Pearl Buck - The Living Reed

“Now,” she said happily, “it is a good thing that we do not need to pay fortunetellers. The wedding must be thought of next — a good wedding. We must prepare the wedding hat and belt for you, my son, and we must mend the old palanquin to fetch the bride home to this house after the three days of ceremony. The curtains are in shreds.”

Yul-han turned. “Mother,” he said. “Remember that she comes from a city family. And I, too, do not wish to have an old-fashioned wedding. What! I go through all that clownery?”

He spoke with unusual energy, and Il-han was surprised that his quiet son could for the moment at least again resemble his older brother. But Sunia was not patient.

“Are we not to have a decent wedding?” she demanded. “True, we are poor now as everyone is, but not too poor to see our sons properly married. Sons? That older brother of yours refused to be married. Alas, where is he these many years and he with no wife to care for him? We do not even know where he is. All the more then must we see to it that your wedding is performed according to law and tradition.”

“Mother,” Yul-han urged, “I beg you let it be as I wish.”

It was now time for Il-han to interfere. “Sunia, we must consider. It is true the times have changed and I am not sure the change is evil. I remember our own wedding day with no great pleasure — all that folly of ashes thrown at me when I left this house to go to yours and all my relatives flocking after me as I went and that wedding chest carrier with his face blackened to make people laugh! And you, with your face painted thick with white powder and your yellow-and-blue coat and red skirt and your family bowing when I came in! And all through the wedding feast we were teased until I was afraid you would cry and streak your painted face. And then when they tied my two legs together and hung me from the beam of the house and they pretended to beat the soles of my feet to make me promise them another feast! Those three nights I spent in your father’s house as bridegroom were not joy, I can tell you, what with teasing friends and neighbors listening at our door.”

Sunia heard this with eyes growing wider as she listened.

“And all these years you have kept this inside yourself!”

Il-han laughed. “Until now, when I bring it out to defend my son!”

They stood, two men against the lone woman, and she could only yield unhappily. She looked at them mutely and Il-han nodded to Yul-han and he went out and brought back the tall handsome girl, whose fresh skin and dark lively eyes showed health. She was not bold, in spite of her composed ways, for she bowed to Il-han and did not speak until he spoke.

He put on his tortoiseshell spectacles and looked at her in silence and then he nodded his head.

“Welcome to my house,” he said. “We break custom here but the times are new.” With this he took off his spectacles. “Forgive me,” he said. “It is not discourtesy that makes me put on spectacles. My eyes are not what they once were.”

This was true, for the midnight teaching by the light of flickering candle made his eyes dim.

“Necessity is no discourtesy nowadays, sir,” she said.

There was no more to say, and in a few minutes she went away as gracefully as she had come, pausing at the door to look back at Sunia.

“If you please, good Mother,” she said sweetly. “Come with me.”

She held out her hand and Sunia could not resist the gentle voice, the pleading eyes. Hand in hand, the two women left the room.

Now Yul-han was left alone with his father and he knew the time had come to confess that Induk was Christian. He did not know whether his father would accept the marriage when he knew, and he had tried to prepare Induk. Indeed only yesterday they had talked long on the necessity and he had begun thus:

“How shall I tell my mother that our wedding will be according to the Christian ceremony? You know how women enjoy our old-fashioned weddings.”

“Leave your mother to me,” Induk had replied. “Tell only your father. If we are wise in what we say, we shall win them separately and each will help us with the other.”

She had a calm assurance, this young female who was to be his wife, and sometimes Yul-han felt a certain awe of her. Where did she find this wisdom? Could it be that her strange religion did indeed communicate a power unknown to him? She never spoke of religion, not even to ask him if he had read the book she had given him, nor did she ask him if he would be Christian too. Yet he knew that she made her prayers to the unknown god, and she went every seven days to the Christian temple. Now and then, however, she spoke of the missionary, sometimes with laughter, for he was very foreign, yet always with respect.

“He is honest,” she told Yul-han, “and he is incorruptible. Moreover, he is for our people. He risks himself for our sakes.”

Beyond this she did not go, except to say her parents wished her to be married with the Christian ceremony, and she also wished this to be. But they had very little time to talk. It was difficult to meet, for old tradition still held in many ways, and if they were seen alone together, tradition might compel those above to dismiss them from their schools on the pretext that their conduct could lead their pupils into unseemly freedom. For this reason Yul-han had urged immediate marriage. Afterwards, as husband and wife, they could discover each other’s minds and hearts in mutuality.

“Father,” Yul-han now said, “I need your good advice.”

Il-han made a dry smile. “Unusual, is it not, in these days, to hear such words? I try to be useful, nevertheless.”

Yul-han ignored this irony natural to age. “What I have to tell you will not shock you, Father, for you know these new times, but I fear for my mother.”

Here he paused so long that Il-han was impatient.

“Well, well, well?” he said sharply.

Yul-han forced himself on. “Her family is Christian, Father, and she wishes to be married with their ceremony.”

He had said it, and properly he had not spoken Induk’s personal name. Sitting motionless on the floor cushion, he took courage to lift his head and look at his father across the low table between them. What he saw was not comforting. His father’s eyebrows were drawn down and beneath them the eyes were narrow under lowered lids. His father’s long thin hand moved to stroke the scanty gray beard.

“Why have you waited to tell me?” Il-han demanded.

“Father, would it have made a difference if I had told you early?”

The long thin hand fell. “You are saying that you would have married her anyway.”

“Yes, Father.”

Father and son gazed into each other’s eyes.

“You two,” Il-han said at last, “you and your brother, inside you are alike. You are both stubborn and willful, he with outbursts of temper and wild words, and you Confucian, always mild in speech. Seemingly without temper, you are the worse of the two. I am always deceived by you.”

“I am sorry, Father,” Yul-han said.

“Sorry! Does that mean you will change yourself?”

“No, Father.”

“I suppose you will be Christian too.”

“I do not know, Father.”

Il-han closed his eyes. He took a black paper fan from his sleeve and fanned himself for a while.

“These Americans,” he said at last, eyes still closed, the fan still moving to and fro. “Do you know that they betrayed us? Have you forgotten that they broke their treaty with us? When we were invaded, they favored the invader. Do they speak now against our oppressors? They do not. They preach their religion, they declare that we must submit ourselves. They say they are not anti-Japanese. They even adjure us to do justice to our oppressors. They bid us remember Korea is the most exposed part of the Japanese empire. Japanese empire, mind you, no longer our country! The Russian base, Vladivostok, is very near, they tell us; it borders Manchuria and by steamboat it is only a few hours from the Chinese port of Chefoo. Therefore Japanese must be allowed to rule Korea!”