ‘The Golden Frog.’”

Il-han knew the story from his own childhood. It was the tale of King Puru who, because he had no son, prayed to God for a male child. On his way home one day, for he had ridden horseback to a place called Konyun, he was amazed to see a weeping rock. He ordered his retinue to examine the rock, and under it they found a golden frog which looked like a baby. He believed his prayers were answered and he took the frog home. It grew into a handsome boy, and he named the boy Kumwa, that is to say, Golden Frog, and this son succeeded his father and became King Kumwa.

“At this point,” the tutor was saying, “the child tore the book from my hands and dashed it on the floor. Then he ran from the room. I searched for him and when I found him in the bamboo grove he was wrenching the bamboo shoots with both his hands and all his strength and throwing them on the ground. When I asked him why he did so, he said he did not want a golden frog for a brother.”

Il-han was amazed. “Who put that in his mind?”

The young tutor lowered his eyes again. A red flush crept up from his neck and spread over his cheeks. “Sir, I am miserable. I fear it was I who did so, but unwittingly. He had heard of his brother’s approaching birth and he asked me where this brother would come from. I did not know how to reply, and I said perhaps he would be found under a rock, like the Golden Frog.”

Il-han laughed. “A clever explanation, but I can think of a better! You might, for instance, have replied that his brother came from the same place that he himself did. And when the child inquired where that was, you could have said, ‘If you do not know, how can I know?’”