The Living Reed

III

“WHY DO YOU FOLLOW ME?” Yul-chun demanded. He bent over the small refractory hand press. It was too old, this press, worn out years ago in an American newspaper office in a country town in Ohio. Without it, nevertheless, the Independence News of Korea could not be published. As it was, the sheet appeared irregularly, although he had been able to keep it weekly after the Mansei Demonstration had been put down at the end of the World War. It was well that the press was small for he had to move it from place to place now that the revolution had to go underground again. Only in America could the Koreans continue openly in rebellion against the invaders.

The bitter tonic of anger and disappointment had invigorated him and others like him. When he left Yul-han’s house that night, he had not gone to China as he had said he would. Somewhere, by someone, he had been betrayed. As he stepped into the street, he had been seized in the dark by rough hands, and bound. He never saw the face of his captors but he knew by their muttered words that they were Japanese although they spoke in Korean. They had beaten him with the butts of their guns until he was insensible. When he woke he was once more in a cell in an old prison, lying on a floor of uneven stones laid on the earth. He did not know why he was not dead, why they had not killed him. No one was within sight or hearing. He heard no sign of voice or footsteps except that once a day a guard brought a bowl of millet and a gourd of water. He saw nothing of this guard except his hands, sliding open an aperture in the iron door. Slowly he had recovered until he was able to think of life again, and escape. Yet perhaps he could never have escaped had it not been for the madness of the Mansei Demonstration. He would not have escaped then except that the guard, handing in his food as usual, handed in a steel file, and still without a word. A steel file! The guard could only be a Korean, a traitorous Korean whose conscience was moved for some reason. He had taken the file without a word and had compelled himself to eat the miserable food to which he was sternly accustomed. He must have time to think. Was the file a trick to tempt him to escape? Were his murderers waiting outside the window?

Then he had heard, far off, like the surf of a distant ocean, the uproar of human voices. That had decided him. He must chance his escape. He worked all day on the thick iron mesh of the hole in die wall that served for light and air, an aperture too small, one would have supposed, for a human body, but he was bone-thin, a collapsible skeleton, he had told himself grimly, and he had forced himself through it in the night, tearing the flesh from shoulders and hips. Immediately he had lost himself in the swarming crowds and then had hid in a ruined temple outside the city walls, where old and toothless monks were his faithful watchmen. From here he sent out the small printed sheet. Another young rebel, disguised as an acolyte, helped him here in the temple, sleeping by day and at night distributing the sheets throughout the city and to others throughout the country. Others, monks themselves, were also his messengers and his news-gatherers.

On this day, now drawing near its close, Yul-chun was making haste to finish his task, a warning to his fellow patriots that they were to take no heart in the proposals of Woodrow Wilson that there should be a League of Nations.

“If we cannot trust one nation, will twenty be more fit to trust?”

He was setting the type for these words when the girl appeared at the door. He had met her at a secret meeting, a strong slender figure in man’s trousers and jacket, and she had followed him from then on, appearing wherever he was, obedient, speaking little, persistent in offering herself to him. He would not have noticed her except she moved swiftly to obey his commands. Today she came in a blue cotton skirt beneath her jacket instead of trousers. She did not speak when he looked up. She was simply there at the door, and he remembered now that he had asked a question and that she had not answered. He straightened himself, pushed back a lock of hair and left a smudge of black on his forehead.

“Well?” he said impatiently.

She came in and stood leaning against the wall, her arms folded across her breast.

“You said you needed someone to help you.”

“Not you,” he retorted. “Not a woman.”

“Man or woman, it makes no difference in our work.”

“It makes a difference when it is you.”

“Can I help being a woman?”

“You can help pursuing me.”

She made her eyes wide at this, great dark eyes, the whites very clear.

“I have chosen you,” she said simply.

“I have no wish to be chosen,” he retorted. “I have too much to do. Ah, this wretched machine!”

He had worked as he talked, and now the press stopped. Ink ran over the paper in black streams. He tore out the paper, threw it on the floor and set the line of type again.

“I know how to set type,” she said.

He seemed not to hear her, absorbed in his task, his mind busy. He had to think far ahead now. The revolution must never fail again. Nothing must be wasted in petty effort, and that it might not, he and his fellow rebels must join with others like them in every country. The mistake had been that here in Korea they had thought they could win alone against their own aggressors. He knew now that they could not. Revolution must be worldwide. Wherever the most immediate need was, there all must attack, until country by country the people were free. Divided, the revolution would always be crushed by the stronger foe. Nothing could be done now in Korea.

“Never hit a Japanese, even in retaliation.” Yul-chun had sent the advice into every part of Korea, and he had watched it obeyed. Now was not the time to strike, he had said, and he had seen his fellow patriots tortured and some of them die, but had not lifted a hand to strike back. How long it could go on he did not know. Six thousand fresh soldiers had been sent from Japan. Yet less than two months after the Mansei Demonstration, through his printed sheets he had summoned representatives from every province and they had organized again a secret Korean government. They had elected a president, a young man surnamed Yi. There had been meetings in China and in Siberia, too, to support the secret government. Then Yi had gone to America to meet with Koreans there, but Woodrow Wilson had forbidden his State Department to issue a passport to the Korean, saying that a passport to such a person would disturb the Japanese whom he did not wish to disturb now, since he planned to build peace in Asia upon the foundation of Japanese power.

When this news was brought back to him, Yul-chun had bared his teeth in grim laughter.

“Peace? Can peace be built upon Japanese power politics? War is certain — another world war! It will begin in Germany as it did before, but next time Japan will strike at America.”

At this moment he felt her hand on his shoulder. She stood beside him, but he went on working. The sheet was coming through at last.

“When you go to China, take me with you?”

“I am going to Russia.”

“I will go to Russia.”

“Perhaps I am going to China.”

“China, then.”

He shook off her hand and stopped the press. “Where I am going you cannot follow,” he said bluntly.

“Where are you truly going?” she demanded.

“To many places.”

“Where first?”

“To Kirin in East Manchuria. Is that a place for a woman?”

She knew Kirin as well as he did. When the Korean soldiers were disbanded by the Japanese years ago, thousands of them went to Kirin. There they had built a military school to train guerrillas. Since then some had come back, one by one, few by few, to fight in the mountains of Korea and in the city byways. Not only soldiers but many Korean landfolk had gone to Manchuria, a million and more, and these supported the army. Besides these men were those who had gone to China when the Manchu dynasty ended, and they were not a few millions. In every country in the world he supposed there were at least some Koreans in exile.

“I am as woman what you are as man,” she was saying.

He ignored this. She was always stressing their difference — she a woman, he a man.

“From Kirin I shall go on foot through China to the center of the revolution now shaping itself in the southern provinces.”

“I can walk,” she insisted.

“I may even go into Russia, to see what their new techniques are for training the landfolk.”

“I have always wanted to go to Russia.”

He struck his hands together in desperation. “Hanya!” he exclaimed. “You know that I have sworn never to marry. I have no life to give a woman. I have no home.”

“I have not asked you for marriage.”

“Well, then love, if that is what you mean! Such love always ends in quarrels and hatred. I have no time for women, I tell you!”

“I am only one woman,” she said stubbornly.

He exploded. “I will not have myself weakened and distracted by emotions!”

“You are a man. You have desire—”

“I am a man, yes, but not an animal! I can control my desires and I do.”

He looked at her, his eyes hard. “What sort of woman are you that you would force a man?”

She returned his look, her eyes as hard. “I am the sort of woman you men have made nowadays. You tell us we must take our share in the struggle for independence. You say that we cannot be soft, or think of childbearing, or living safely in houses. Yet I am still a woman.”

“Is it your need to pursue me?”

“If you do not pursue me, I must pursue you.”

“I have told you I will not allow myself to love a woman. If a man loves a woman, whether he marries her or not, he loses his freedom.”

“If you cannot love me, then—”

“I am not saying I cannot. I am saying I will not.”

He went back to his work. She stood in silence, watching him.

“When are you going away?” she asked after a while.

In the rattle of the machine he pretended he did not hear her, but she knew his silence intentional and she came close to him.

“If you are going away, when will you go?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Perhaps.”

She stood looking at him, again in silence. She let her eyes linger on his body, on the straight shoulders, the bare brown arms, the strong neck, his clipped dark hair, his thighs, his brown legs bare beneath his upturned rolled trousers, his feet in sandals — how many miles those feet had walked! She loved even his feet and she could have cradled them in her arms. She yielded to the strange sweet enchantment of his body, the attraction of his flesh. She longed to spring at him as once she had seen a female tiger in the mountains spring at her mate, forcing herself beneath him, but she dared not. He was capable of such rage that he could throw her on the ground and trample her. A deep rending sigh shook her and she turned and went away.

He knew when she had gone but he continued steadfastly at his work. When it was finished he bound the sheets into bundles and hid them behind a corner of the wall. With them he left a printed message, unsigned, that he was going away. He needed to say no more. Someone would take his place. Then he took up his knapsack and strapped it on his back and walked away into the darkness, heading north for Siberia.

He had not been in Russia before but he would be no stranger there. When the Japanese occupied his country many Koreans and their families in the north had crossed the short boundary between Korea and Siberia. They had been welcomed and had settled on lands allotted to them, or if they were scholars they had gone to Moscow and Leningrad. Koreans had taken part in the Russian October Revolution and in the Civil War and through the disturbances of the intervention. Lenin himself had taken advantage of the Korean struggle against the Japanese invaders, declaring that in Korea the people understood better than the Chinese the necessity for learning the methods of revolution. Yet Yul-chun had never been to Siberia or to Russia. It was his intention now to go there first and to discover for himself at the purest sources what the new Communism was and how it was succeeding. He would learn the techniques and master the logic. In his knapsack he carried Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and a copy of the Communist Manifesto, and Lenin’s State and Revolution, all translated into Korean. This was not to say he had any love for Russia or Russians, but simply that now when Japan was the enemy, it was time to make Russia a friend. Long ago Taiwan-gun had played the same game, hating both countries meanwhile. Reflecting upon history in the long days while he walked and in the lonely nights when he slept in a village inn or under a mountain rock, Yul-chun remembered well that twice in his lifetime Russia and Japan had met in secret to divide his country between them at the 38th parallel, and they had been prevented from announcing such division only because they feared the Americans and English.

He walked by night and slept by day until he reached the high mountains. Then, as the danger of meeting Japanese soldiers and spies grew less, he walked at dawn and after sunset, sleeping through the small hours under some rock. His was a country of mountains, four-fifths of the land area in high terrain, and he loved the heights. To rise when the first pale light broke over the lofty crests still black against the silvery sky, to breathe in the mists from the gorges, to hear the splash of waterfalls and the echoing voices of singing birds, cleansed his mind and renewed his spirit. Alone as he was, stopping near a house of a village only to buy food, he could not but remember Hanya, however unwillingly, and he reflected upon his relation to her. That there was a relation he could not deny, although he had never so much as touched her hand. Yet a man cannot hear a woman declare her love for him without knowing that a relationship is established, and this though he will not allow himself to respond or indeed wish to respond. He had a strong natural desire for women, and this he knew, but he would not yield to it. He had remained virgin in spite of much teasing and ribaldry among his fellow revolutionists, who took women wherever they went and left them behind. Sejin, for example, who was like a brother to him, had often argued women with him.

“It is dangerous for you to continue a virgin,” Sejin declared. He was a tall slim young man from a seacoast village, and he could swim in any sea and dive deeper than any woman abalone diver. “You are defenseless, you saint among men! You are afraid of love, but the only defense against the one great love is women-women-women! To have many makes it impossible to have only one. It is the one who is the tyrant. If you have many women they are all your slaves, rivals, and therefore eager to please.”

“Not so,” Yul-chun had replied. “A single love may be a tragedy but it is not a day-to-day, bit-by-bit destruction.”

“Ah, you innocent,” Sejin had retorted. “I agree that we should not marry. None of us should marry when we have a revolution to make. But it is not we who are destroyed, it is love that is destroyed. I daresay I could love one woman and write poetry and live obsessed, as you will do if you are not careful, but my safety is that when I think of many women, I lose the possibility of the one — and the dream. Thus I keep my freedom. You still dream, and even your dream enslaves you.”

Yul-chun had listened but remained unchanged, reflecting that it was Tolstoy who decided his mind and gave him strength to deny all women, even Hanya. He had been inspired by Tolstoy and when he discovered that Tolstoy had created his greatest novels only when he had ceased to occupy his time and his energy with women, he had determined to renounce women from the first. Why waste any part of his life? Nevertheless, he was too honest not to acknowledge to himself that in spite of resolution he found himself curious about women and what their place was, however he might decide that they had no place in his individual life. In the society of the future it was scarcely sensible to believe that a woman could be allowed only to do the slight work of her own household and her own few children. The problems and labors of the times were immense, and was it just that all solutions and labors should devolve on men while women were permitted to busy themselves with the small affairs of single households? But why was he thinking of women? He would not think of any woman. Since he had sacrificed everything for his country, he would also sacrifice desire.

… He walked northward through the mountains to Antung, a city at the mouth of the Yalu River but on the soil of Manchuria. Here he planned to rest for a while and learn of what was taking place in Russia before he made the long journey northwest. Since Antung was a city where many travelers met, he would hear news. He arrived at Antung in early summer and found many Koreans there, some in families eking out their livelihood as petty merchants and traders, but most of them solitary men like himself, restless and searching for a means to free their country. All advised Yul-chun against going to Russia.

“Go to China,” they told him. “The revolution is finished in Russia. In China it is only beginning. The Chinese leader, Sun Yat-sen, has invited Russians to help him, since Western powers have refused him help, and you will see their tactics. We Koreans are more like the Chinese than like the Russians.”

He followed this advice and after staying long enough in Antung to learn what he wanted to know, he packed his knapsack again and went deeper into Manchuria. In Manchuria he stayed with the escaped soldiers, and found them not dismayed by the failure of the Mansei Demonstration. Instead they were training themselves for the next world war, which they said was surely coming, for Japan was making ready to conquer China now while confusion was increasing in that country. A great new revolution, they told him, was shaping itself like a thunderhead out of the south.

“Sun Yat-sen needs an army,” they told Yul-chun, “and Russia is training Chinese soldiers for him. When all is ready they will make a second attack, marching along the Yangtse River to the southern capital of Nanking and then they will seize the country and set up a new government.”

Yul-chun listened to this and much more, and then without telling anyone where he went he headed south again to China.

… It was nearly winter before he reached Peking and there he was halted by a fierce storm, the wind blowing out of the cold desert and driving the snow in drifts along the country roads. Half frozen and his money gone, he was compelled to stay for a while in the city and he sought out the Koreans he had once known and who had fled there. Most of them were gone, some killed in the south, some killed or in prison in Korea, but he found one whom he had known, a monk who came first from the Chung Dong Monastery on the island of Kanghwa and later had gone as a mendicant monk to the Yu-lin Monastery in the Diamond Mountains.

The monk was also a Kim but not of Andong and he remembered Yul-chun from earlier days when they had worked together in their own country. Now when Yul-chun stood at the door of the small, poor house where Kim and his fellows lived in the Chinese part of the city, they cried out in joy each at the sight of the other.

“Come in, come in!” Kim cried. He shut the door quickly to bar the great drifts of snow that blew in with Yul-chun. “Say not one word until you have taken off those wet garments,” he went on, “and I daresay you have had nothing to eat all day.”

“I am empty as a bag,” Yul-chun confessed, “and a penniless beggar besides.”

As he changed into dry garments and ate the hot noodles that Kim prepared, they talked, exchanging news and hopes. In the year of Mansei, the young monk had become a member of the Monks’ Independence Movement, and with his fellows, some three or four hundred, they too had printed a declaration of independence. He had traveled among villages, wearing his monk’s robes, but when he came to the capital he was too late for the day of Mansei, and he was seized by the police and put into prison for a year. When he was free again he went on with his work. While he was in the capital he fell in with the young men and women who were reading Russian books, and so he read Karl Marx, for which Hegel, he said, had prepared him.

Last year, with seven fellow monks, he came here to Peking so that he might learn more about revolution, but after a few months, five of the seven monks returned to the monastery, where they said life was more pure and more safe than among these revolutionaries.

“What shall we do now?” Kim asked.

Yul-chun, remembering his printing press, made reply. “We must publish a magazine.”

“There has been one called The Wild Plain.”

“We will make no poetry,” Yul-chun said bluntly. “We will call ours Revolution.”

Long into the night they talked and they ate again and at last they went to sleep. Before he slept, however, Yul-chun made up his mind that he would stay in Peking at least for a time and return to his best loved work, that of creating new literature for the revolution, his home here with his fellows. For this he needed only a pallet for bed, and he had in his knapsack his lacquer rice bowl and the silver chopsticks and spoon which his grandfather had given him a hundred days after he was born. He was happy again, safe among his kind, and he set himself to his chosen work.

“You make yourself blind!”

The sound of Hanya’s voice struck a blow across his brain. His hand, holding the chisel, hung motionless above the stone. He did not turn his head, but he knew that she was crossing the brick floor, though her straw-sandaled feet made no sound. She came to his side and snatched the chisel from his hand.

“They told me you were doing this stupid thing,” she cried. “Do you imagine yourself a god? Can you make miracles?”

“Give it to me,” he muttered between his teeth.

He put out his hand to take the chisel from her but she held the tool behind her back.

“I would not believe it when they told me,” she went on with the same passion. “‘He is making himself blind,’ they said—‘writing the magazine with his own hand, all of it,’ they said, ‘and then carving the letters into stone—’”

“I am compelled to use lithograph because I can find no printing press in the city, at least none that I can buy,” he retorted.

“So you will be blind because there is no printing press in Peking that you can buy!” she mocked. She threw the chisel on the floor and took a magazine from the table of rough unpainted wood. “Thirty-two pages! Twice a month! How many copies?”

“We began with eight hundred, but now we have more than three thousand. It goes to our own country, but also to Manchuria, America, Hawaii, Siberia—”

“Be quiet!” she cried. And stooping she took up the chisel, and walking to the door she threw it as far as she could into the street.

He was too surprised to move, not imagining that she could do such a thing. Then he sprang at her and twisted her out of his way but she clung to him and would not let him go. Try as he would, he could not rid himself of her. Arms about his neck, legs around his thighs, she clung, catching his arms when he flailed at her, kicking him when he pulled away. They fought in silence, their breathing hard, their faces set in angry grimace, their eyes furious.

He was shocked at her strength. Passive he had always said women were, passive and negative, weak frail creatures at best, but this woman he had to fight as though she were a man. He paused for a moment to get his breath and she seized the instant to wrap her arms around him under his shoulders and then he felt her teeth bite into his neck.

“You — you tiger,” he panted. “You — you — dare to—”

“Your blood tastes sweet on my tongue,” she murmured against his neck.

And he felt her lips soft against the spot where an instant before he had felt her teeth. He stood motionless, suddenly aware that she was no longer fighting him. Her body relaxed, she lay against him, yielding, her face in the curve of his shoulder. She was drawing him down slowly, gently, and he felt his head swim. She reached out her hand and between thumb and finger she pinched the wick of the candle by whose light he had been working, and they were in darkness. In darkness she drew him down until they lay on the floor, she beneath him. His whole body was warm and fluid, his will gone, his entire being one swelling urge toward her.

… This was the story of their love thereafter. He yielded to her and he fought her. When she insisted that he must stop printing the magazine he declared that he was by nature a writer, and never so happy as when he wrote, and he was fortunate that the revolution needed writers. He insisted that he would never yield to her and daily he did yield to her until in desperation he decided to leave Peking and go south again. This he did because she told him one day that she would have a child.

He forbade her to come with him. “There will be war,” he told her. “It will be dangerous for you. And I must not be hampered by a pregnant woman. I would think of you instead of the battle.”

They had been living together for more than a year, here in Peking and in villages of North China and Manchuria to which they wandered from time to time, but he had never ceased to believe that it would be better if he were alone and to tell her so. When she said that a child was coming, her black eyes soft with joy and her whole being radiant, he felt a strange new anger against her, a surge of love mixed with hatred, and he cried out now, against her joy.

“You know I said we must not have a child! You use this trickery to compel me to think of you — you and the child — you divide me! I am to pity you and the helpless child. You make a triumph of it.”

She heard this, her eyes wide, and she looked at him as though she had never seen him before. “You are not a man,” she said, her very voice wondering. “I have not wanted to believe it, but now I know. You are not a man, and I have loved you, thinking you were a man, believing that in your heart you loved me.”

She studied his angry face, dwelling upon its every feature.

“How I have loved you,” she said, still wondering.

And with these words she turned and left him standing there in the room which for this short time she had made into a home.

… He waited for her through twenty-three days and nights and he could not believe that she would not come back. When day passed into night and night dragged endlessly toward dawn again, he began to understand that she was never coming back. Then he had himself to battle. He longed for her. He yearned to go in search of her. He dreamed of taking her with him to Korea to his father’s house and staying with her at least until the child was born. He had told her of that house and of his family. Lying quietly side by side in the night after they had made love, she had often asked him to tell her about his childhood. She asked him of every small thing, as though she herself had lived in that house.

“Did you sleep in the room next to the kitchen, or in the one next your father?”

“We spread our beds in whatever room we wished,” he explained, “but never in my father’s room. My tutor slept with my brother and me, after we no longer needed a nurse. My brother was a good child, but I was not good.”

She laughed when he said that. “You are still not good!”

“Yet it is I who am alive,” he retorted, “and my poor brother is dead.” For Yul-chun knew, as all Koreans knew, how his brother and Induk had met their end, and with them their daughter who would not be separated from her mother and so Induk had taken her to the Christian church that day.

“Prudent and careful and good, it was he whom they killed,” Yul-chun now reminded Hanya. “You see why I say a man should not have a wife and children?”

“Be quiet,” she told him.

It was her usual rejoinder when he said what she did not like to hear. It had come to such a pass of love between them that what he had once said seriously he said at last in play, for he believed she knew that he loved her although he would never tell her so. Part of the play, or so he thought, was her pleading to be told and his refusal.

“Tell me you love me — tell me only once so that I have it to remember!” This was her plea.

“I will not,” he always replied, “for if I do, I have no defense against you. You will get so far inside me that I shall never be able to root you out. Words are like iron nails hammered into hard wood.”

“You do love me?” she coaxed.

“What do you think?” he asked, biting back the words that would say he loved her.

“I think you do,” she said in the same soft voice, “and since you do, why not tell me so?”

“Ah ha,” he had cried, “you nearly caught me, but I am too clever for you.”

So he had never said he loved her and now she was gone and he could not tell her if he would. He waited seven days more, sleepless with longing, his body demanding her presence, but he would not yield to his own demand. If he went after her, then he would never be free again. He rose one night in the small hours, desperate with weariness and longing, and he packed his knapsack and set out for the south on foot and alone.

… He traveled three thousand miles, on foot and on horseback, and lived through many months before he reached the city of Canton in South China. He lingered here and there on the way to see how the people lived and whether there could be reason to expect revolution, for he was too just by nature to believe that they should be compelled, nor would he allow himself to use these Chinese land people to strengthen the cause of freedom for his own people. He was not able to make up his mind as he walked the country roads and passed through villages and slept in small inns. The people were a cheerful, cruel people, accepting hardship and dealing hardly with any whom they thought unfriendly, too gay for suffering, although they spoke robustly against the times, grieving that they had no ruler in Peking now that revolutionists had destroyed the imperial throne.

“Oh, that we had our Old Buddha again,” they told him. “She was our father and mother. While she lived, we knew we were safe. Now who knows what will happen to us?”

They spoke of the Empress Tzu Hsi. She had died many years ago, yet such had been her power over their minds and hearts that he came upon villages where the people did not know she was dead and when he told them, they were afraid. The difference between the Chinese and his own people was that the Chinese were still free. If they had no government, as indeed they had not, for Sun Yat-sen with all his followers had not been able to set up a new government in the vast and ancient country, at least the people were free to govern themselves according to family tradition and habit, which they did, so that the country was at peace except for the war lords battling among themselves for a chance to rule, and the revolutionists who were young and full of discontents. In spite of all, the land people farmed their fields and the sea people caught fish, and the river people lived in boats, crowding the canals and rivers and the coastal towns. He doubted much that the vast continent and the countless people could be roused to revolution or indeed whether they should be roused. Their lives were stable in custom and tradition and they were not starving and no one oppressed them except here and there a greedy landlord. He heard laughter and lively wit in the teashops where men gathered, and children were fat, and women were busy. Against whom then could they rebel? They asked only to be let alone, and more than once some old man or young would quote to him the ancient saying of Lao-tse, that the governing of a people was like the cooking of a small fish, it should be done lightly.

The further he traveled the more he marveled that one country could be so vast and contain such variety in landscape and people. Desert in the north and northwest spread into rich plains, and here the fields were wide and the land people grew wheat and dry crops and they ate wheaten bread and millet and they were tall and fair-skinned and they reeked of garlic, for the favorite food of the countryfolk was a thin sheet of unleavened bread rolled around stalks of garlic. The northern cities were busy with shops of every kind, the markets plentiful and the streets wide. The people wore cotton garments, in winter padded with cotton, and if one wore silk, he covered it with a cotton outer robe.

In the central part, above and below the Yangtse, a river as wide as a sea for a thousand miles, where steamships of many countries came and went and foreign warships kept watch at treaty ports, the country grew mountainous, but not as his country was. Here the mountains were green and gentle and the valleys were spread in fertile plains between. The people were tall but not so tall as those in the north, and there were many cities, richly crowded with shops. The people were less simple, too, than those of the north, indeed they were often crafty and worldly, even shrewd, but they were gay and full of talk and laughter, the women lively and free in coming and going as they liked, except for the ladies in rich men’s houses who stayed inside their walls.

One whole winter he spent in the city of Shanghai, for here he found some three thousand Koreans gathered and he soon made a place for himself among those who printed a magazine called Young Korea. Yet again he discovered his compatriots divided, and this time into two main groups, those who still favored Americans — and these were for the most part Christians and educated in the United States, and believed in nonviolent revolution — and the second group who were for the Russian method of revolution and were all for direct attack against the Japanese now ruling in Korea. Both groups received money secretly from Korean patriots in Korea and the exiles elsewhere.

Yul-chun lived at first among those who still believed in Americans, and from them he learned much that he had not known of those people who had befriended his country through their missionaries and then had betrayed it through their politicians. He hated them for the betrayal, but as he learned of them through the leader of Koreans who had spent many years in the United States, it was not the history or the nature of the Americans that moved him to relinquish some of this hatred. Instead he was moved by their songs. While he was in school in the United States, this leader had learned many songs, especially the songs of the black people who were slaves there, and he had returned to Korea with these songs in his soul and had taught them to schoolchildren. Now, exiled in the vast, heartless city of Shanghai, he taught the songs to his fellow exiles. In the evenings as they gathered in the shabby room they had rented as their meeting place, these Koreans sang the songs of the African slaves in America.

Yul-chun at first refused to sing, partly because he did not know the songs, but also because he feared anything which might soften his heart so that he could feel pain. Yet in spite of his determination, his heart did soften as he listened to the voices of his fellow exiles, singing the mournful music of slaves. He was haunted by the melodies in the songs, “Old Black Joe,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground.” Melancholy music, tragic words, which somehow comforted their sad hearts, and one night Yul-chun found himself weeping as he sang.

This weeping frightened him. He had not wept since he was a child in his father’s house and he had long believed that he could never weep again, for he had seen too much of torture and danger and death for weeping. He resolved that he must put such music far away from him, knowing how music could seduce his people. And to this end he left these exiles and joined the terrorists, a small secret group here in the city who had dedicated themselves to killing and destruction.

It was not the first time that Yul-chun had been with them. His childhood tutor, the gentlest of men, who had trained him in the nonviolence of Confucius and in the merciful compassion of Buddha, when he joined the Tonghak, had become the most reckless of terrorists. It seemed that this kindly and mild young man was compelled to make a sacrifice of himself, and again and again he had committed the most ruthless acts. He had emigrated to Siberia and had formed the terrorist group called The Red Flag, and from there he had gone to Manchuria to take part in the assassination of Prince Ito, after which he himself was captured and put to death.

Now in Shanghai Yul-chun approached the second terrorist group, the Yi Nul Tan, or Society of Brave Justice. He was with them but not of them — not yet. He could not as yet commit himself wholly to death and destruction as the only weapons of revolution and especially when among these singlehearted young men he found division. For in this winter of the Christian year 1924, the Society of Brave Justice was split into three parts, Nationalist, Anarchist and Communist. He watched this division with growing cynicism, and the more because the most violent of the terrorists were also the most corrupt as men. They wore western dress, they oiled their hair, they made a cult of their appearance, and since most of them were tall and handsome young men, women sought them, and among these the most passionate were women of mixed Russian-Korean ancestry, the daughters of exiled patriots in Siberia.

One night in early spring Yul-chun walked in the park in the French section of Shanghai where the exiles lived, and he saw how these members of the Society of Brave Justice made rendezvous there with the women, how boldly they exchanged the acts of physical love, how wild these exchanges were and how promiscuous and how quickly forgotten. The fires in his own flesh were strong enough to be stirred and he could understand how young and desperate men, daily face to face with death, were compelled to find relief in brief and violent passion. But this was not his way. His eyes were on the goal of independence for his people and a wise and sensible plan for life. It was time for him to be on his way again, therefore, and he left Shanghai before the spring grew warm, and went south again.

… He arrived back in the city of Canton in the autumn of the year, at the time of the rice harvest. The fields were gay with cheerful harvesters, the crops were good and food would be plenty for the winter. Again he doubted that these Chinese people could be stirred to rebellion unless there was a war from outside, which was to say unless Japanese military men again dreamed their dreams of empire. Then he reminded himself that he was here for a greater cause than this. He was here to find those who could help him make Korea free.

… “You have come at last. And alone?”

This was Kim’s greeting and question. When Yul-chun had given up the magazine at Hanya’s insistence, after he had been ill with a heavy cough, Kim had left Peking in some disgust because, he said, Hanya had spoiled Yul-chun for a revolutionist. With several others he had come to Canton, they had rented two rooms in a house which was in a narrow crooked street where workers in ivory lived and plied their crafts. Tusks of ivory came whole from the jungles of Burma and Malaya and were sold to the craftsmen, who cut them and carved the pieces into ivory gods and goddesses and figures of men and women, into boxes and jewelry and every sort of object for use and beauty. Among these many families the exiles came and went unnoticed, all wearing Chinese dress.

“Alone,” Yul-chun replied.

He threw down his knapsack and shook off his worn sandals. The soles were in shreds and he had a stone bruise under his left instep. He sat down, nursing his foot in his hand, while Kim stood looking at him.

“Did she leave you or did you leave her?”

“She left me,” Yul-chun said shortly. “And I did not go after her,” he added.

“You look hungry,” Kim said next.

“I am not hungry,” Yul-chun replied in the same short voice. “I have been well fed all the way, especially in Shanghai.”

“Then you have another hunger,” Kim said, laughing. “Easily satisfied, comrade! Though how you could leave Shanghai with that sort of hunger — but we have many comrades here, too.”

“Who could believe you were ever a monk!”

Yul-chun nursed his painful foot as he spoke, and looked about the bare room. “Can you put a few boards on two benches for another bed?”

“I have been expecting you,” Kim said. “I have kept space for you here. No woman could satisfy you forever. I knew that I had only to wait.”

“How many Koreans are in Canton?” Yul-chun asked.

“Only about sixty,” Kim replied, “and they belong to the Yi Nul Tan.”

“Again! I have only just left them in Shanghai.”

“Russian advisers here are teaching them new methods, and it may be we shall need them in our own country when the time comes.”

“I have no confidence now in terrorists,” Yul-chun retorted. “They enjoy their work too much — and they leave fury behind them.”

“We can use them,” Kim said. He was dragging his bed to one side of the room and arranging a place for the other bed.

“Have you joined the Communists?” Yul-chun asked.

“Yes! If I am a revolutionist, let me be complete! And you?”

“No. I must be convinced that it is the best means for getting independence.”

“You cannot know until you become Communist yourself. Faith first, and then conviction.”

“That is the difference between us. You must have a faith. Not I! I have no faith in anything or anyone. And I am convinced that the Japanese will never be content with our small mountainous country. What they have been saying ever since the time of Hideyoshi is still true. For them Korea is only a stepping-stone to Asia. And now that I have seen China with my own eyes, the richness of its soil, their great cities, the skills of its people, I am convinced that whoever holds China holds Asia — and perhaps some day the world.”

He spoke with eloquent energy, and Kim listened, enchanted. “You should talk instead of write!”

But Yul-chun was not finished and did not hear. He went on, his eyes blazing his thoughts. “Who can prevent this island dream? Who but us, an independent Korea, blocking the aggression? Who else sees the danger? China is no more than a watchdog, what has she done to prevent Japan? What has any other power done?”

“You should be a terrorist, my friend,” Kim said. “You would make a good one.”

And he rose and went to the open door and stood looking out into the growing darkness.

Behind him Yul-chun sat in silence. Then, overcome with exhaustion sudden and profound, he threw himself on the bed.

… “The real war,” Yul-chun complained to Kim, “is the war we wage among ourselves.”

For Yul-chun, after only a few months, discovered that the Korean revolutionaries continued here the feuds they had brought with them from their own country. Those who believed in terror were against those who believed in nonviolence. Those who came from the north were against those who came from the south. Some were Communist and believed that only a total change in ideology could save their people; some were against Communism, saying that an ideology was only an obstacle when independence was the goal. Those who had come from Manchuria separated themselves from those who came from Korea and both were against those who came from Siberia. Beyond such internal division among his compatriots, Yul-chun discovered the enmities between the sects and clans and the Chinese groups, especially the single-minded Chinese Communists who, under their Russian advisers, felt that they should control all, and were cruel to those who did not follow them.

“We destroy ourselves,” he continued despondently.

They worked all day at their chosen tasks, Yul-chun again at writing and printing, but at night he and Kim and many others gathered in a large old teashop which they had rented for their meetings. The numbers of exiles grew daily until now hundreds had come to join the Chinese revolutionaries. In a few months there were eight hundred Koreans alone, some four hundred from the Army of Independence in Manchuria, a hundred and more from Siberia, and the rest from Korea. They were all young, under forty years of age, and some as young as fourteen and fifteen. Among them a lad name Yak-san attached himself to Yul-chun, and the two became friends. This boy had put aside the name his family had given him and had chosen the name of a famous terrorist, Kim Yak-san, who had once tried to kill a Japanese Governor-General in Seoul, by the name of Saito. According to legend, the terrorist had borrowed the garments and the mailbag of a follower who earned his living as a postman. In the bag he hid seven bombs and on a day when he heard the Governor-General was to meet in his office with other high Japanese officials, he went there and threw the seven bombs into the room. The officials had already left, but the bombs destroyed much of the building and other Japanese were killed. Meanwhile the terrorist disguised himself again, this time as a fisherman, while the police looked for him in every part of the country. After a few days he escaped to Antung and from there he went to Manchuria.

When the lad Yak-san heard Yul-chun’s family name he went to him eagerly.

“Sir, are you Kim of the Kim Yak-san?” he inquired.

“I am not,” Yul-chun replied. “I am a Kim of Andong, and I am not a terrorist.”

The lad’s face fell, but he stayed with Yul-chun, nevertheless. For Yul-chun, Yak-san was like the younger brother he remembered in his father’s house, and for Yak-san, Yul-chun was both elder brother and father. Yak-san’s father, the boy told Yul-chun, had been killed by police in a northern city of Korea. He was an only child and, left alone, he had joined others who escaped to Manchuria where he heard the story of the terrorist. With the terrorist he went as far as Shanghai where he had lost him.

“He did not love me,” the lad said bravely. “He told me not to follow him, and when I said I could not help it, he moved to another part of the city and I could never find him, though I tried for many days.”

“He could not love anyone,” Yul-chun said to comfort him. “He was afraid that if he let himself love he would not be able to kill.”

The boy looked thoughtful for a while. Then he spoke. “May I follow you?”

“Certainly you may,” Yul-chun replied.

Now in the teashop he sat beside Yul-chun on a low stool and listened to all that was said.

“We must achieve unity, at least in the core of our group,” Yul-chun went on. “We should gather together those who believe in unity as we do and make the core.”

“And thereby create only another clique,” Kim retorted.

“To be a terrorist is most simple,” Yul-tan, the present leader of the terrorists, announced.

“When you have killed everyone,” Yul-chun argued, “what will you have? Terrorists who will then begin to kill one another!”

“Nevertheless,” the terrorist maintained, “we are the most unified of all the groups. We agree among ourselves that all our enemies must be killed, one by one if necessary. Houses must be burned, palaces destroyed, governments overthrown, armies deceived.”

As usual, they talked far into the night. Indeed, there were times when Yul-chun believed that talk was their chief occupation. Yet through the interchange of thought and argument slowly, as form is shaped from stone, he perceived that a certain unity was built.

After a year of such argument and still against his doubts, Yul-chun at last accepted the terrorists as the center of this unity, since they were the only ones who agreed upon one simple principle of action, that of destruction, and it might be true that destruction there must be before construction could take place. He would not accept them without compromise, however. He demanded that the terrorists promise, for their part, to give up their name of Yi Nul Tan and take instead the name of Korean National Independence. Through this core of unity Yul-chun maintained connection with all other Korean independence groups in many countries, in preparation for the day when their country could be free. That day, it was now finally agreed, could only be after the next great world war, already appearing upon the horizons of time.

He might have grown a heart as hard as stone during these years had it not been for the lad Yak-san, and two others, a man and wife who worked together in the group. Yak-san followed him like a young faithful servant, listening to what he said, obeying his every wish, and watchful that he ate his food and drank tea when the day was hot. Unwilling as Yul-chun was to allow himself to feel emotion, yet he could not but be touched by the loyalty of this lonely orphan boy. Something of the old family feeling stirred in him again and he wondered if his own child had been a son. He would be beyond babyhood now, a boy of four years. Had Hanya told him who his father was and who his grandfather? He had never heard of her since she walked away that day in Peking, he had not received a letter, nor did he know where she was. He might not have thought of her except that among those with whom he worked there were also these two, husband and wife by the name of Choi, who taught him unwittingly by their devotion what love could be between man and woman. Both were Korean, the woman a young widow whose old merchant husband had been killed on the day of the Mansei. The man was the son of a landowner, and he had been in the streets and part of the battle when he came upon the young woman, trying to lift the body of her dead husband. He had helped her, and together they brought the dead man into his house, and later he helped her to find a burial place and to buy a coffin. When the funeral ceremonies were over, he asked the young widow if she had loved her husband and she had said simply that she had not, but she wished to do her duty to him nevertheless. He asked if this duty meant that she would always be a widow and she replied that she would like to love a man. Moreover, she had no family by marriage since her husband’s parents were dead and he had been an only child. Nor had she children, and her own family had moved away to Siberia. She had begged her husband to go there, too, but he had refused, saying that since he was only a merchant and his business good, it was not likely that he would be mistaken for a rebel. On that day of his death, however, he had been so mistaken and a Japanese soldier had shot him through the head because he went into the street to see where the crowds were going.

All this Choi heard with lively interest and when she had finished he asked her if she could love him. She had looked at him thoughtfully, his tall frame, his handsome head and brilliant dark eyes, and then she said that she thought she could love him. He took her by the hand and led her away and they were married by the new code and had remained together in perfect happiness ever since, living first in Siberia and Manchuria and then coming south to help the Chinese.

These two, as he saw them always together, persuaded Yul-chun into new reflection upon marriage and he allowed himself to remember Hanya and to wonder about her. In his desire to remain free he had asked her nothing about herself. Whatever she had told him had come from her in the few times of peace between them. At night after love, she had curled herself against him and out of her quiet would come now and again fragments of her memories.

“Such peace as this I used to feel when I climbed the mountain behind my father’s house,” she told him. “To climb, to climb, and then to reach the crest of the mountain and know I could go no higher — that was peace. I lie on my back upon the rock and I gaze into the blue sky. Up there the sky is very blue.”

He listened and did not hear, drowsy with his own peace.

“My father was shot,” she said one day.

She was making duk, a steamed bread such as one could not buy in Peking. He had been impatient when she spent time on such cookery, but now he remembered with a reluctant tenderness how she had bought glutinous rice and pounded it to flour and steamed it in a sealed jar, and then pounded it again and rolled it out and cut it into circles which she filled with sweetened crushed beans, and how carefully she had brushed each cake with sesame oil. He had complained when she brought the cakes for him to eat to celebrate a holiday, but she had laughed at him.

“You eat them — you eat them,” she had exulted.

“My stomach is stronger than my will, and that pleases you but it does not please me,” he had retorted.

He had blamed her in his heart because this was, he thought, another of her wiles to imprison him in a house and home. Only later did he recall that she had said her father was shot, and he was about to inquire of her how it had come about, and did not for fear she might bind him to her through sympathy and her need of comfort. Her father had been some sort of official in the Regent’s court, that he knew, for she had a seal that had belonged to him, a piece of jade carved in Chinese letters giving his name and rank, and she kept this jade with her, tied in a square of silk. She had two brothers, he also knew, for sometimes she spoke of their games together in a large garden somewhere and how she was stronger than they, and this made them angry.

“I am too tall,” she sighed.

When he had not replied to this, she looked at him sidewise, her beautiful eyes longing.

“Do you not think I am too tall?” she had coaxed.

He denied his own impulse to lie. “I have never thought of it,” he said.

Now with time and distance between them, he wished that he had told her the truth, that she was not too tall, since he was the taller. And one day, consumed with longing for her, he asked his old friend Choi if marriage was not a hindrance to him, and hoped to hear him say it was.

“Not only in matter of time that a woman demands,” Yul-chun added, “but in matter of the occupation of a man’s thoughts, the division in him between devotion to his country and to her.”

Choi laughed. “You spend more time thinking about women than I do, I swear! No, my brother, when you have a woman of your own, you no longer think of women. You do not think even of her. She is simply yourself, in you and with you. She makes you free. Moreover, she shares your work, if she is the right woman. Then, too, it is pleasant to have your clothes clean and your food cooked, and she takes care of your money so that it is not spent foolishly. You are always better off when you have a good wife.”

Yul-chun put such replies in his heart and slowly his heart changed his mind and he ceased to resist the thought of Hanya. Some day, he even thought, half dreaming, he might go north again and find her and his child. Not yet — not yet, whatever his longing, for he must stay by the revolution until in triumph he and his comrades entered the imperial city of Peking. Then he would return to his own country, for with their help, whom he had helped, his people too could be freed.

He saw Yak-san grow from a child to a youth, hard and brave and ruthless. The young were always ruthless, and Yul-chun saw himself again in Yak-san. At fifteen Yak-san had a new hero, the terrorist Wu Geng-nin, who led the attempt to kill the Japanese General Tanaka when he came to Shanghai to continue his plans for empire after he had written the memorial of demands upon China. The terrorists had arranged for attack from three directions as Tanaka came down from the ship which brought him from Japan. Wu was to shoot him with a pistol. If he failed, Kim Yak-san was to attack with a bomb. If the bomb did not kill, a third terrorist, He Chun-am, was to hack him with a sword. An American woman passenger, however, came down the gangway before Tanaka and when Wu fired she became afraid and grasped Tanaka. He, seeing what was happening, pretended to fall dead, and Wu, believing he had killed the enemy, turned to escape. He leaped into a taxicab but the driver would not drive him, and Wu threw him into the street and tried to drive himself but not knowing how to drive, was arrested before he went far by British police, who gave him to the French, since he lived with the other exiles in the French concession, and they in turn gave him to the Japanese. He was locked in a tower with several Japanese, one of whom was an anarchist. A Japanese servant girl pitied Wu and brought him a steel knife and he cut the lock from the door and with the anarchist he escaped to the house of an American friend who hid him until he could get to Canton to tell his story.

The young Yak-san sat at his feet, not only for the sake of Wu himself but because his other hero, Kim Yak-san, had been part of the plot. Wu was kind to the youth, and unknown to Yul-chun, he argued for terrorism to Yak-san, so that Yak-san’s heart was divided between the two men who befriended him.

In the next year the founder of the Chinese revolution, Sun Yat-sen, died in Peking and all revolutionists were cast into deep sorrow and gloom. Yet what could they do but persist in what had been planned? With Russian advisers an army was built under the headship of a young soldier, Chiang Kai-shek, who came back from military training in Japan and Russia.

A second revolution was soon in readiness, its armies trained to march north to the Yangtse River and proceed down that river to Nanking where a new capital was to be set in the heart of the ancient city. Yul-chun, now detailed to make translations of Marxist books from the Japanese, began to doubt more and more whether the Chinese revolutionists understood fully the hardships that lay ahead if they were to fulfill this dream of conquering their vast continental country. Their people were still firm in old ways, they were not yet discontented enough for revolt, and family tradition took the place of government. They were poor but they did not know it. Their landlords oppressed them but not to despair, or if to despair, they rose up and murdered the landlord with knives and pitchforks. Yul-chun perceived that his own countrymen understood reforms far better than the Chinese revolutionists did, because of the long oppressions of the Japanese in their own country, forcing Koreans to rebel, and because many young Koreans had been educated in Japan, where they had learned of anarchy and Karl Marx.

In an early spring the Second Revolution set forth on the journey northward, Kim, the ex-monk, still irrepressibly full of optimism and faith in mankind, among them.

“We will help our Chinese brothers, and then they will help us,” he told Yul-chun as they packed their knapsacks.

Yul-chun could only smile. His faith in the Chinese was dim, and he was no longer an optimist even about revolutions. On the last night before they were to leave the city he did not take part in the meeting of celebration. Instead he went to see three foreigners. One was an English labor leader, Thomas Mann by name though he was not related to the German writer. He was an old man, cheerful and in the loneliness of age affectionate with all the revolutionists whatever their group. Now when he saw Yul-chun at his door he took him by the arm and drew him into the small room which was his home.

“Come and have a cup of tea,” he coaxed. “Good English tea with a bit of sugar and milk. And I’ve some Huntley biscuits from England.”

Yul-chun sat down on a chair beside the small iron grate of coals. He drank the English tea which reminded him of Tibetan buttered tea he had drunk in Manchuria, and he listened for an hour to the old man’s rambling, casual talk of how the English people had achieved independence under their own kings. “Killing a king only when absolutely necessary, you know,” he said, chuckling. “In an odd sort of English way we rather like them, you know! It was our own government, after all, and we shaped it into a democracy. It wasn’t easy — Have another biscuit!”

Yul-chun, his school English taught by Americans, was puzzled by the strong English accent, but he could follow, and so he was moved to trust the benign old man, at least to trust his good heart, if not his mind, invincibly hopeful in his old age.

He was not so sure of the American, Earl Browder, whom he next sought. He had heard him make speeches against American imperialism and while they were clear and easy enough to comprehend, and were much applauded, yet Yul-chun felt an instinctive distrust of a man who accused his own government while he was in a foreign land and among foreigners from many countries. He watched Browder as they sat together in a hotel room. The man had the look of a scholar, but scholar or not, Yul-chun resolved never to trust an American again. As for Borodin, whom he visited last, this man was a short, stocky Russian, middle-aged, slow in speech, practical. He looked like a successful businessman rather than an ardent revolutionist, a man with a mind for organization, a father to the young enthusiastic childlike men whom he led. The youthful Chinese trusted this Russian, but for Yul-chun trust in any Russian was impossible. Too long Russians had been on Korean soil, too many plans they had laid for possession. Yes, the Czar was dead, but did a country change its soul because it changed a ruler?

He returned to the room he still shared with Kim and found that Yak-san had finished packing his knapsack for him and had gone to bed.

… What might he have become, Yul-chun sometimes wondered, had he not kept within himself the smoldering fire of his hope that some day he would find Hanya and return with her to his own country? He dreamed how it would be, and he set the dream into words for Yak-san sometimes, when they were encamped before battle. When others slept and he kept himself awake from duty, he would talk to Yak-san thus:

“When all this weary fighting is over, when the cause is won, then we will go home, you and I, to my father’s house. Somewhere on the way we will find my wife and my son, and together we will all go home. First we will rest a few days, say for a month, and then we will take up war again, but for our own and in our own country.”

Home was now the word that held the dream, and he would not let himself think of it except at such times or in the night after the day’s bitter warfare. For the year was only one long war. He was proud of his countrymen. They fought with dashing bravery and dauntless leadership. They were eloquent in persuasion of the landfolk and city dwellers among whom they marched and the Chinese generals sent Chinese-speaking Koreans first to prepare the way. The new revolutionary army swept northward, victory upon victory, they reached the Yangtse River in central China, and still victorious, marched on to Nanking.

Then they were betrayed. Their leader went past the city, leaving it to his second in command, while he went with his own army to Shanghai in secret to set up a counterrevolutionary government. The news came at the very hour of this triumph, when the city gates were battered down after three days of siege, and the city taken.

It was not to be believed. They looked at one another, unbelieving. They gathered in crowds in captured buildings to talk. It was true, nevertheless, and when they were compelled to believe, the armies retreated up the river to Wuhan, there to set up a government of their own, and with them went every Korean exile, except those who were killed in battle.

But Yul-chun began to draw apart from the revolution. He knew that sooner or later he must leave the Chinese. Cruelty — cruelty was what drove him away, and hardened though he was, he was not cruel. He saw Chinese killing Chinese, “purges,” they were called, but for him purges were murders, young men, young girls, accused by rightists of being leftists, landfolk and merchants accused by leftists of being rightists. In one day, in one hour, within the space of a few minutes, he made the decision. The day was hot, the air humid and heavy, and the men were as quarrelsome as angry bees in midsummer. A mighty battle was looming, for the great city of Changsha was next to be taken. All were anxious and discouraged as they faced battle for, although the Russian advisers had directed every battle, the revolutionary army had not won a victory since the split in Nanking. Moreover a young revolutionist, Mao Tse-tung, rejected by the Communist Party because he had declared that Russian tactics would not serve in China where the mass of the people were landfolk and where there was no true proletariat, this man now came forward and declared that no battles could be won without the help of the landfolk. Scholar and peasant, according to Chinese history, he declared, could overthrow a dynasty, but separately they could never win a battle. He predicted failure in Changsha, and this frightened the revolutionists while it angered the Russians.

Alas, the prophecy was fulfilled. The men fought bravely, but they could not prevail against the landfolk who swarmed in from the countryside in all four directions to aid, not the revolutionists who announced themselves as their saviors, but the old magistrate and all his court. Many revolutionists were killed, among them not a few Koreans, but this alone would not have changed Yul-chun’s mind. What compelled him was that in retreat to the northwest the revolutionists in angry despair grew mad with despair and they fell upon any hapless peasant who came into sight.

Thus Yul-chun saw before his own eyes the monstrous murder of an entire family in their own farmhouse. Innocent and prudent, they had stayed at home and barred their gate. The retreating men paused to rest, and seeing that the farmhouse was larger than most, they beat on the gate. The family within hesitated long enough to draw a few breaths, wondering, doubtless, whether they should pull back the bar. In that instant the irritable anger of the men burst forth. They broke down the gate and swarmed into the house and destroyed it utterly. The old grandparents they hanged from the beams of the roof, the peasant and his wife they shot and butchered, the young daughters were raped by many men and left bleeding and dead, and the sons were cut to pieces in savage joy, except for one small boy, whom Yul-chun saved, and in this fashion.

He had at first tried to prevent the men by reasonable persuasion, but the soldiers were beyond reason and their ears were deaf. He stood helplessly by, and yet he forced himself to stay, for he must know what these men were with whom he had cast his lot. He must know the worst, for what they did now they might do again and again if ever they came to power. Thus he saw the full horror of what they did and what they could do. Cruelty was in their blood and being. Suffering, perhaps, had made them cruel, but cruel they were, whatever the reason, and as he saw, he changed. No, these too were not to be trusted, and all the fine talk of saving the people could not make him trust them. Whatever the government, it could be measured only by the quality of the men who administered it, and these men could not be good rulers.

“Come,” he said to Yak-san who had stood near him, taking no part but staring his eyes out while he watched.

They were about to turn away when a child fell at their feet, an infant boy, naked and bleeding, tossed there on the point of a bayonet by some soldier. Yul-chun stooped and took the child into his arms and ran, Yak-san following, and in the noise and madness none saw them go.

“What to do with this child!” Yul-chun exclaimed to Yak-san.

“We must leave him with some farm family,” Yak-san suggested.

This they did that same evening. They came to a small quiet village beyond the range of battle, and Yul-chun, asking for shelter for the night, told the story of the child to the villagers as they sat on their benches around the village threshing floor in the cool of twilight. When he asked if any one of them would accept the child, a young farmwife came forward.

“Look at me,” she said, pointing at her bosom. “My breasts are dripping full of milk, for my own child died two days ago of the ten-day fever, and there is no one to drink my milk.”

Her jacket was wet with the milk overflowing from her bursting breasts, and she took the child and let him suckle.

Those were the years of a strange imprisonment. Mountains were the walls of the prison, and they, the vanquished, were the prisoners. At first Yul-chun fell into an empty despair. What could be useful to him in this wild region? He was cut off from the mainstream of the revolution, even from life itself, and far beyond the reach of the underground messengers with whom until now he had maintained connection, however infrequent. Nor was the despair only his. The remnant that was left of the revolutionary armies after the long march north sank into a desperate weariness of mind and spirit far beyond the fatigue of body. Weeks and months passed and in the bitter cold of the winter they did little beyond forage and beg for food and fuel. They sheltered themselves in a deserted temple, they built huts of mats and scraps of wood and tin, they lived in caves, they slept by day as by night to preserve their feeble strength.

So it was until spring came and brought renewal and awakening. They began to stir, they looked at one another in a daze, they went out to find green weeds for vegetables, and to mix with the millet which was their chief food. And Yul-chun was the first to come to himself. By luck he had found shelter with a Chinese farm family, as poor as any; the house had two small rooms shared with the ox, two pigs, and a few hens. Poor as they were, they had a lively interest in Yul-chun because he came from another country and he whiled away the long dark days when snow fell by telling them stories of his people and telling them, too, of all that had taken place here in their own country, of which events they were altogether ignorant, since they could not read, nor, had they been able to read, were there any newspapers.

Yet Yul-chun was amazed by their wit and intelligence, and it seemed unjust that they were compelled to remain ignorant. He conceived a purpose then to teach them to read. Out of this came a people’s school, for once he taught the one family, many others clamored to learn, men, women and children, until he found himself the head of a school, a lowly one, for there were no books and he wrote his lessons in the dust of a threshing floor. Their eagerness was such that many soon could read simple words. Then he found there was nothing for them to read. He was compelled to write small books for them, a few pages in each, and through these little books he was able to teach them the doctrines of better ways of living, and how to govern themselves according to the revolution.

The joy of the people when they found they could read and even write a little became the source of new inspiration for Yul-chun and all his companions. New policies were made, new plans, based upon the people and their cooperation with the revolutionary army. And the people were ready and eager.

“You have opened our eyes,” the elder in a village declared. “Whereas we were blind, now we see. The wisdom in books is now our possession.”

By this means a strong unifying interest in the villagers took hold and the leaders of the revolution learned how to win the people, who in turn fed and supported them.

“We help you,” an ardent farmer had shouted. “We help you for you are the only ones who have ever helped us.” Then he cursed and swore against the rulers they had had, and spat into the dust to show how he despised them.

In this way time passed swiftly for Yul-chun. One year followed another, until one day he knew he must find his way home.

“We must travel alone,” he told Yak-san that day. They left the friendly village that night and the next day they went on, by foot and by horseback, until they came to a railroad where, by following the tracks, they came to a station and so entrained for Peking.

The scent of pines hot in the August sun mingled with the scent of incense in the small room where Yul-chun sat at a table, writing. A cicada burst into rasping song, mounted to a crisis of midsummer frenzy and exhausted sank into quiet. From some distant place in the temple the monotonous chanting of Buddhist priests provided an atmosphere of peace in contrast to the statistics which Yul-chun was compiling for record. The Korean exiles, what were left of them, lived here while they waited out the years and watched for the hour when they might return to their own country. This was Yul-chun’s room in which he slept and worked. Yak-san shared a room with three other young men, but Yul-chun, because he was now considered among the elders, had this cell to himself, a pleasant place opening upon a narrow court on the edge of the mountain. Beyond the pine tree tops the mountains rolled down to the plains and in the distance were the walls of Peking.

He returned to the counting of the dead, their names, the places where they came from in Korea. He counted not only these who had died in China but the many who had been exiled in the long struggle for independence since the Japanese came to Korea: in the Christian year 1907, seventy thousand men of the Korean army scattered and forced into exile; in 1910 more than a million Koreans driven across the Yalu River and wandering to Siberia and China and Manchuria, and countless others in Europe and the Americas; in Korea itself in 1919 after the Mansei Demonstration, fifty thousand prisoners and seven thousand killed; in Japan after the great earthquake of 1923, five thousand Koreans, one thousand of them students, massacred because some had said that the earthquake was punishment on Japan by the gods for the crimes committed in Korea; in Manchuria in 1920 more than six thousand Korean exiles killed by Japanese troops there; and three hundred Korean terrorists killed by Japanese in Shanghai; of the eight hundred young Koreans who joined the Chinese revolutionaries in Canton, almost all were now dead, two hundred in Canton alone, and in 1928 in Korea, the Japanese killed one thousand young men in Korea as Communists, although less than half of them were Communists. Yet who could count or even know how many Korean exiles had been killed in Siberia under the Czars, in China under war lords, in Japan, and even by the French and British in Shanghai! And who could know how many had died in prison cells under torture or with minds deranged! Who knew, who could ever know, the loss Korea had suffered in these, her best and most brilliant young men, who only asked that their country be their own!

Yul-chun put down his pen. Yak-san was at the door with his noonday meal of vegetables and rice, for in the Buddhist temple no meat was eaten.

“I have news,” Yak-san said, putting the tray on the table. He leaned to whisper. “The Japanese will seize Manchuria within ten days!”

Yul-chun dropped the chopsticks he had taken into his right hand.

“We must leave here tomorrow,” he exclaimed. “We must be out of Manchuria before it belongs to Japan. I must know what will happen to our own country if—”

He broke off and went to the door and stood gazing across the mountains and the plain.

“Elder Brother, your food is growing cold,” Yak-san reminded him after a few minutes.

Yul-chun did not turn. “Take it away,” he said. “I have no appetite. The entire world will be at war once more before long, if the news you have brought is to be trusted.”

They left as soon as Yul-chun could prepare others to take his place. Kim, the ex-monk, had long been his aide and to Kim he entrusted all that had been his own responsibility. The few Koreans who still remained gathered around him as he prepared to leave. All were homesick and yearned to go with him, but they would not.

“It would be unthankful if we were all to desert our Chinese comrades now,” Kim said, “before their war is won. Remember that we said we would stay until they entered Peking in triumph. Alas, the world war must be won before we can hope for that victory.”

“I will go home first,” Yul-chun said, “and I will tell you when you must follow. I will find out how matters are in our country and, if war comes, what we must do.”

With these words, Yul-chun bade them farewell and took up his knapsack and went down the mountain, Yak-san following.

On the long journey toward the north, which they made on foot or horseback since Japanese had seized all trains, Yul-chun had many days and nights in which to review these years during which he had lived among Communists, had known them well, had believed in their honesty of purpose and in their devotion, and many he still thought of as friends. He had not regretted leaving the Chinese Communists, but he wished now to distinguish between Communist and Chinese. The Chinese could be very cruel and for that reason he had left them. But need Communists be cruel? In the coming divisions of a world war, Japan and Russia would become even more bitter enemies than in the past, and if Japan were on the losing side, Communists would be on the winning side, and they would become strong in his country. He trusted no one, but must he distrust Communists? Evil men there were among them, yet these were punished and cast out when found. Some were even killed. In Canton he had sat in tribunal more than once to try a comrade who had betrayed them by dishonesty or by personal cruelty and oppressive behavior. He had more than once raised his hand to signify his approval of the death sentence and though he had never fired the last shot, he had stood by to see it done. Nor had he refused to take part in the judgment of greedy landlords and evil magistrates and conniving tax gatherers. These, too, he had judged worthy of death and he had seen them killed and he had remained silent. He had even shouted the slogans of the Party, LAND FOR THE PEASANTS, FOOD FOR THE POOR AND THE WORKERS, PEACE FOR THE SOLDIERS, and he had helped to write the principles agreed upon by the Sixth Congress of the Comintern to establish a government to be called a Workers’ and Peasants’ Democratic Dictatorship.

He was walking side by side with Yak-san in the even swift stride that had become habit. The scene about them was one of peace. Autumn had come, harvests were gathered and the fields, quiescent in waiting for winter, made an ordered pattern, broken only by the low thatched roofs of villages where the landfolk lived and had lived for thousands of years. The immense land spread of China and Manchuria belonged to these folk. Even the landlords knew in their hearts that the land was not theirs in truth, whatever the purchase price. And landfolk could be cruel. Unless Communism made them gentle, they could be very cruel.

“The scene is peace,” Yul-chun said to Yak-san, “but there is no peace. I do not speak of the battles among war lords in China but I speak of the war of centuries. Do you remember the young man who was killed in Hailofeng, the one I tried to save?”

“I remember,” Yak-san said. “We were the same age.”

They said no more, for they had learned in the dangerous years not to speak if silence were more safe and they had become taciturn by habit. But Yul-chun remembered. The landfolk of the region had that day brought to the revolutionary court of judgment a young man of handsome and frank countenance. He wore the ragged garments of the poor, but the landfolk accused him of disguise.

“He is not one of us!” they had shouted. “Look at his skin — like a woman’s! He is as white as a foreigner. Surely he is one of our enemies.”

Yul-chun, who that day sat in the court, had taken pity on the young man. It was not too hard to see old men killed whose faces told the story of their evil lives and he had learned to watch such deaths, impassive and silent. But this man was young and intelligent and one who could perhaps be won to the revolution. The landfolk, however, were implacable.

“He is our enemy,” they insisted.

“Do you know his name?” Yul-Chun had inquired.

“His name does not matter,” they had replied. “He is our class enemy.”

And they clamored for his death.

When no hope was left, two women, one older, one younger, came from the waiting crowd, also dressed in poor garments. It was easy to see that they too were not landfolk. Each took the young man’s hand, right and left, and side by side the three walked to the wall of execution and there all were shot. Of the many whom he had seen thus killed, Yul-chun could not forget the faces of these three, kindly and intelligent and pure. Now the memory came freshly and he allowed himself to wonder whether the revolutionists had been wise in following the Communist pattern. Alas, it was too late for China to decide but for his own country there was still time. And he remembered what Kim had told him of the retreat to the northwest. Kim and the remaining Koreans had marched with the Chinese Communists until they heard that Yul-chun was in Peking, and they left the Chinese there and gathered in the temple. Days and nights they had talked, telling Yul-chun all that had happened.

The Chinese Red Army had fought bravely, they had suffered starvation and sickness, but the Nationalist troops had outnumbered them a hundred to one again and again. Only when the landfolk began to help the Red soldiers with food and clothing and new straw sandals were they able to escape from constant defeat. Their great mistake at first had been to meet the enemy in battle. Face to face they had always lost.

They had lost count of time in days of danger and suffering and hunger, in nights when they halted beside river or brook and washed their wounds and buried their dead. They had been forbidden to rob the landfolk of food as the enemy did, and yet they starved if they did not, or begged. They had eaten sweet potatoes roasted in coals or boiled in soup, they said, until never again would they willingly eat sweet potatoes. And what of the days when they marched through heat and long grass, their blood drained by huge mosquitoes, so that they were weakened for months thereafter by the chills and sweats of malaria, for which they had no remedy! They took off their white summer garments lest they be seen by the enemy and crawled on their hands and knees, and they dared not cough lest the sound betray them to the hovering enemy. They slept by day and walked by night and they learned to sleep as they walked. There were days upon days of which now they could remember nothing except that they waked in the house of some merciful peasant, hidden in a village whose name they did not know, and then they walked again. Sometimes they found fellow Koreans and again each was alone and lost among the Chinese. Many they never saw again and they thought them dead.

“I thought Kim was dead,” one said, “until once on a city street my hand was clutched and I knew I felt Kim’s hand although I could not recognize the face I saw!”

Here Kim broke in. “I saved myself by lying under the water of a rice paddy, only my nostrils above water, and thus I hid for several days.”

The long march was ended, the Chinese Communists were in the far northwest, the Nationalists were in Nanking. But none of this was important now, in Yul-chun’s mind. He had left it all behind. He was going home. Home! The word, so long unused, summoned Hanya again. It was time now to find her, to find their child, and take them with him, home.

Yet so committed was he that he could not prevent himself from lingering on the way to set up people’s schools here and there. His way was to find one man or boy who could read a little, or if he could not read, possessed a good intelligence, and teach him how to teach others, and so begin a school.

To the landfolk, he said, “This one is your teacher, but if he is to teach you, then you must find him shelter, and two suits of clothes, one for summer, one for winter.”

This they were willing to do, and so wherever Yul-chun went, he left behind him centers of hope and enlightenment, small indeed, but each a light in the surrounding dark of ignorance. His journey was lengthened by years beyond what he had planned, and often in the lonely nights he reproached himself for delay. Yet he could not harden his heart against these eager, good landfolk of China, whom none had heeded or helped for a hundred years. And so he lingered and so he stayed, chafing and longing all the while to be on his way.

It was more, too, than love of his own people and his own country. He was no longer a youth and in the lonely nights he thought of Hanya and their child. In each place Yul-chun made inquiry about her. Few remembered her. Even in Peking where they had lived together, he and she, he had been unable to find any trace of her. It was only when they came to a dust-ridden village in Manchuria where he and Hanya had once lived for a few months that he heard of her. Here he and Yak-san went to the home of a Korean who had known Kim when he was a monk, and after Yul-chun was washed and rested, he went into the streets and to the market, everywhere that he and Hanya once were known. The faces now were strange and people shook their heads, and after six days of such search, unwillingly he began to believe that perhaps she was dead.

Then, the last night before they were to rise early and begin their walking again, an old woman came to the gate of the Korean’s house.

“A beggar woman,” he said, “but she pretends she knows you. It is a ruse for begging.”

Yul-chun rose, nevertheless, and went to the gate and recognized the old woman as one from whom Hanya used to buy cabbages for kimchee. The years had changed her from a buxom countrywoman to a wizened hag. She put out her withered hand and seized Yul-chun by the sleeve.

“I hear you are looking for your woman,” she said in a hoarse whisper, the spittle flying from her toothless gums.

Yul-chun drew back. “What have you to tell me?” he asked.

“She stayed with me after she left you,” the old hag said. “She came to my house on her way to Siberia and she stayed half a moon of days. I sold her cabbages cheap and she sold them again in the markets and got herself some money for her journey north.”

“How can I believe you?” Yul-chun asked, not believing and yet longing to believe.

“She gave me this,” the hag said.

With this she reached into her scraggy bosom and pulled out a filthy string, at the end of which was a small amulet, a little silver Buddha, which he remembered now that Hanya had kept in a box with a few treasures she had saved from her mother — a pair of jade earrings, a thin silver bracelet, a thimble, and two brass hairpins.

“Now do you believe?” the hag asked.

“I believe,” he replied. “Only tell me where she went.”

“She said she went to her brother in Siberia,” the hag replied.

“She had no brother,” Yul-chun declared.

The hag showed hideous broken teeth. “That is your misfortune,” she cackled.

She held out her hand, and poor as Yul-chun was he put into her dry old palm a piece of money.

Northward again they went and Yul-chun stopped in every place where he found people of his own country and inquired of any one who might remember Hanya. None remembered. She had walked alone and kept to herself, it seemed, and he knew that was her way. Before he reached Mukden he and Yak-san both put on Chinese garments, gray cotton robes, so that they appeared as two scholars who come to visit a city. They put their hands in their sleeves and hunched their shoulders as such scholars do, and the Japanese police thought them men of Peking and let them pass. Koreans they arrested, for they knew Manchuria had many Korean exiles, all of whom were rebels against Japan, unless they were traitors.

It was not possible, however, for Yul-chun to pass through Manchuria without being known. By this time more than a million landfolk from Korea were exiles here and they worked as farmers for wealthy landlords. Yul-chun delayed, and with him always Yak-san, until he could inquire into their plight. When he found it was hard and that they were poor, he met secretly with leaders of the Chinese peasants, hiding themselves in the fields of tall sorghum as though they were bandits, as many of the Chinese were, and in this way he united both Chinese and Koreans — the Koreans the leaders, for the Chinese peasants had no unity. The new group was called the Korean-Chinese Peasant Association. The young Korean scholars had their own secret group which was called the Korean Revolutionary Young Men’s League, in which the leadership was Communist. These Korean Communists were poor and hungry and many of them were ill. They had no homes and they slept under trees and in crevices of the earth, in caves in the mountains, wherever they could, and this in winter as well as in summer, the bitter winters of a northern land. Yul-chun was determined now against Communism, fearing that for his country this would mean exchanging one tyranny for another and he drew aside from the Communist young men, much as he pitied them and praised them, too, for their courage.

What was his surprise then when one day Yak-san came to him and asked to remain in Manchuria with these young men!

“You desert me!” Yul-chun exclaimed.

“Let me remain with these young men,” Yak-san replied.

“I said I would take you to my own home,” Yul-chun argued.

“I am an orphan, so destined by fate, and I must avenge my parents,” Yak-san replied.

“How will you avenge them?” Yul-chun demanded.

Yak-san looked away. He scraped his bare toes in the dust of the road, for they had stopped in the middle of the day to rest under a date tree and gnaw their dried unleavened bread.

“I know you do not wish me to say this, Elder Brother,” Yak-san said at last, “but the Communists will help me.”

Yul-chun tried not to be angry. “You believe in them?”

“I believe in their ways,” Yak-san said. “I care nothing for their faith in this or that, for or against, but I like their ways. When they meet an enemy—” He drew his finger across his throat.

“You think this settles everything?” Yul-chun demanded.

“I have two enemies,” Yak-san replied in the same slow steady voice. “One killed my father, the other killed my mother. My father was crushed to death under the butt of a gun. I know the man who did it. I know his name, I know his face. He is not dead. My mother died from a stab in the belly with a bayonet. She carried a child in her — my brother, ready to be born. I know who stabbed her and who killed my brother before he could draw his first breath. I shall kill that man.”

What could Yul-chun say? A dozen years ago he would have leaped to his feet and cried out that he would go with Yak-san. Now he knew that merely to kill a man did not end the evil he had done or that others like him would do. Only to kill was not enough.

“You long to have the comfort of revenge,” he told Yak-san.

“Say so if you like,” Yak-san retorted.

At the next center of Koreans, in Antung, on the border of Korea, Yak-san left him. A coolness had grown between them, but when the last moment came, they looked into each other’s eyes, and suddenly they embraced. They parted then and without looking back each went his way.

… At Antung, Yul-chun was tempted to go without further delay to his father’s house. During the years of his youth he had never been sick for home, but now he was. He longed for the safety of the old house about him, and this though his mind told him there was no safety even there. He longed for his lost childhood and even for his mother’s cookery. He remembered his tutor, their walks in the gardens along the country roads, the many stories his tutor had told him and read to him, and the poetry he had recited to him, the ancient beautiful poetry. His tutor had a sweet singing voice, neither deep nor high but warm with love of country, and as a child he, a stormy, restless boy, would sit in the cool of the evening and listen to this singing, and feel a brief and melancholy peace. Who could have thought in those quiet days and nights that the young poet would have joined the terrorists! His own first doubt of death as a weapon had begun then, when he saw his gentle tutor so changed, a dagger in his hand instead of a lute. It is not only the stabbed who die. He sighed at such thoughts and turned away from his home. No, he would continue his way northward to Siberia. If Hanya were alive he would find her and find his child. If he made a center of his own, he could begin again.

He rested in a small inn for three days and told himself that he would soon set forth on his long and lonely journey into the wide plains and eternal forests of Siberia, forests of pine and birch, stretching endlessly beyond all horizons. But now he waited, making inquiries of any Koreans, as his habit was, to know whether one had seen or heard of Hanya. Some replied with laughter and teasing, asking why he still yearned for a woman he had not met for many years, to which he replied simply that she had his child, who might be a son, to which they replied in turn that any pretty young woman would willingly give him a son. He smiled without mirth, knowing that none could understand his need for Hanya and his own child. And yet after so long a time, would not both be strangers to him? He was irresolute again and lingered still longer in the inn, divided by his longing to return to his father’s house and his wish for his own. He was angry with himself, too, for surely this was no time to indulge his private family longings.

And while he lingered thus, time passing, he perceived that every year, every month and at last every day the ingredients for war were more near to boiling and again in Germany. An ancient and demonic spirit was combining them with present discontent, a mixture resolving into a concentrated surge toward violence and power, waiting only for the voice of some one man to be the vent. The man was found, and in Europe the old turmoil began, the rush and halt, the protests and the justifications, the talk of peace while peace became impossible. All made him know that war was near again, world war, and he must not go north to Siberia, for it was too late and he must not linger.

And yet he did linger, making excuse at last that he should start some schools in the countryside around Antung. The landfolk here were as ignorant, as good and as eager as any he had found in China, and he might never return, and they would in that case remain forever unable to read. In one village and another he set up such schools.

One day in spring he walked back from a village school to the city. Something of the softness of the spring crept into his blood and bones, the lovely and reluctant spring of a northern climate. The Yalu River swelled with spring floods, fruit trees blossomed and weeds grew green on the roadsides. The land women and children came swarming out of their villages to dig the fresh weeds for tonic food. He wandered into the country one day in his irresolution, and an impudent old woman looked up from her digging to remark his good looks.

“Here is the man I look for,” she cackled, “no longer young and not yet old,” and she thrust out the tip of her tongue until it touched the end of her flat nose. Her wicked old eyes twinkled at her companions and they burst into ribald laughter.

Yul-chun smiled. “I might accept your favors, Mother, except that I have a wife. True, I have lost her but I look for her — and for my son.”

Womanlike, they were ready to hear such talk, and they squatted back on their heels and tossed out their questions.

“Where did you lose her?” “Is she young?” “Is she pretty?” “How long ago and why did you let her go?”

He answered, half absently, half playfully, making a romantic tale of it partly for their pleasure, partly to satisfy his own heart. He could not speak of Hanya to his fellows except to say he searched for her, but to these old wives, whom he would never see again, he could speak.

“I lost her long ago,” he said, “and yes, she was young, and yes, she was pretty, and she carried my son in her. I know it was a son. And I lost them both because I did not know I loved her. I thought my duty was elsewhere. She went away one day and I did not go to find her. Why? Because I thought she would surely come back if she loved me so well.”

“Ah ha,” the old woman said, “there you were wrong. When a woman loves whole and is not loved, she must leave the one she loves, or see her heart break slowly day by day. Better to leave him and have it broken, clean and forever.”

Here a small crumpled woman piped up. She had not spoken before but had kept on busily at her weed-digging. “There are many who look for those they have lost — wives looking for husbands, sons for fathers, daughters for sisters and mothers. In these times many are lost and many are looking, especially here in this region between one country and another.”

“Have you heard of a wife looking for her husband?” Yul-chun asked.

She looked up at him sharply and down again. “Not for a man like you,” she said. She sat back on her heels and stared at him. “There is a young man — very young — who comes here in the winters and in the summers he turns north again. It may be that he is already gone north. Coming or going, he passes through our village since the road north runs through it.”

“How old is he?” Yul-chun asked.

She pursed her dry old lips. “Eighteen — say — or something more.”

He refused to believe that any good fortune could be his. Nevertheless he put the next question. “Do you think he has passed through to the north yet?”

“I have not seen him,” she said slowly, still staring at him. “I have not seen him since autumn. But he does not look like you.”

Yul-chun put his hand into his pocket and drew out a piece of money. “I am at the inn at the corner of the first street to the left of the city gate. Bring him to me if you see him, and I will give you twice this much over again.”

He gave the money to the old woman, scornful of himself that he did so. The money was not his to give. It was the scanty precious store that his fellow Koreans sent him from time to time, knowing that he kept watch for them while he lived here in Antung, between Manchuria and Korea, a likely place for news, and he was wise in knowing what such news meant.

“Take this,” they said when they gave him money. “Use it for the cause.” Well, he would pay it back double for the cause some day, when the world war was won.

He returned to the inn, still scornful of himself for dreaming even the smallest faintest dream that this youth might be his son. Yet it was true that many people were looking for others lost and Antung was the place of meeting. Many stayed as he was staying, in hope. He refused to hope but he stayed. He tried to make himself hopeless, it was urgent that he go home, and he stayed on, clinging to his dream of taking Hanya with him and his son. And dreaming of his son, he thought often of his brother’s son, that child, that babe, that matchless boy who, springing into his arms and embracing him as though he had found one for whom he had long searched, had so astounded them all, that one must now be a young man. Yul-chun’s first question when he heard of his brother’s death, through a spy, had been to ask of Yul-han’s son.

“What of the boy?” he had cried.

“He was safe with his grandparents. He is with them now,” the spy told him.

And there he must be now, growing into that grace and strength that only such a child can have. No, he would wait a few days more. And these days grew into weeks.

Then suddenly, on a midsummer day, war broke across the Western World. Now Yul-chun knew he must go home, even childless, and he prepared himself toward that end and in haste he taught others how to do what he did. He gave a thought or two as to whether he should find the old woman once more. He had seen her every month at least twice, had asked her if — and when she shook her head and cracked her knuckles, he gave her a coin and let her go.

He could not believe what he saw therefore when, a few days before the day he had set to begin his journey, the old woman came to his door holding by the sleeve a tall bone-thin young man who needed to have his hair cut. Long and straight his black locks fell over his forehead and down his cheeks, and he wore Russian clothes, full trousers and high boots and a tunic belted at the waist.

“Here he is,” she said, mumbling through her broken teeth. “He came through our village late this year, after I wasted many days watching for him — good days of work I have missed — and I told the guard at the village gate to wake me if a young man came by, and he must be paid, too, that guard!”

Yul-chun was lying on his bed when she came in, his hands folded under his head, reflecting and regretting, perhaps, the time he had spent here in waiting and watching, and wondering if he should have gone into Siberia to look for Hanya. Many times he had been about to go and had not gone, prevented by his fellow Koreans who said that since it was well known that he had refused to be a Communist, he would be killed if he went upon Russian soil.

“Dead, you will never find your woman,” they argued.

“You must think of your country first,” others argued.

And so he had not gone as he had thought he would when he left China, and now would never go. Yet while he had lingered here, he held together the exiles through the news sheets he printed wherever he went. Thus only he had told the others how the Japanese were victorious in China, and how a month ago in Canton seven thousand Korean conscripts had turned against their Japanese officers and killed them.

Now when he saw the old woman he rose from his bed and went toward the young man she led. He saw no likeness in that sullen face either to himself or to Hanya. Let him be prudent lest he commit himself to a stranger!

“Do you look for someone?” he asked.

“This old woman,” the young man answered, his voice lusty and strong, “this old woman has dragged me here, saying that you are my father, but I see no likeness to what my mother told me.”

They looked at each other with mutual distrust.

“Nor have I reason to think that you could be the son I have never seen,” Yul-chun rejoined.

The old woman set up a clamor. “Where is my money?” she screamed and she thrust her dirty palm up into Yul-chun’s face.

He was on the point of saying that he owed her nothing since this was not his son, then he remembered that his bargain had not included such certainty. He had said that she was to bring the young man to him wherever she found him, however long the search, and he had given up the search. Yet here the young man was! He could only reach into his pocket again and take out two coins and put them in her black-lined palm. She looked at the money coldly.

“Come,” she said, “for how many days I have not worked, spring and autumn, watching at the city gates for this fellow! And because this year he was late, I watched through summer, too!”

At this the young man took umbrage. “You!” he shouted. “You bring me here for nothing! I am set back in my journey. This is not my father. My father is a young man, taller than I am, very handsome — his skin white as milk, my mother said!”

So shouting, he took the old woman by the shoulders, spun her around twice and sent her flying from the door. Then he closed the door and barred it. “These land people,” he complained. “They are too greedy and altogether ignorant. They need a power above them to compel them.”

Yul-chun was not listening.

“Your mother said your father was young — and handsome — and his skin was white? How many years ago did she say that?”

“Many years,” the young man said. “She died,” he added. He gnawed at his lower lip and mumbled. “Died? She was killed.”

“Killed?” Yul-chun’s lips went dry. He sat down on the bed. “How was she killed?”

The young man sat down on the bed beside him. “We lived in a hut on a Russian peasant’s land. It was not his land, but we helped to till it. A nobleman owned the land. Long ago that was — long ago, and everything is changed now. But in those days the winters were endless and we were always hungry before spring came. We dried berries and roots and mushrooms but we always ate everything too soon. That is — I ate too much. I was young and I did not see that she gave everything to me. One day in the spring she stole into the forests of the nobleman to find some early mushrooms, or a few green weeds. She said she knew a hollow where the sun shone warm and where there was no wind. There she went and I followed. She told me to hide among the trees, and so I hid, but where I could see her. It was a quiet place, scarcely the birds were there. Suddenly I heard footsteps and a great crackling of broken branches on the ground. I saw a big man in good clothes, high leather boots and trousers of leather and a loose jacket belted in at the waist, a bearded man, with a whip in his hand. He shouted at my mother that she was a thief and she tried to run but he laid hold of her — and—”

The young man faltered and bit his lip and then went on.

“He beat her when he was finished with her and she did not get up again. She fell in a drift of late snow under a thick pine tree. She did not move when I called. She did not answer. Her eyes were open and staring at nothing. I was afraid and I ran away. I left her there and I never went back. Nor did I ever tell what had happened to her. And I do not know why I tell you now, for no one can do anything.”

“What was her name?” Yul-chun asked.

“I do not know,” the young man said. He frowned. “You will think I lie, but I only called her O-man-ee. And we knew no one except the Russian peasants. They called her Woman!”

It was on the edge of Yul-chun’s tongue to ask the next question. Did she not tell you your father’s name? But resolved against hope, he would not. At this moment the young man shook his hair back and it fell away from his ears. Yul-chun stared. The lobe of the left ear was not perfect. It was the same ear with which his brother Yul-han had been born!

“What is your name?” Yul-chun muttered. His voice would not come out of his throat and his heart beat hard enough to make him faint.

“Sasha,” the young man said.

“Sasha!” Yul-chun exclaimed. “But that is a Russian name.”

“I was born in Russia.”

Yul-chun looked at him with reluctant certainty. The young man got to his feet. “I must be on my way,” he said.

“What is your haste?” Yul-chun asked, to delay him.

“I am a trader,” Sasha said. “I bring furs and woolens here to Antung and I take back brass and silver goods and sometimes a rich man orders celadon dishes and lacquer chests from Korea.”

He was set on going, and Yul-chun could think of no other way to delay except by telling the truth.

“It may be that you — it may be — you are my son,” he stammered.

Sasha paused at the door.

“How do you know?” he demanded.

“You bear upon you a family mark,” Yul-chun replied. “My blood brother had that same ear you have. It cannot be accident that there should be two such ears.”

He came near to Sasha and lifted the lock of his hair and looked at the ear.

“It is the same,” he said.

But Sasha pulled away from him. “That cursed ear,” he muttered.

“Not cursed, but perhaps most fortunate,” Yul-chun retorted.

“Fortunate? Unfortunate,” Sasha exclaimed. “Too many men tease me for my ear. Did a Russian bear bite me — what woman loves you too well — such things, all stupid!”

Yul-chun, fearful and hopeful, tried to laugh but Sasha looked at him gravely. For an instant the two men exchanged a speculative gaze.

“Do we part?” Yul-chun inquired at last. When Sasha did not answer he stepped back. “It may be you are right. The lobe of an ear — it is no proof. Who knows how many people in the world have the same defect?”

Now it was Sasha who hesitated. Then he spoke. “My mother had something of jade which she valued above all else. Though we starved, she would not use it. What was it?”

Yul-chun answered instantly. “It was a seal of red jade which was once her father’s, before he was killed.”

Sasha could not hide his astonishment. Speechless, he put his hand in the bosom of his tunic and brought out the jade seal.

Yul-chun gazed at it and nodded. “I saw it last in her hand,” he said slowly.

Suddenly he could not hold back his tears. He threw his arms about his son.

“Now we will go home,” he said. “At last — at last!”

… He was a silent young man, this son of his. He must be wooed and coaxed, it seemed, for he could let hours pass in silence. But Yul-chun’s heart melted into constant warm-flowing talk, so moved he was by having his son. For the first few days he held back nothing. He drew his son into his own life and into the life of the Kim family. When he found how ignorant Sasha was of his own people and his own country, he talked of the early history of the Korean people, and how they came to be living here on this long mountainous strip of land hanging from the Russian mainland like fruit upon a vine. He told of the struggles of their people to keep their independence and how they had been compelled through the centuries to play one nation against another, lean first toward this one, and then toward that.

“I tell you, Sasha,” he began earnestly one day as they walked side by side, and then paused as he spoke the name. “Sasha?” he repeated. “How can I take you to your grandfather with that name? I shall give you another. Yes, I have it — you shall be another Il-han. Your grandfather’s name will honor you, and may you honor him.”

His son did not say yes or no, but as the days passed, Yul-chun saw that he would not accept the new name. Unless he were called Sasha he did not answer. For a few days, as they traveled on, Yul-chun inquired of himself whether he should not argue the name, and then decided he should not. It was too soon. The bonds which should have been between father and son since birth must be knit now as carefully as though his son were newly born to him, as in a sense he was. He returned then to the Russian name, and still Sasha said nothing for or against. Studying that closed handsome face, the high forehead, the broad cheekbones, the small dark eyes under flying black brows, the full stubborn mouth, Yul-chun puzzled as to what sort of man his son was. Closed against the world, secretive, brooding, and yet sometimes suddenly impetuous, how could Sasha be revealed to him? He had told Sasha everything and Sasha told him nothing.

“Will you not speak to me of yourself and your mother?” he said at last one day.

They were well into Korea now, walking through high mountains, treading narrow footpaths that clung to the cliffs and wound in and out among the rocks.

“I have nothing to tell,” Sasha said. “Every day was a day of work on the land. At night we went to political meetings. There was nothing more.”

“But after Hanya — after your mother died, what did you do?”

“I was put into a Russian orphanage.”

“And then?”

“Nothing.”

“You were sent to school?”

“Of course. All children are sent to school.”

“Were they kind to you?”

“Kind? I had enough to eat and a place to sleep.”

“But someone was — someone took the place of your mother?”

“No — there was no need for that.”

“You missed your mother — being so young.”

“I do not remember.”

“Are you — have you ever been in love?”

“Love? No!”

“How is it you are a trader?”

Yul-chun put the question innocently, and he was surprised to see that Sasha turned suspicious eyes on him.

“Why do you ask that?”

“Why? Because you are my son.”

Sasha waited an instant, then answered. “I am restless. I like to wander. Since I am Korean I am not forced — that is, I am free. Also my mother told me to find you if I could, and especially to look for you in Antung. If you returned to Korea you would pass through Antung, she said.”

“Did she say I would return?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“Surely there is more,” Yul-chun urged. “What are your dreams? Where are your hopes? Every young man has dreams and hopes.”

“Not me,” Sasha said stubbornly, his eyes on the path ahead.

“Have you known terrors that make you silent?” Yul-chun asked next.

“There are some things I will never tell you,” Sasha said.

Yul-chun felt a desperate reluctance to reach home with this son until somehow he had discovered how to open his heart. If Sasha could not love him, the father, how could he love his grandparents, or even his country? Moreover, there was no haste. The Japanese had strong hold everywhere, and the time for revolt was not yet. Why, then, Yul-chun inquired of himself, why should he not linger here in villages as he had in China and Manchuria and near Antung, and sow the seeds of the people’s schools? It would be difficult for Japanese police would be watchful, but he would be wily. He would teach the people Japanese words by day, but at night he would teach them Korean.

He told Sasha of his plan, and begged his help. Sasha listened, unmoved. “The government should do this,” he said.

“It is not our government,” Yul-chun replied.

Sasha shrugged and said no more. Thereafter he sat watching while his father labored earnestly with new and old scholars and then a young student teaching them the way to teach the unlettered landfolk.

“Son, will you not help me?” Yul-chun asked one day.

“I read only Russian,” Sasha replied carelessly.

Yul-chun’s jaw dropped. It had not occurred to him that though Sasha spoke he could not read or write Korean, his ancestral language.

“How is it you did not tell me?” he demanded.

Sasha shrugged again. “I am not one for books,” he said.

“Nevertheless I must teach you,” Yul-chun said firmly.

And he did so from that day on. Each night, wherever they slept, Yul-chun taught his son. Sometimes in the day, too, if they were in a lonely place, he stopped and gave Sasha a lesson.

As for Sasha, he learned well enough, neither willingly nor unwillingly, and unmoved as ever. No, not by touch or word was this son’s heart moved. Days passed and months, for Yul-chun continued his building of schools, as slowly they went southward, until almost two years had passed, and Yul-chun, at first wounded, had learned to accept Sasha as he was.

This was the son he had found, a slim, silent, grim young man, who hid himself even from his father. Urging and persuasion only made him draw the invisible cloak the more tightly about him. Somehow he must be won, but not by force. Thereafter Yul-chun used every device that love and pride could conceive. For already he loved this son. The human feelings he had so long repressed emerged powerfully now from his strong nature, and finding no other object they centered on Sasha. Often in the evening when they sat resting after the day’s travel on foot or in some passing vehicle a landman offered, he longed to put out his hand and touch the warm brown flesh of his handsome son. He did not yield to the longing after the first time. Sasha had endured the touch and then had moved away and Yul-chun let his hand drop. No, not by contact nor by word was this son’s heart to be moved, if indeed it could be moved. Yul-chun, wounded, could only sigh and try to remember himself when young. He, too, had not welcomed the touch of his father’s hand. Now that he had this son, he began to understand how often he must have grieved his own father, and from his present hidden pain he spoke one day, as he and Sasha came out of the mountains and into the foothills below.

“I hope that my old father still lives when we reach home. I have not seen him for many years, nor have I written a letter, fearing that such a letter from me might bring him into danger. But now, as we walk together, you and I, I think of my father, and I remember many times when my coldness and my abrupt speech must have cut his heart. He never told me so and I was too young to know.”

To this Sasha made no answer. The thong of his sandal broke and he stopped to mend it while Yul-chun waited.

And again on another day Yul-chun spoke. “My mind in those days when I was young was altogether engaged in the sorrows of our people. I thought only of our freedom, of our independence as a nation, and I wished not to yield any part of my being to our family or to any claim from the past.”

He said this and waited for Sasha to say that he too had such feelings, but Sasha did not say so. He looked at his father as though he did not know what had been said, as though he heard a foreign language, as though he listened to a dotard.

Yul-chun gave way then to silence. In silence they went except for the small necessities of daily life, and the questions of food and drink and a place to sleep at night were all that passed between the two. Yet every day they walked side by side, or one following the other if the path were narrow, but still together, and every day they saw the same landscapes, the magic of the unchanging beauty of blue sky and sea and gray rock and green field, and the stately procession of the tall and handsome people to whom they belonged. Even the poor, even the beggared, had beauty, and Yul-chun himself saw his people with new eyes. He had lived long among the squat dark people of southern China and he had forgotten how different his own people were, different in the very build of the bone, in the fairness of skin, in the eyes brown, not black, in the hair softly dark, not stiffly black. He longed to tell his son how proud they could well be of their people, how gay they were, in spite of all hardship, witty in their talk, lighthearted singers and at the same time hardworking and thrifty and brave, but he bit back such words, knowing that this, too, the son must discover for himself.

Soon, to his joy, Sasha did one day speak of his own will and not in answer to a question.

“I have grown so used to the flat plains of Russia that I did not know how fine the mountains are. As for the sea, what I have heard is not the half of what I now know by my own eyes.”

They were never out of sight of mountains and seldom out of sight of the sea. They walked nearer to the west than the east, and when they lost the sea for a while suddenly they came upon it again in bay and cove, for the western coast was deeply indented with bay and cove and these were narrowed between cliffs so steep that the tides ran always high.

This that Sasha said revealed to Yul-chun that his son’s heart was alive somewhere in the depths of his being. He could feel beauty, and he was observing what he saw and not walking without seeing. If Sasha could not be won by the natural feeling of father for son, then it might be that he could be won by the strong beauty of his country. Perhaps through love of country other loves could be aroused. For the ability to love, though a natural gift, may be stifled before it can grow, and what had there been in Sasha’s life to teach him love? His mother had died when he was a small child, he had grown up one of many children in an orphanage, and until now his father was a stranger. As for women, he had yet to know more than the clamor of his male impulse. He did not know how to love, or even that he needed love, and his ability to love human beings could only develop when he came to know them.

At night, therefore, when they stopped at some inn or in a landman’s house, Yul-chun did not allow himself to sleep early. Instead he sat with the others and led Sasha to do so with him. In this way Sasha could learn something more about his people than he had by mere trading. More than this, Yul-chun too could learn of what was taking place in the underground in Korea and elsewhere. Thus he learned that Kim Yak-san, the terrorist, was still alive and in China, and he had gathered Koreans in the central part of that country into a volunteer corps against the Japanese. The Chinese Nationalists feared this group as revolutionary, and sent them to the front to face the Japanese. Yet many Korean conscripts deserted from the Japanese armies, and helped the Chinese. And he heard that in the heart of China, in Chungking, the city to which the Chinese Nationalist leaders had fled, Koreans had united several factions into one independence society, and Korean exiles came from many countries to join that society and fight the Japanese. The Chinese Nationalists welcomed them at last, and a Korean Independence Army was formed.

In Korea itself, Yul-chun heard, the Japanese rulers were using every means to change Koreans into Japanese. With his own eyes he read in newspapers that the new Governor-General, a military officer of high rank, insisted that “Japanese and Koreans must blend to make one harmonious whole.”

“It is impossible,” Yul-chun exclaimed to Sasha.

He threw down the newspaper he had been reading. As he did so he caught a strange secret look in Sasha’s black eyes.

“Why do you say impossible?” Sasha asked.

Yul-chun exploded. “Ask yourself! If it were possible, why do the Japanese need twenty thousand regular police here in our country, and two hundred thousand auxiliaries? Why do Korean workmen get paid only half what Japanese are paid? Why do Koreans cross the Yalu River again as brigands to attack Japanese?”

Sasha shrugged his shoulders. “You make yourself too hot.”

Heat went out of Yul-chun and he felt suddenly cold. “Why do you never call me Father?” he muttered.

When Sasha did not answer, he hid his hurt, saying, “Never mind. It is better that you are honest. It will come. I can wait.”

… They continued their journey southward day by day and there were times, now and then, when Yul-chun felt some hope that he and his son could some day come together in heart and spirit as he took pains to guide their path through those places famous for beauty, the tombs and temples, the castles, and ancient fortresses. Thus while they traveled along the western coast Yul-chun turned aside often to see the ancient tombs, and while they were still in the north he showed Sasha the dolmens made of great flat stones set on rude stone pillars so that they looked like tables for giants. In reality they too were tombs and within each vast structure was the tomb chamber. While he showed the treasures Yul-chun told of the great men of the past who were buried here, and he told of their great deeds and their high dreams and how their lives too were spent in the struggle to keep their country independent and apart from those who sought always to enslave its people and seize its wealth.

Temples Sasha would have none of, nor would he so much as step over the threshold of any temple. The guardian gods in the entrance hall only made him laugh in derision.

“There are no such beings as gods,” he declared, and if a monk came out from the temple he would shout at him rudely. “Are you a man? Or are those women’s robes you wear?”

Yul-chun passed all temples after this without stopping, and soon he found that the fortresses were where Sasha lingered, the stone fortresses of the early days when the hordes of Manchuria invaded and were driven back, the fortresses attached to great old castles, the fortresses of old palaces, all these Sasha studied with lively interest and he asked many questions of wars and victories and when he heard of defeats he scowled and swore that once the present invaders were sent out, never again must other invaders be allowed.

“But how?” he demanded one night when they stopped for the night in a village inn, “how shall we rid ourselves of these invaders?”

He talked easily now with his father, never of himself or of the past, but always of the present and always of their country. The country was winning him, the beautiful country that he was coming to believe was his own. He was still shy with people, but he was ardent with love — yes, perhaps it was love — for the land and the sea and the sky.

Yul-chun, rejoicing, was careful to seem cool. “When this present world war is over,” he replied, “the Japanese will be vanquished, at least for a generation. We must seize the moment. The instant they surrender, we must step forward and take back the throne and claim our country. The western world is fighting for us now except Americans, who still hold themselves aloof, and though we cannot take our share in the war, yet our enemy is the common enemy and we have a right to our share of the victory. We ask no spoils, no land belonging to others. We ask only for our own country back, which is our independence.”

He was watching Sasha’s face as he spoke, and for the first time he saw something of what he wanted to see and heard what he longed to hear. His son’s face lighted, his son’s hand was outstretched and his son’s voice spoke with unusual ardor.

“I will be there, at that moment — with you—” He paused and then spoke the one word which Yul-chun had waited so long to hear.

“Father—” Sasha muttered, his voice low and still reluctant.

Yul-chun could not reply. His heart swelled into his throat and he put out his right hand and clasped his son’s hand. For the moment the two were in communion.

… Three days later the news flashed over all Korea and crept into every village and byway: Japan had attacked the United States. Yul-chun and Sasha were a dozen miles from the capital. Arriving in a small town in the twelfth month of that year toward the end of the seventh day, Yul-chun had decided to stop there for the night, for he had not wanted to go immediately to his father’s house. He and Sasha were travel worn, their garments soiled. Moreover, he had put aside some money to buy Sasha other garments than the Russian ones he wore. Thus they could appear with dignity as members of the Kim clan. And no sooner had they entered the inn of this town than they heard that on that very day in the morning while Christians were meeting in the churches, Japanese airplanes had swarmed over Honolulu and dropped bombs on the American warships in the harbor. The innkeeper told them, his voice a whisper, his eyes exultant as he put his hand before his mouth.

“Have you heard—”

“I cannot believe it,” Yul-chun exclaimed to Sasha. “Even the most arrogant Japanese officer could not dream of victory over the United States.”

Sasha was stuffing his mouth with good Korean bread. They sat at a table in a small room.

“Believe because you must,” Sasha said. “It has happened.”

Yul-chun did not hear. His mind ran ahead in hope renewed. Now the Americans would enter the war in all their power. Now the mighty industries of the United States would be put to work against Japan, and what was against Japan was for Korea. For the first time in how many years he dared to hope again. When the war was won, when the Japanese were vanquished, his country would be free. Victory — victory!

He leaped up as though he were a young man again. “Come, my son!” he cried. “Not a moment’s delay now! We must go instantly to my father’s house. We must prepare for independence!”

Sasha stared at him, his mouth full. “But — but you said I must have new clothes tomorrow!”

Yul-chun was suddenly impatient. “Your cousin will lend you something. Come — come!” And with this urging, sooner than words could tell he had paid the innkeeper, who in consternation asked why they left so soon and what was it they did not like in his inn and only tell him and he would make it right. Yul-chun assured him his inn was good, the food good, but the news hastened him, and in less than an hour he and Sasha were on their way again.

… It was after midnight when at last he stood before the well-remembered gate, Sasha at his side. There was no moon and in the darkness he felt the path under his feet for a rock and with it he pounded the barred gate. After a long few minutes he heard the gatesman’s cracked and drowsy voice.

“Who is here at this hour?”

“It is I, your master’s son,” Yul-chun replied.

The gateman would not open at such easy answer. He mumbled while he lit a lantern and then he opened the wicket and peered through. Yul-chun put his face close to the opening and smiled. “It is I,” he said, “older by many years, but your master’s elder son, nevertheless.”

The gateman gave a shout then and opened the gate, the same gateman, young when Yul-chun was a child, and now old.

“Come in, young master,” he cried. “Welcome home, young master! But I must wake your father slowly, or he will die of joy.”

“Do not wake him,” Yul-chun said, stepping into the courtyard. “Let him sleep until morning. Are my parents well?”

“Well except for the ills of old age, which we all have,” the gateman replied, “but who is with you, young master?”

“My son,” Yul-chun said proudly.

“Your son,” the old man echoed and lifting his lantern he let the light fall on Sasha’s dark and handsome face.

The old man gazed at him for a lingering moment. Then he let the light fall. “Now there are two of them in the house,” he muttered.

“How two?” Yul-chun demanded.

Before the gateman could answer, the lattice of the house slid back and a young man stood there, slim and tall and naked except for a towel about his middle and in spite of the winter night, in which a few snowflakes were already falling.

“Who is there?” he called.

“In the name of the gods,” the gateman cried, “do you come straight from your bath into the snowy night?”

“A minute,” the young man cried, and in an instant was back again, wrapped in a quilted robe.

The gateman beckoned with his left hand, the lantern held high in his right. In the path of light the young man came toward them and the gateman turned his head to Yul-chun.

“Behold your brother’s son,” he said to Yul-chun. And to the young man he said, “Behold your uncle who we thought was lost. He has come home. And here is his son. Now there are two of you.”

Yul-chun could not take his eyes from the young man. Yes, this was Liang. Yul-chun knew him. The glorious child had grown into this young man. Glorious? Yes, the eyes were the same, larger, luminous, benign, the mouth smiling, the head nobly shaped and held high.

“Do you recognize me as once you did?” Yul-chun asked.

He felt his heart beat, inexplicably quickened as Liang gazed at him intently.

“I do recognize you,” Liang said and his voice was deep and kind.

“Is it possible that you remember? You were very young,” Yul-chun said.

“I cannot remember, but I recognize you,” Liang said.

He spoke with calm confidence in the largeness of his soul, understanding and expecting understanding, and Yul-chun felt the same reverence now that he had felt when he held the remarkable child in his arms. There were indeed two of them, as the gateman had said, two of this new generation, two young men to take the place of the dead and the old, two for the struggle ahead, two for the victory that must be won.

He reached for his son’s right hand and for his nephew’s right hand and he bound them together in his own hands.

“You two,” he said, “you must be more than cousins. You must be brothers.”

He left them then and went into the house alone, the gateman leading the way with the lantern. At the inner door an old servingwoman stood and the gateman told her who Yul-chun was. She knelt then and took off Yul-chun’s worn leather shoes and put slippers on his feet.

“Sir, I am Ippun,” she said when this was done. “I have served your honored brother and his lady.” She hesitated and then she said proudly, “It is I who have cared for their son.”

He inclined his head. “How can I thank you?”

He said no more but went to the room where he had slept as a child, and she took the mattresses from the wall closet and laid them on the floor and spread the coverlets. Then she went away and he undressed and prepared for rest. Yet weary as he was, he paused to look from the window into the main room of the house. There he saw the two young men sitting on opposite sides of the table, the candle flickering between them. They were talking, talking, and they had forgotten the hour. He gave a great sigh as though a burden fell from his shoulders, and then he laid himself down to sleep.

… He was wakened in the morning by Ippun coming in with a basin of water for washing and fresh garments.

“Our old master sends these for you. He asks you not to make haste after your long journey. He has waited a long time, he says, and it is nothing to wait until you have washed and eaten.” She bowed and went out.

He lay for a moment, collecting himself out of deep sleep, realizing that he was in his old room. Nothing had changed. Only he! He rose at last and washed and put on the fresh garments. Ippun returned with a tray of tea and small sweet cakes. She set them on the low table.

“Eat a little, drink a swallow or two,” she coaxed.

While he ate and drank she put away the mattresses and the silken quilts into the wall cupboards, and when he was finished she handed him a cloth wrung out of hot water to wipe his hands, bowed and took the tray away.

He stood a moment, preparing his spirit, then went into the main room. His old parents were standing side by side waiting for him, and behind them stood Liang and Sasha. His parents stretched out their arms to him as he entered and he fell to his knees as their son. They lifted him up then, tears on their cheeks, and he felt their arms around him, he put his arms around them, first his father and then his mother. How thin and small their bodies were, how piteously shrunken to the very bones!

“Have you not had enough to eat?” he kept saying. “No, you have not had enough to eat! While I have been wandering you have grown so thin — I shall never leave you again!”

They tried to laugh, his mother sobbed and his father held his hand. “We are only old,” Il-han said, “we are very old, and it is time for us to die, but we had to live until you came home again.”

“And you bring us this fine grandson,” Sunia sobbed, pointing to where Sasha stood at one side. “Thanks be to all the gods — and we must all have something to celebrate — I made some special — where is Ippun? I told Ippun—”

She hurried away, tottering slightly as she walked, but the two young men pressed forward.

“Grandfather,” Liang said. “Sasha and I, we must go to the city immediately. There may be more news.”

Il-han stretched his head. “Must you go? The police will be savage today, puffed up with pride for what was done yesterday. When they find that your uncle is here — do you think the Living Reed can be hidden?”

Sunia heard and came running back as fast as her old feet could carry her. “Not both of you,” she wailed. “One of you must stay, lest an evil come about and — if we lose one—”

Il-han made apology for her to Yul-chun. “So used has this poor soul become to the loss of one or another of our family and clan—”

The two young men spoke together.

“I will not stay—”

“Nor I—”

“Safer for two—”

“Go,” Yul-chun said. “I will stay. And do not think of me. Whatever your duty is, do it.”

As he spoke he noticed that Sasha no longer wore his old garments. Instead he wore Korean robes that Liang, doubtless, had lent him. Strangely they did not suit him. His dark face and black eyes and hair, his bold profile and arrogant bearing, made him look foreign in the long white robes, somewhat too large for him at that, for Liang was the taller.

“Go,” he said again, “and if there is time, buy yourself some clothes. You cannot always wear those. Here is enough money.”

The two young men went away then and while they were gone, Yul-chun stayed with his parents and he told them of all that had befallen him, even of Hanya and of how Sasha was born, and he heard the long story of their lives here in the grass roof house. They ate of the dishes that Ippun brought in on trays and set before them, but Sunia did not eat with the men. She had never eaten with menfolk and she did not now, whatever young women did. She bade Ippun set her tray to one side so that the two men could talk. She listened, nevertheless, and she put in her part from time to time, and while they waited for the return of the young men, Yul-chun, from one parent and the other, was able to discover much that he had not known before of all that had happened and was happening in the lives of their people.

“And now,” Il-han said at last, “we can only wait until the Americans win this war. Then we will ride in on the wave of victory.”

“Father,” Yul-chun exclaimed. “I hope you do not mean what you say. There will be no easy riding on any wave. We must be ready with the machinery to take over the government and administer it in modern and efficient ways. Without delay we must study Western government and choose from each those elements which best suit our people. The President must choose the cabinet, the whole structure to offset the Communist structure—”

He saw that his father was listening without comprehending, his eyes fixed on Yul-chun’s face, as he leaned forward to hear.

“Why do I trouble you with such matters, my father?” he said in love and pity. “You have done your share. Tell me about Liang.”

Here was a subject upon which his parents could not say enough, his father carrying the tale and his mother putting in such bits as his father forgot.

“After the fire died down from the burning of that church,” Il-han said, “all who had lost relatives went to find relics and bones for burial. Of Induk and the little girl we could find nothing, for who could sort out such bones as were mingled with the hot ashes?”

Sunia broke in. “I always did say that scrap of blue cloth was a bit of Induk’s skirt. Ippun said she wore a blue skirt that day—”

Il-han continued without pause. “Your brother’s body was not burned — not altogether. I was able to—”

Here Il-han’s chin trembled under his thin white beard, but he put up his hand when Yul-chun tried to urge him not to say more.

“No, no — I must tell you. It is your right to know. The police stood by while we searched, and they allowed me to — to — see — we had taken a — a coffin with us, the servant and I, and we were able to — we gathered the parts — a beam had fallen across his back, but the face — it was he, I–I couldn’t mistake him. Yes, it was he — and we — we had — a funeral—”

Sunia was sobbing softly. “We buried him beside his grandfather. Such a rainy day — the rain falling like waterspouts, though the fortuneteller said it was a lucky day — and a yellow frog hopped out of the grave and I thought of your old tutor and the story of Golden Frog, do you remember, my son?”

“I remember,” Yul-chun said.

“And whatever became of that tutor’s wife?” Sunia mused in the easy diversion of the old. “Not his wife altogether she was, for he went away somewhere before the wedding day and never came back, and they sent his distant cousin here to ask where he was, but how could we know? He had left us, too, and the poor young woman went into a nunnery since she had no husband and was too virtuous to marry another.”

Il-han waited with some impatience while she talked on and now he could wait no longer. “It was of Liang that we were speaking, I believe! A god watched over him that day the church was set on fire by the police. He—”

“No god but his mother,” Sunia put in. “She knew the child loved you, his grandfather, and she sent him to us.”

“Well, well,” Il-han said, “at least he was here. Let us agree on that. And he has been here ever since, our hope and our comfort, for we feared you dead, too, my son!”

“As good as dead,” Yul-chun agreed. “I dared not write letters to you. A price has been on my head, as you know, since the day I escaped from prison, after the Mansei—”

Sunia broke in. “And was it true that a bamboo shoot sprang up between the stones of the cell after you escaped?”

Yul-chun smiled. “Is there such a legend?”

“No legend,” his father retorted. “There were many who saw it, and the police, discovering the reason why they came to the jail as though on a pilgrimage, dug the bamboo up by the roots.”

“Did they do so?” Yul-chun said and fell into musing. “So the green bamboo was gone, root and all!”

“But,” Il-han went on in triumph, “they could never get all the root. Up the green shoot came in some other corner! And at last to stop the people’s joy when they saw it, the police poured cement over the floor.”

“There is bamboo everywhere,” Sunia said.

Yul-chun turned to her. “True, my mother, and so let us talk of Liang.”

Il-han leaned against the back rest of his floor cushion and prepared to enjoy himself again.

“This grandson of mine, before he was three he knew his letters. At five he could write very well. At seven he was beyond my teaching him anything except the old classics, and I sent him to an American school, although privately I taught him, too. He speaks English well and reads English books. He speaks French and German and he studied Latin for his medicine.”

“Medicine?”

“He is learning to be a physician in both foreign and Korean medicine. He is also a surgeon, for he says no one can be only one in such times as we suffer.”

“But why a physician?” Yul-chun inquired.

“He says that he can at least heal the people’s bodies,” Il-han replied. “It comforts him, he says.”

“Is he Christian?” Yul-chun asked.

“No, and yet yes,” Il-han said.

“How no and yes?” Sunia demanded. “No, he is not Christian.” She had left her corner and now sat with them, her eyes still lively in her withered face.

Il-han yielded. “He is not Christian, true, yet he behaves as though he were. He is not Buddhist, but he is like a Buddhist. As for Confucius, Liang reads the classics and he observes correctness.”

“You have taught him well,” Yul-chun told his father.

“I have taught him nothing,” Il-han insisted. “He learns without being taught.”

“I wonder,” Yul-chun said, reflecting. “I wonder how he will like Sasha.”

“Sasha — Sasha — what name is this?” Sunia demanded.

“His mother gave it to him,” Yul-chun said shortly. He saw weariness on his father’s face and he rose. “Rest now, Father. I have tired you.”

“You have only blessed me,” Il-han replied, and his eyes followed Yul-chun out of the room.

“It is better than Moscow,” Sasha said. He stood on a low hill above the city and gazed down upon the palaces and parks, the wide streets, the massive buildings of universities and new department stores. Liang had brought him to show him the city before they entered it.

“You have been in Moscow?” Liang asked.

“Once,” Sasha replied. “Our school sent us there at our graduation. Moscow is also very fine, but—” He swept his right hand over the vista. “Still I do not know whether I go or stay.”

“Stay,” Liang said. “At least stay until you know us well.”

A western wind had cleared the sky in the night and his face, open and benign in the clear sunlight, expressed an inner radiance. Sasha felt an unwilling admiration.

“You are very busy with your work.”

“Yes, I am busy,” Liang said. “I finish my internship at the American hospital next summer. But I have time when I am off duty.”

“Is it a Christian hospital?”

“Yes — a missionary hospital.”

“‘Are you Christian?” Sasha’s question was curt.

“No,” Liang’s voice was amiable, “I am not Christian.”

“All religion is bad,” Sasha declared. “It is an opiate for the people.”

“I believe in God,” Liang said quietly. “Where there is law as there is in the natural world, there must be a law-giver. Yet I do not believe, as Christians do, that we can be saved by a passive acceptance of God. We must save ourselves by doing what is godlike and we will become godlike.”

Sasha protested. “I see no sense in what you say. How do you know what is good? How do you know there is a god? I say there is none.”

Liang did not reply at once. When he did it was with a firm gentle authority.

“In the beginning, Sasha, our people were sun-worshipers. History tells us so, and it is reasonable, for our ancestors came from the cold and windy lands of Central Asia. The winters were long, and in the deep valleys between high mountains the sun shone for only a few hours a day. It is natural that our ancestors loved the sun and went eastward to find the sun. This is how they arrived at our country. But their longing for warmth and brightness, their heavenward yearning, persisted. They dreamed of a kind and powerful friend, a father-being, who lived far beyond their reach and because they could not reach him, they dreamed that he reached them, and he sent his son to become a man. Everywhere in the whole world there is such a dream. The Christians thought they brought it here — but we had it already. True, the manner of his birth varies. The Christians say he was born miraculously of a virgin. We have a legend that he was born of a union between bear and tiger—”

“Bear and tiger?” Sasha had sat down on a rock, brushing away the light snow, but now he suddenly stood up.

“Yes,” Liang said, “and so we Koreans have kept the mountain tiger as our national symbol.”

“Bear is the symbol of Russia,” Sasha exclaimed.

Liang laughed. “Let us not stretch symbols too far! Some of our patients say the tiger has nothing to do with gods, that it is our national animal because the map of our country looks like a sitting tiger. Some say it is because we tell the other peoples to leave us in our lair and we will not disturb them, even as the mountain tiger will not attack unless he is attacked.”

Sasha did not answer. He lay back on the cold rock, hands clasped behind his head, and gazed into the purple sky. Too much was happening, and too fast. He was Korean, and among the Russians he had felt alien. Now that he was here, he felt more alien than ever. Yet this was his family, his cousin, his father, his grandparents — those grandparents, like two ancient dolls in their old-fashioned garments! And this cousin, so handsome that it made a man jealous to look at him, and yet this air of being saint, poet, scholar, all that was remote and impractical except that he was a doctor, a surgeon, and wanted to practice among the poor!

“I wish I could remember my mother better,” he said suddenly.

“Tell me about her,” Liang said.

Sasha stared into the sky. “I should remember her better,” he said, “but she worked day and night for our food, and she never talked much. And I was too young to ask the questions that I wish now I had asked. She came of landfolk. I think she did, for she read no books. But how came she to have a jade seal? Yet here in this scholar’s family, I feel out of place.”

Liang rose as he spoke. “Rather, you have been out of place until now. Come — we must buy those clothes. And I have taken half a day’s absence, but I must be back at the hospital and you may come with me — after you are dressed in your own clothes!”

And suddenly he went running down the mountainside like a boy, Sasha following.

… “Dr. Blaine, this is my cousin, Sasha.”

The American stopped in the corridor of the big new hospital. “I didn’t know you had a cousin.”

He put out his hand. Sasha looked at it and Liang laughed.

“He has not known Americans. Sasha, put out your hand, please, like this!”

Sasha put out his hand and felt the warm, strong, foreign hand. The American turned to Liang.

“Did you take that throat culture yesterday, Liang? The woman’s fever is up this morning.”

“The report is on your desk, sir.”

“Good.”

He hurried away, and the two young men went on. Sasha had never been in a hospital before but he was too proud to say so. He looked at everything as though he had seen such things, until at last they came to a ward of young men.

“This is my special ward,” Liang said. “I am responsible for these men. They are all wounded either by accident in some industry or in a political battle.”

“Battle!” Sasha exclaimed.

“Many battles,” Liang said. “We have our underground war. This patient, for example—”

He stopped by the bedside of a haggard boy of seventeen or eighteen. “How were you wounded, Yu-sin?”

“I am a student, sir. Our school went on strike with the factory workers — who get paid only half what Japanese workers get — we were marching — they attacked us with bayonets — we had only sticks we held over our shoulders, symbols of the guns forbidden to us.”

“He has a fractured skull, his right arm broken, three ribs — and a strip of flesh torn from his right hip.”

They went from bed to bed, Liang telling one story after another. In one bed a man lay near death and Liang sent for a nurse and a hypodermic, then called his superior. It was too late. The man ceased to breathe. Liang covered him with the sheet.

“No one knows who he is,” he told Sasha when they were outside again. “He was in the underground and would give no name, either his own or another.”

“How will they know he is gone?” Sasha asked.

“They know,” Liang said. “And another has already taken his place.”

Yul-chun seemed to live in idleness for many months after he returned to his father’s house. This was partly to deceive the Japanese police and partly to allow himself time to decide what he should do. It was true also that he found himself weary after so many years of danger and hardship. He had been plagued by pains in his joints while he walked south with Sasha, but he had not spoken of it, knowing he was under surveillance, and now he decided to return to writing while he waited for the war to end with victory for the western nations, as end it must since the Americans were using their vast national machinery for war. It was a bold decision. As long ago as the end of the war with Russia, Japan had forbidden such Korean newspapers as were not favorable to Japanese. When she annexed Korea in the Christian year 1910, all Korean newspapers were stopped. Only the underground newspaper upon which Yul-chun had worked during the Mansei Demonstration could not be stopped. Ten years later, however, three newspapers were allowed if they did not speak of political matters. The year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, these were stopped. There were now no newspapers in Korea except those Japanese. He prepared to publish as soon as possible not a newspaper but a magazine, wise, clever, subtle, which to an ignorant Japanese would show no hint of subversion, but to an intelligent Korean would convey information. It was not to be a magazine for the merchant, the trades, the landfolk or the seafolk. It was for the intellectual, for the thinkers, for the planners. He would take time for its conception, its preparation. He would choose his associates carefully, and none should be of his own family.

Yul-chun now assumed the life of a recluse and a scholar, traditional for one who had retired from public and political life. He put aside his western clothes and the trousers and jacket of the Chinese and wore the white robes of the Korean gentleman. He bought a horsehair hat, he let his beard grow, he seldom left his father’s house.

Il-han could only be delighted. He assigned two rooms for Yul-chun’s use and gave orders to the household that his son was not to be disturbed, which orders Sunia disobeyed whenever she felt that Yul-chun should be given food and tea. They were poor these days, and she had trouble to arrange for the delicacies she wished him to have, but Ippun was crafty and when she went to the markets she brought back more than she paid for, and Sunia asked no questions. In these times theft was right and lies were necessary.

The household settled itself around the two newcomers, and outwardly all was well enough so long as they were careful not to seem concerned with government. For Il-han this was easy. Age was creeping into his bones and marrow, and he lived in the past. He was typical of his people, conciliatory and peaceful, inclined to resignation. He quoted old proverbs more and more often to express what he could not put into words.

“Can one spit on a smiling face?” he inquired; or he said, “Vengeance cannot last a night’s sleep.” His only reproach to a lazy servant or an idle farmer on the land was a handful of gentle words. “The man who lies under a persimmon tree with his mouth open may never get food, however long his patience.” Most of the time he slept — the sudden short slumbers of the old. Only Sunia did not sleep or rest. She grew old very thin, but the handsome outline of her bones gave strength to her face and bearing. Only her voice did not change. Clear and strong, scolding or tender, to hear that voice without seeing her one would say she was a young woman.

Among these three, the young men lived a life of their own. The difference between them, Yul-chun reflected, was of communication. Sasha could not explain himself to others, nor could he understand beyond the sound of their words to him. But Liang moved in total comprehension. There was a genius in him, and it sent forth a shaft of light between him and every human being. He scarcely needed to speak, it seemed, for in the wholeness of his comprehension of the feelings, the thoughts, the very being of others, they gave him their confidence in return. Enlightenment, the Buddhists called it, and had Liang been Buddhist he would have been a high abbot, or if Tibetan, then a Dalai Lama, an incarnation. The result of this difference between Liang and Sasha was that Liang lived in peace and without apparent struggle, as though when he was born he had already climbed his mountain, while Sasha, imprisoned within himself, fought against the bonds of his own wayward moods, and could not climb beyond himself.

Yet Yul-chun was troubled. The joyful recognition which Liang had given him in babyhood was not renewed. Open as Liang was with him, ready always for talk or service, the special moment did not come and Yul-chun found himself waiting for it as though for ascension.

… In his quiet room in the house of his ancestors Yul-chun now began to spread the net which was to cover not only his own country but other countries as well. His purpose was twofold; first to prepare the Koreans for victory so that when the moment came and the Japanese were expelled, the nation would have its own government ready to function; and second, he planned to hasten victory by rousing the Koreans in other countries, and especially in the United States. Somewhere in the periphery of his mind and consciousness was the warning that Russia must be watched. For hundreds of years Russia had wanted Korea for its seacoast, its treasures of metals and minerals hidden in the mountains, its fisheries, the power of its rushing rivers and high tides. He did not believe that the heart of Russia was changed. Her ambitions might even be sharpened and intensified by a new government of hungry men, whose ancestors had been half-starved peasants. It was now their turn to grow fat and grow rich.

How was he to achieve such immense purpose? He pondered long on the question. He was too well known and he did not doubt that the vital men and women of the underground knew he was at home and were only waiting to reach him. There were many small but important signs of their knowing. Rude drawings of young bamboo appeared on the walls and gates. Certain products of daily use were named Bamboo. Poems about spring and growth were scattered in the streets, none mentioning his name but some using the words “living” and “reed.” He maintained a steady silence, nevertheless, knowing very well that the Japanese authorities understood such signs and knew where he was and were watching him.

He could only conclude as months passed that he must have help. It would be foolish to risk his life and lose hope for his purpose, and after further thought and with reluctance he decided that he would talk with Liang. He hesitated to do so, for he knew that he might involve and imperil his nephew who would some day be the head of the family, and perhaps soon, since his own life was always in peril. Yet so far as he knew, Liang had no interest in politics or government. He seemed absorbed in his hospital, in his patients, in his people. He came and went freely, greeting Japanese as easily as he did his own countrymen, and speaking Japanese without accent. He had many patients among the Japanese who did not trust Korean doctors but did trust Liang. He had graduated with high honors from a Japanese university in the capital yet he had never gone to Japan, saying when he was invited that he was too busy, and that some day he would go when his internship was ended. To the American doctor he behaved as a son, speaking English perfectly and working with warm affection.

Yul-chun observed this universality and hesitated for a matter of weeks before he approached Liang. Could it be possible that a man beloved by all was really to be trusted? Who knew where his secret heart was? In the night he was beset by doubts and questions, but in the morning again, he had only to see Liang’s open face and hear his voice, clear and confident, and especially hear his laughter, to trust him again. At last, compelled by his necessity for help, he decided that he would indeed speak. He waited for the opportune moment.

It came one day in winter, upon the second anniversary of the day when the Americans entered the war. It was evening. The old couple, his parents, had gone to bed early for they felt the cold, and Sasha had been in the city all day and had not returned, might not return, perhaps, for he was restless and often away. Liang was not on duty at the hospital that night and Yul-chun, putting all these signs together, made up his mind to speak after their evening meal.

“I need advice,” he told Liang when Ippun had taken away the dishes and had filled the teapot again.

Liang smiled. “You flatter me, Uncle!”

“No,” Yul-chun replied, “I have been too long away from home and I cannot remain idle.”

With this, he outlined for him his twofold purpose, and thus continued: “It is not difficult for me to communicate with our countrymen abroad. I know all the leaders. Of these the most important are in the United States, and the next in China. The first group must shape American opinion and persuade the American government to recognize our right to independence and to realize that we are able to govern ourselves. Our provisional government is still in existence, its officers now in the United States. Through them we must work, and it is our task from here to keep them informed in both countries of what is taking place. They must keep us informed in return so that proceeding together we shall be ready to take back our country at the moment the Americans arrive upon our shores in victory.”

To his surprise, Liang’s whole being changed. The moment returned, that moment when as an infant he had recognized the man. His face was illumined, his eyes shone, an electric force beamed from him. He put out his hands and grasped Yul-chun’s hands.

“I have been waiting ever since you came back,” he exclaimed. “I thought you would never speak, yet I knew you would, I knew you must.”

Yul-chun was amazed and overjoyed and yet half afraid. This was what he had hoped for, this was what he needed.

They talked long then, Liang assured yet modest, his mind quick and clear. He listened to the long story Yul-chun now told of his life in China, and how he had fought wholeheartedly side by side with the revolution there, and had learned the technique and the tactics, had maintained his work of writing and printing, and then had left, repelled by cruelties and driven by his fear of new tyrannies.

“There is no guarantee of freedom merely because a new power arises in a nation,” Yul-chun concluded. “We must be prepared against such power. We must still distrust those who have been our ancient enemies. It is true, I have trusted the Americans. Yet of all the nations, we must count them as our only possible friends. They have betrayed us — yes, but it was in ignorance, not greed. Perhaps they have learned now. If not, we must teach them. That is what our fellow countrymen must do — teach them, so that when victory comes, they will know what to do with it. Let us forget the past. Let us remember only that the Americans among all nations have not seized our land or tried to rule us. And I do not forget their Christian missionaries. I am not Christian and I doubt religion, but they have opened hospitals and schools and they have been friends to us, these missionaries, and they have spoken for us and it is not their fault that they have not been heard. Governments are deaf and blind. Therefore I accept the Americans! They are our only hope. I was bitter against my father once because he said these very words. I am not bitter now, I am in despair. I know that in the world we face after the war there will be the same enemies, and the same passion to rule. We must have friends — and our only hope is the Americans. Above all, we must find someone who will go to America, and soon.”

Liang listened to this speech with quiet attention and again Yul-chun felt the comfort of his total understanding, so complete that he had the illusion that he need not have used words. It was a strange feeling, one that he could not analyze or compare to any other, but it permeated him.

“I know one who can help us,” Liang said. “She is a woman.”

Here he stopped. He filled his uncle’s tea bowl and his own, then went on.

“A few months ago I would not have hesitated to bring her to you. Now — I hesitate!”

Yul-chun proceeded cautiously. “Is this woman young?”

“Very young.”

“And beautiful?”

“Very beautiful.”

“A friend? Or something more?”

“Let us not speak of what she is to me — only of what she is.”

“Then what is she?”

Yul-chun leaned against his back rest and fixed his gaze on Liang’s face. He imagined that he saw a cloud there.

“She is a famous dancer,” Liang said.

“A dancer!” Yul-chun exclaimed. His voice expressed what he thought. A dancer? How could she be trusted? Above all, could it be possible that Liang was like other men, his calm beautiful face merely a trick of birth?

Liang smiled. “I know what you are thinking and I agree with you except in this one person. She is not merely a dancer. She is — everything.”

“How is it you know her?” Yul-chun demanded.

“She came to our hospital two years ago, from Peking. Since she is partly Japanese the Chinese had arrested her as a spy and tortured her.”

“Partly Japanese!”

“And partly English. Her grandfather was an English diplomat in China and he fell in love with a beautiful Manchu girl, the daughter of a prince. They had to escape from China to save their lives. Nor were they accepted in England, and so they went to Paris, and there Mariko’s mother was born.”

“How is she Japanese?” Yul-chun inquired.

“Her father,” Liang replied. “Her father was the Japanese Ambassador to Berlin, and on a holiday he met her mother in Paris. They were married, and came back to Japan, where Mariko grew up until she was twelve when her father was sent as Special Envoy from the Emperor. She speaks five languages equally well, but first of all she is an artist.”

Artist, he said, not woman! Yul-chun put his next question.

“And why is she here?”

“She is dancing in the Japanese theatre.”

“How can she be of use to us?”

“She is going to the United States to perform.”

“And you trust her?”

“As I trust myself.”

Yul-chun sighed deeply. He had known no dancers except the simple girls who danced in the Communist propaganda plays used for the landfolk in China and Manchuria. Cynic though he considered himself, of women he knew nothing, and a dancer, he believed as all Koreans did, was woman at her lowest level. He did not speak these thoughts lest he offend Liang, but Liang answered as though he had spoken.

“You have been so absorbed, Uncle, in your devotion to our cause that you have not had time to realize the change in the world. I assure you that she is a woman of dignity as well as beauty. Many men pursue her, of course, but I insist that she is trustworthy.”

“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 what 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.

He had of course seen kisses in western motion pictures but he had taken it as a strange western custom. Nevertheless at her bidding he had leaned forward until his lips rested on hers, and had let them so rest for a short space. Then he had sat back.

“Pleasant?” she had inquired with mischief.

“New,” he had said reflecting, “very new—”

“You are not sure you like it?” she had inquired.

“Not quite,” he had confessed, somewhat embarrassed.

“Shall we try again?”

She made this suggestion in so calm a voice that he had tried again and had made conclusion.

“Very pleasant!”

She had laughed outrageously at him then and the scene had made cause for laughter many times thereafter. He would not allow many kisses in an evening, however, and tonight not until he had finished his duty. He had no wish to use her as a prostitute. It might be that she had been so used but he had never inquired. In the reserve and delicacy of his spirit he did not want to know. What had been could not be changed. She was what she now was and he had complete faith in her. His comprehending instinct discerned no impurity in her.

“I shall not be able to refuse Sasha forever,” she said suddenly.

He waited, aware of a quick anxiety. She helped herself to chicken and with a pair of silver chopsticks put a tender bit into his bowl.

She went on when he did not speak. “What shall I tell this cousin of yours? He is very fierce — not like you—” She broke off.

He spoke out of a fear such as he had never felt. “How can I answer until I know how you feel?”

“I am afraid of him,” she said in a low voice.

“Why?”

She shook her head. “He has a power in him.”

“Over you?” he asked.

A long pause then, while she ate, bit by bit, daintily, not lifting her eyes. Then she put down her silver chopsticks.

“I feel him,” she confessed, “and I am afraid.”

“Of him?”

“Of myself, too.”

He met her pleading eyes gravely. “I have not finished my duty. Do we speak now of Sasha or shall I go on with what I must say?”

She sat back and folded her hands together. “Please go on.”

Against all his being he went on. “You are to take certain letters to certain persons whose names and addresses I will give you. Do not entrust the letters to anyone else, but put them yourself into the hands of those who should receive them.”

“Are these persons Americans or Koreans?”

“Most of them are Koreans but a few are Americans. It is essential that the important persons in Washington should know that we have a government ready to perform its duties and that when the American army arrives it is we who will receive our country from their hands and not our Japanese rulers.”

She listened closely and without coquetry or graceful movement until he had finished. “Must I know all this?” she asked.

“You prefer not to know?”

“It is safer for me not to know. Let me be the innocent bearer of these messages.”

He had now to face the truth. He was putting her life into danger. Upon the slightest suspicion of what he was asking her to do she might be arrested or, more likely, simply shot when she came on the stage, or as she left the theatre or in her own garden or anywhere in the world where she happened to be, in any country, in any city.

To such death they were accustomed. An unknown assassin, a murderer never found, meant that no attempt need be made for justice. And who more reasonably killed than a beautiful woman whom many men loved?

He groaned aloud. “What man was ever compelled to make such a choice — between his love and his country!”

She smiled and suddenly was all woman again. “Do you know,” she said softly, hands clasped under her chin, “I have never seen you troubled. Now you are troubled — and for me! So I know you love me. And I shall be safe. Do you know why? Because I shall be very careful — very, very careful — to come back alive and well and safely to you. I will take no chances. So you need not make the choice. I will take the messages. I will deliver them, but I will not know what is in them. I do not ask. I will only see that they are received. It will not be difficult. I have many American friends. Some are famous and powerful. They will all help me. Say no more — say no more! Some moment before I leave, at one o’clock six nights from now, after my performance, give me the letters. Let me go alone to the airfield. There will be many people there to see me off, but you must not be there. And now that is enough.”

She looked at him sidewise. “If this is not the night, sir, my love, then you had better go.”

She tempted him heartlessly and with all her heart every night, and every night he went away. There would be a night when he stayed but it was not yet and it was not this night. He trusted to the clairvoyance he knew he possessed but which he could not explain. Somewhere far away, but still within the realm of his own being, he had instincts that he believed were old memories for he felt them rather than knew them. He heard no voices but he was directed through feeling and he had learned long ago as a small child in his grandfather’s house that when he disobeyed this feeling he was sad, and when he obeyed, he lived in harmony with himself. He did not think of it as evil or good but as harmony or disharmony.

Now with all his strong and passionate nature he longed to say to her that he would stay and he did not, for he knew indeed the time was not yet. They rose together, he went to her side, hesitating, not trusting himself to touch her lips. Instead he took her hand and pressed his lips into the warm soft palm, scented as her whole body was always scented, with Chinese kwei-hua, a small white flower of no beauty except in its undying fragrance.

… He slipped through the gate and into the quiet street. The hour was late and if he met a watchman he would be questioned. There was always that danger. He braced himself then when at the left turn of the street a man came toward him through the twilight of a clouded moon. Then he saw that it was no watchman but Sasha, wrapped in a capelike cloak. They met and stopped and he saw Sasha’s face, pale and staring.

“What is it, Sasha?” He made his voice calm and usual

“I followed you,” Sasha muttered. “I have been waiting for hours.”

“Why have you waited? Why did you not knock on the gate and come in?”

“It is you,” Sasha said in the same muttering. “You are why she would not let me come! Baron Tsushima! What Baron are you? You and she — you and she—”

Liang stopped him. “Sasha, what you are thinking is not true. We are not lovers.”

“Then why are you with her in the night?” Sasha demanded.

Liang waited for a long moment before he replied. Then it became clear to him what he must say. He took Sasha’s arm.

“Come with me!”

In silence the two men walked the dim streets, empty except for beggars who crept through the night looking for refuse or shelter. Of these there were more than a few but they did not accost the young men, fearing these two, well dressed and strong. By law, beggars were forbidden and it was only at night that they could prowl about the streets, knowing that the Japanese were asleep and the watchmen were Koreans. On the two walked until they came to the hospital where he had his room. Many nights Sasha had stayed here with him, sometimes in sleep, sometimes in talk. They were cousins, but they were not always friends. Something new, something strange, was in Sasha. Whether it was the ancestry of his northern mother, whether it was the rudeness of his upbringing and the harshness of the Siberian climate, Liang did not know. With his peculiar genius, he understood Sasha, but not as part of himself.

“Sit down,” he said when they had closed the door. The building was modern, and his room had a wooden floor, a table, two chairs and two cot beds.

Sasha flung off his coat. Like other young Korean men he now wore western clothes. He sat down on the cot bed and began to unlace his shoes.

“Tell me that you stay half the night with a dancer and do nothing but talk and I will not believe you.”

His voice was sullen, his face dark. He kicked off his shoes and threw himself back on the cot.

“Believe me or not, it is true,” Liang said quietly. “And it was not only a dancer with whom I talked. It was with a famous artist, who happens to be my friend.”

“A dancer,” Sasha insisted in the same sullen voice, “and if you have not heard what else she is, you are a fool, and I know you are not a fool. I could tell you what she said to me tonight — yes, we spoke, she and I.” He sat up and stared at Liang with flashing eyes. “I wait for her every night at the stage door. Sometimes she lets me go home with her.”

He watched Liang to see what the effect of this might be. Liang was sitting in the chair by the table, and there was no change in his face.

“You don’t ask what she said?” Sasha cried.

“No.”

He was about to say more. Then he did not. She had told him she was afraid of Sasha. In a woman fear of a man may be the under edge of admiration, and admiration the upper edge of love. He wondered why he was not angry with Sasha, or even with her, but he was not. The gift he had been given was sometimes heavy to bear, the ability always to understand why the other person was as he was. Wounded, yes, but never angry, and there were times when he longed to feel fierce personal anger. Now, even now, he imagined that it might be possible to strike Sasha a hard blow, wrestle with him in combat, shout at him that Mariko was not to be fouled by his desire and suspicion.

“She is afraid of you,” he said suddenly and was shocked. He had no intention of such revelation.

A strange secret look stole over Sasha’s handsome face. His eyes narrowed and he smiled.

“She told you that?”

“Yes.”

“It is enough — for a beginning.”

Sasha lay back again, his hands behind his head. As clearly as though his eyes could penetrate that skull, Liang knew what was taking place there. A hard simple core of ruthless desire was shaping into a plan. A woman who fears, Sasha was thinking, is a woman who can be taken by force. No more pleading — no more waiting at stage doors! He would enter her house. When she came home he would be there. He would enter by force.

This was what Liang saw as clearly as though it had already taken place. He felt a sudden uplift of power in him. Was this anger at last? Was this how a man felt when he could strike another man? He leaped up and felt his hand curl into fists. He saw Sasha leap up to meet him. They stood staring into each other’s eyes. As suddenly as it had come, the impulse died in Liang’s body.

“It cannot be done, Sasha,” he said. “She has guards in her house. You will have to find another way.”

He sat down again. The loneliness of Sasha, a boy who saw his mother dead under a tree in the forest, whose home was the coldness of an orphanage in Russia, a youth, wandering here and there to earn his living who found his father only to know that they could never meet, a man who had never known what love was in parent or friend or lover. Of what use was it to strike such a man as Sasha? A blow could never change him.

He felt this as clearly as though he were inside Sasha’s skin, Sasha’s blood running through his veins, and by the instinct in himself which he could never understand, he knew that he must tell Sasha that Mariko now was embarked upon a most dangerous mission.

“The reason I went to see Mariko Araki tonight was a secret one, but I will tell you what it is. You are a Korean, Sasha, and you are a Kim of Andong. Above all other things that you are, you are first of all Korean of the clan of Kim. Our blood is the blood of patriots. At this time we cannot think of ourselves. We must think of our people, our country. Our grandfather has spent his life for our country. He saved our Queen when she was about to be killed and his lasting grief is that he could not save her in the end. My father died because he was a patriot and my mother suffered and died. And your father has been an exile since his youth, and now he is about to begin the most dangerous work of his life. We, the Kim, are staking all we have and are on the moment when victory is declared and the Americans come to our country. We must be ready for that moment. We Koreans must not be divided as we have been, fighting each other, in the open as we did in the past or in secret as we still do. We must be ready with a united government able to take over our country from the defeated Japanese. The Americans must know we are ready. It is for this that I went to see Mariko. She is to take letters to America.”

Sasha stood listening, his hand hanging, his mouth ajar.

“Why Americans?” he demanded. “What have the Americans ever done for us?”

“They have never taken our land,” Liang replied. “They have never dreamed of empire. Whatever they may have done or may not have done, they are the only people who have declared the ideals of which we have only dreamed. True, we were not saved, but an American, Woodrow Wilson, declared self-determination of peoples.”

“I never heard his name,” Sasha retorted.

“He is dead,” Liang said gently, “and I think he died when he found how large his promise was and he knew he could not fulfill it. Yet though dead he lives.”

Sasha turned away. “You are being religious.” He threw himself on the bed and yawned.

“Nations, like individuals, can only learn by their own individual experience.”

Yul-chun paused in his writing. The snow was falling softly but heavily into the garden. It had begun only a few minutes ago, but if it kept up there would be a foot of snow by twilight. The house was silent and he was alone. Yul-han’s house was now his own. He had found himself cramped in his father’s house, and at the mercy of his mother, coming in too often to see if he were cold or hungry or feverish or had he not worked too long, and he had asked for this house. There was also Sasha. To his surprise, Sasha after months of idleness had wished to go to the Christian school so that he might improve his English and go to America. Sometimes Sasha came home at night, sometimes he did not. Last night he came home early with his books, and after he had his meal he went to his room. On the whole, Yul-chun reflected, Sasha was improving, although of late he had shown a sudden hostility to Liang which the latter seemed not to notice. Yul-chun sighed and turned his thoughts resolutely away. Deeper than his longing had once been for Hanya was the constant troubling anxiety he felt for his son. Hanya had been a stranger, but Sasha was part of himself, though how often he too was a stranger!

Resolutely he took up his pen. “We cannot learn to govern ourselves as a modern nation while we are ruled by another. Yet we must be able to defend ourselves at the moment of victory, lest defenselessness invite new invasion. We must be willing to be poor in order that we can build a navy to protect our shores. On the north we must build bastions and fortresses and maintain a heavy defense to prevent the age-old threat of Russia. To the incoming American Military Government, let me recommend immediate recognition of our provisional Korean government. It was our hope that our own brave Korean soldiers, now in China, could have helped the American army against Japan, our common foe. We would have saved many American lives thereby. Bitter indeed was our disappointment when this was not allowed.”

Someone knocked and looking up he saw Liang at the door, and with him a small slender woman wrapped in a sable coat, snow glistening on her dark hair. They bowed.

“We disturb you, Uncle,” Liang said.

“No — no, I was just finishing an editorial,” Yul-chun replied.

“Uncle, this is Mariko Araki,” Liang said.

Yul-chun bowed once, not too deeply, and Mariko bowed deeply several times. Then she allowed Liang to take off her coat. Underneath she wore Korean dress, a short bodice of pale gold brocaded satin, tied at the right shoulder with a bow, and a full skirt of crimson satin. Under the skirt he saw the upturned toes of her little gold shoes and he gazed at her frankly from head to foot. This was the dancer!

“Come in,” he said. “Seat yourselves. I have some western chairs. Sometimes I sit in a chair myself to promote circulation in the legs.”

Mariko laughed. “I do it by dancing!”

“Ah,” Yul-chun said. “It is a resource, but not for me.”

She sat down on a chair and Liang took another. After a moment’s hesitation, Yul-chun resumed his seat on the floor cushion beside the low desk.

“Apologizing, Uncle, for sitting above you,” Liang said with his usual good nature, “but these western clothes allow me too little freedom.”

He wore a western suit which made him look slim and tall.

“We shall all be sitting in chairs when the Americans come,” Yul-chun replied.

Liang and Mariko exchanged looks, and Liang began again. “Uncle, Mariko is leaving tonight for America. I promised that I would bring her to see you before she went. Yet I have put it off until today, I suppose because I have been — I am fearful for her. But she is very brave. She will help us.”

“I am not brave,” Mariko put in. “I do not want to know anything. I wish not to answer questions. But if you put something in my hand, sir, I will put it in the hand where it should be. That is all.”

Yul-chun listened, appraising her as she spoke. He was experienced in such appraisal. How often had he not searched one who must be entrusted with a message of life or death! He was satisfied now with what he saw in this charming face. It was an honest face, frank, mischievous perhaps, but a child’s mischief born of gaiety and not of wile.

“Why are you willing to do this?” he asked.

She did not hesitate. “I do it for someone I love. He is Korean and so I do it for Korea.”

She did not look at Liang. Was it he? Yul-chun asked of himself. Was it Sasha? Liang inquired of his heart.

“That is to say I am only a woman,” Mariko was saying, “and being a woman I do something for a man, not for a country — unless it is his country.”

Yul-chun waited, still expecting to hear who this man was, but Mariko was finished. She composed herself, folding one hand over the other, her small hands pale against her crimson satin skirt. He opened a drawer in the desk and took out a silver key. With this key he unlocked a compartment hidden in the back of the drawer, and from it he drew three letters.

“I have already written them,” he said, his voice low and solemn. “They are addressed to—”

He held out the letters for Liang to see. Liang nodded and Yul-chun proceeded.

“In case the letter to the President does not reach him, I have this friend—” he pointed to the second letter—“who will then go personally to Washington. He has access to the President. This is essential, for the President does not know our history, else how could he have suggested two years ago that Korea be placed under the international trusteeship of China, the United States and, he said, one or two other nations? We, who have been a nation for four thousand years! What if that one other nation were Russia! In my letter to him I have explained the fearful peril of Russia.”

Here Yul-chun felt compelled to pause, so great was his agitation. He set his lips, he cleared his throat and heaved up a sigh from the bottom of his heart. Then he continued.

“I repeat to both of you, who will outlive me, the day may come when we will look back to these years under the Japanese rulers and call them good. At least the Japanese have prevented the Russians. I say this, although I have known the torture of my flesh and the breaking of my bones under the hands of a Japanese torturer.”

They listened to him in silence, motionless, their quiet expressing their respect and their awe. They loved him for the legend that he had become in their country, the Living Reed, and for what he was now, heroic, selfless, a tall powerful man, worn with suffering, his face noble and bold but lined too early with pain, his thick dark hair already gray. Suddenly Liang spoke.

“Uncle, I told Sasha that she was going to the United States with letters. Did I do wrong?”

“You did very wrong,” Yul-chun exclaimed. Then realizing what he had said, he turned to Mariko. “My son is not evil. I am sure he is not evil. He has not lived in his own country and now he seems somewhat lost here. We must win him to our family. Liang, I cannot blame you, but—”

The door to the right opened, and as though he had heard his name Sasha came in. He was dressed in western clothes, a hat in his hand, a coat over his arm. He looked at the three, surprised. Or was it pretense at surprise? Liang could not decide. Yul-chun spoke immediately and too quickly.

“Come in, my son. Liang has told you. We are sending the letters. I have made them very brief but firm, very firm. As for example, to the President I — this is the copy, I kept it for our own records. Now that you know — I am very glad you know — Liang, I change my mind, it is well that you told him. I would like Sasha to become part of us—”

Yul-chun was fumbling among papers in the secret compartment. “Yes, here it is. Yes! To the President as follows—”

And again Yul-chun lifted the paper and read in his loud clear voice. “We in Korea have been deeply disturbed for the past two years. Those few words agreed upon by you, Sir, and the British Prime Minister and the Nationalist Chinese ruler Chiang, haunt us day and night. I repeat them, Sir, lest you have forgotten what we can never forget. ‘The aforesaid Powers, mindful of the enslavement of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea become free and independent.’ These words, Sir, are carved into our hearts and they bleed. ‘In due course.’ Sir, in the space of these three small words Korea is doomed.”

When he heard this, Liang had one of his moments of foreknowledge. He could not explain the prophetic weight, he tried to escape it, he shrugged it off. He rose and walked about the room, but could not escape. Doom! The heavy word resounded in his ears as though he heard near him the single heavy beat of a great bass drum, and the echoes reverberated into the future.

Behind him, afar off, he heard Sasha’s voice. “I am going into the city, Mariko. The carriage is at the door. Come with me.”

Liang turned. Mariko rose, unwilling, and looked from one to the other bewildered. Her asking eyes rested on Liang’s face. He nodded as though she had spoken and she bowed to Yul-chun and followed Sasha from the room.

“But here are the letters,” Yul-chun exclaimed.

“I will take them to her tonight,” Liang said. “It is better that she does not have them with her now—”

… She was in the house directing the packing of her costumes for her tour when he went to her that evening. Japanese kimono, narrow Chinese robes slit boldly up the thigh, French evening gowns, English tweed suits and Russian furs were piled on the mat-covered floors. Three maids worked silently and without rest under her command. She sat in a deep chair, frowning with decisions made quickly and without argument. At the sight of Liang she rose and went to the other room and closed the wall screens.

“But at last,” she exclaimed when they were alone. “Where have you been? I thought I would have to leave without seeing you.”

“I came by horseback,” he said. “The snow is a foot deep. I inquired at the airport to know if the planes were stopped, but they are not.”

“Are you coming to the theatre tonight?”

“Yes, but not to your room. And not to the airport. We shall not meet again until you return.”

She stood motionless as a deer stands, suddenly afraid. “How has Sasha so much money? Those new clothes!”

“I do not know.”

“Are you afraid of Sasha, too?”

“No, I am afraid of no one.”

“Why, oh why did you let him take me away?”

“It is not the time to quarrel with him. And you must not be afraid. You are an artist. No one can destroy you unless you destroy yourself by fears.”

“Let us not speak of Sasha,” she said with resolution. “Have you the letters?”

“Yes.” He took them from his pocket and she thrust them into the bosom of the Japanese kimono.

“Tell Sasha not to come to the theatre!”

“If I see him.”

They stood looking at each other, suddenly speechless, the abyss of being parted already between them.

“When you come back …” he said and stopped.

“When I come back,” she repeated. “Oh when I come back — yes — yes — yes—”

“The war may be over. And we—”

“Yes!”

The word was a yearning sigh. He put out his hands and she clasped them in hers and then loosed them and pressed herself against him. He bent his head and kissed her deeply. They stood for a long moment, until the maid called from behind the wall screen.

“Mistress, shall I put the gold dress into the box for Paris, or is it to be worn in New York?”

She tore herself away, gave him a pleading look, and left him, and he knew he would not see her alone again.

… Whether Sasha went to the airport Liang did not know. He did not see his cousin at the theatre and he returned to the hospital. The next day he performed a difficult and new operation alone for the first time, the American doctor at his side but taking no part. The necessity for concentration helped the hours to pass, and Liang finished his task at noon, his patient still alive and likely to live.

“Good work,” the American exclaimed. “I thought for a moment that the artery might slip from your hand. But you’re a born surgeon. I never saw better hands for it.”

The patient was a young man who had been stabbed, the lung pierced and the heart damaged. Liang knew how it had been done. He recognized the man as a leader of the new terrorists. Now he would live again to kill others!

Liang pulled off his rubber gloves. “Thank you, sir,” he said to the American. “You have taught me all I know.”

“I’d like to send you to Johns Hopkins,” the American said warmly. “Some such great hospital, anyway. Techniques for heart surgery are improving every day. Say, I never saw an artery tied like that, though!”

“A Korean knot,” Liang said, taking off his white coat. “It holds fast, but a touch can release it — if you know the touch!”

“You sure have the touch.”

The American clapped him on the shoulder and Liang smiled and went to his office.

By now Mariko must be nearly halfway to New York. The first letter would soon be safely out of her hands. Those little hands, so supple, so graceful in the dance! On that last night she had made her farewell program of old Korean folk dances, the Sword Dance, the climax of the evening. All knew that it was not by chance that she had chosen to perform the story of the famous boy dancer of the ancient Silla Kingdom who perfected himself in a dance, holding a sword in each hand. His fame spread over the whole peninsula until he was summoned to appear before the King of Paekche, the enemy of Silla. There before the throne he danced so well that the audience cried out, beside themselves with pleasure, and the King rose from his throne. At that moment the dancer leaping forward thrust his sword into the King’s heart He was killed, of course, but by his courage he had inspired his own people in Silla and in his memory they preserved the Sword Dance. Mariko had performed it with classical style, even to wearing the mask of a boy’s face, her dance-swords, the blades connected by wires to the handles, striking in rhythm with her flying feet. When she had finished, the audience rose shouting to its feet. She had snatched off her mask to show her own lovely face, and bowed again and again, her eyes fixed, as Liang knew, upon his face. Then she had run away, the ends of her wide golden sash flying behind her, and he saw her no more.

The endlessness of time until they met again! For the first time in his life he, the light of heart, felt his heart heavy in his breast. “Attachment,” Buddha had said, “is the cause of grief.” He pondered the saying, and that night in his room, he wrote it down. After a time he made a poem.

Buddha was both right and wrong.

Attachment with all its pain,

Is now my deepest gain,

My inward Song—

Life long!

He copied it carefully and without writing his name beneath it he put it in an envelope and addressed it to Mariko in New York. They had agreed it would be too dangerous for them to write. But what could a Japanese censor make of a poem?

The American President died suddenly one spring day. The news echoed around the world and into every city and village in Korea. Liang heard it in the hospital and hastened home to announce it to his grandfather and uncle.

Yul-chun drew him aside. “Do you know whether the letter was delivered?”

“I have heard nothing,” Liang replied.

“We cannot know in any case whether the one who takes his place will see the letter,” Yul-chun said, downcast.

“We cannot know anything,” Liang agreed. “We can only wait.”

… Spring passed and summer entered. Liang worked day and night at the hospital and saw little of Sasha until the school year ended. Silence filled the land, a tension of waiting. The end of the war was inevitably near, the world knew it, and yet the mechanism to force that end could not be found. In Seoul the police grew every day more oppressive and all controls were tightened throughout the country. Jails were filled and schools put under surveillance. Germany surrendered and the tension increased. Every Korean now knew that Japan must surrender and every heart was impatient because there was no surrender.

“A blind and stubborn people, the Japanese,” Yul-chun declared.

“The people know nothing of what goes on behind the military screen,” Liang replied.

It was midsummer and they were in the garden for respite from the heat. Sasha was teasing a puppy by dipping it into the goldfish pond, and Liang could not bear to see the small creature’s fright. He walked abruptly to the pool and took the shivering dog into his arms and Sasha threw pebbles into the water to scare the fish.

“I am going to Paris,” he announced.

They heard this in silence. Then Il-han spoke. “I was in Paris once, to see Woodrow Wilson. Many people were there from many countries. He was surprised to see us pressing around him, each begging for his help. I know now he was frightened.”

“Of you?” Sasha asked idly.

“Of himself,” Il-han said.

A roar of thunder rumbled from the mountains to the north, and a naked flash of lightning forked across the twilight sky.

“Come into the house!” Sunia cried at them from the door.

They went in slowly, reluctant to leave the coolness. Sasha lingered alone in the doorway. Suddenly he saw the puppy under a bush and dragging it forth he dropped it into the pool.

… The summer days wore on, hot and long. Liang still heard nothing from Mariko and there was no announced surrender, although the Japanese were losing on every front. People were weary with waiting. Yet they could only wait. One night a man with a gunshot through his leg was brought into the emergency ward and Liang’s duty was to tend the wound. When it was cleaned and bandaged, the man pressed a small square of folded paper into his hand. Accustomed to such messages, Liang said nothing. He turned his back and unfolded the paper. It was addressed to the Japanese people but signed by Americans and it gave the conditions of surrender, warning them also that if Japan did not surrender, eleven cities would be bombed.

He returned to the wounded man now lying on the bed and leaned over him, pretending to adjust his pillow.

“Were they bombed?”

“Six cities.”

“We have not heard of it here.”

“I am just back from Japan.”

“No surrender?”

“None. The Japanese government is split. The peace party has asked Russia to mediate. They ignore the American warning — with scorn.”

“The other cities?”

“They will be destroyed. Millions of leaflets have warned a second time.”

“The people?”

“Dazed, immobile, waiting.”

“What next?”

“The Americans have a new and terrible weapon. It is next — unless Russia acts.”

“Will Russia—”

“No.”

A nurse came near and Liang went away. He hastened to his room, took off his western garments and put on Korean robes. Thus disguised, he left the hospital and the city and returned to his grandfather’s house.

… In the house, meanwhile, there was already confusion. Yul-chun had received a secret message, carried by a fruit vendor from the north. Among his apples and peaches the man had hidden certain objects which could only be Russian, and Yul-chun in the garden recognized them as the man bargained. The man nodded mysteriously when Yul-chun inquired, then drew near to whisper.

“The Russians are pouring into the north!”

These fearful words fell upon Yul-chun’s ears and he hastened to tell them to his father. Il-han was lying in a long chair of woven rattan, smoking his long bamboo pipe as he listened. He knocked the ash from the small brass bowl at one end and filled it with the strong sweet tobacco he enjoyed in his old age.

“Father!” Yul-chun exclaimed. “Do you say nothing?”

“What is there to say?” Il-han replied. He lay back and drew hard on the pipe and two streams of smoke came from his nostrils.

“Then I must go into the city,” Yul-chun exclaimed, more than a little angry with his old father. “I must get in touch again with the underground—”

“Calm yourself,” Il-han told him. “You will only get yourself killed. Do you think the Japanese are not watching for you? They are waiting to see what you will do.”

“Why do you say this?”

“Because they know everything, and nothing you can do now will save us. Pretend you are ill. Go to bed. Declare that you have a fever. I will tell everyone you are not expected to live. We must wait. Then when the Japanese surrender we must all be ready to seize the power.”

“But if the Russian troops—”

“There will be a brief moment, a few hours between the surrender and the arrival. Let us hope there will be the brief moment — the few hours—”

They were interrupted by Sasha bursting through the gate. His eyes were wide, his whole face exploding with what he had to tell, too impetuous for greeting his elders.

“A new bomb, a new bomb has fallen! The whole sky lit in Japan — a city burst into flames. This morning — it was early morning, just as schools were opening and men going to business—”

It was at this moment that Liang reached home and, following upon Sasha, heard what was said. “The military will not surrender, even though the Emperor wishes it,” he exclaimed.

Sasha gave a loud laugh. “They will see another bomb! Another bomb will fall!”

They were startled by his laughter, they looked at him and at one another, and none spoke. No one, not even his father, knew Sasha well enough to reprove him for such laughter, yet all were frightened by it.

Il-han spoke. “Russia will now declare war on Japan.”

“Let that war be declared,” Sasha said joyously. “What the Americans have begun the Russians will finish!” He laughed again, that loud cruel laughter, and the other three hearing it, could only be silent as he went into the house.

“How did Sasha know of the bombs before any of us?”

They looked at one another and none could answer.

… Two days later Russia declared war on Japan. The news leaked out. Everyone knew and no one talked. Still Japan did not surrender. Russia moved her troops into Manchuria, and still Japan did not surrender. On the third day the second bomb fell on the city of Nagasaki. How many bombs did the Americans have? On the fourth day Japan sent an offer of surrender, stipulating only that the Emperor be left upon his throne.

These blows fell, and the men in the house of the Kim — Il-han, his son and his two grandsons — prepared themselves. The orders from the secret Korean government were that all must wait for the coming of the Americans. Until then there must be no move from Koreans, no reprisals against the Japanese, no sign of rebellion. Let all wait quietly in their houses. Their hope must be in the Americans.

In obedience Liang did not go to the hospital and Sasha stayed, too.

“When will they come?” Yul-chun groaned.

He was the restless one. Il-han was calm with the deep philosophic calm of the old. He watched Yul-chun with something like amusement one day as that one walked from house to garden and garden to house, unable to sit or to read or even to put his hand to a useful task when Sunia suggested the mending of the roof where a few tiles had fallen in a windstorm a few days before.

“You should write a book,” Il-han said. He sat on a bench in a corner of the garden to catch the noon sun.

“A book?” Yul-chun repeated.

Il-han knocked the ash from the small brass bowl of his bamboo pipe.

“I wrote a book.”

Yul-chun paused before him. “When?”

“Years ago when I was restless like you. The Japanese had come, and I was a prisoner here, as you are now, and I wrote a book in which I put down every evil act of the invaders. Thus I made history and thus I vented my fury.”

Yul-chun was astounded and diverted. “Let me see this book, Father,” he said.

“Follow me,” Il-han said.

He rose and went into the house, Yul-chun following, and opening a chest of polished wood bound in brass, he lifted from it a thick manuscript wrapped in silken cloth.

Yul-chun received it in both hands. “What labor!” he said. “Am I to read it?”

“As you will,” Il-han replied. “There are good bits in it,” he went on. “You will even find yourself in it. I wrote down faithfully all about your trial, to the last detail of how you looked.”

“You shame me,” Yul-chun muttered.

He did sit down then, as his father returned to the garden and filled his pipe again, and forgot his restlessness as he read the careful polished sentences in which the elder had reported every evil of the times, murder and massacre and assassination, rape and looting and arson, chicanery and deceit. He read day and night until the book was finished, and he had given it back to his father.

Then his restlessness fell on him with double weight, for he knew beyond doubt that all his father had written was true. When would his people be delivered? He began to doubt the Americans, although Il-han remained calm and the two young men were confident, Liang because he trusted the Americans, Sasha — who knew anything about Sasha?

Only Yul-chun, the one between, could neither be calm nor confident. Hope and fear stirred him in equal measure and made him restless day and night, while the slow formal steps were taken between governments, the victor and the vanquished. Meanwhile the Russian soldiers were indeed already pouring into the north. It was no longer the secret of fruit vendors. Six days before the final surrender they had come on foot through Siberia and by sea from Manchuria. The people were too dazed to protest or to move. Only the few had heard that Russia would share in the booty of war, and now like hares before hounds, they stood stricken and silent as the rough soldiery crowded the country roads and villages and swarmed into the cities.

“Where will it end?” Yul-chun demanded. “Will they cover the whole country before the Americans come?”

But they were not to cover the country. Someone, some American officer, somewhere, who knew where, drew a line across a map. The Russians were to stop, the people were told, at the 38th parallel. Where was the 38th parallel? Some remembered that the Russians and Japanese had talked of dividing Korea there. In sickening foreboding men and women studied maps in old schoolbooks their children had once used, to discover whether their homes were to be under Communist rule. If the answer was yes, they gave themselves up to despair and many killed themselves. If the answer was no, they prayed for the Americans to come quickly. Where were the Americans?

“They are asleep,” Sasha declared with laughter.

“They will come,” Liang said steadily.

They did not come.

Yet more days passed, one after another while the people waited in agony, and the Americans did not come. What if the wild Soviet soldiers swarmed even over the boundary that had been set for them? Already there were stories of pillage and robbery and rape. In the grass roof house Liang cleaned and loaded two old rifles he had bought in the city. There were no young women here and for that let all be thankful, but it was well to be ready. How thankful, too, that Mariko was now safely in Paris! He had followed, through newspaper reports, her path of glory.

“Something entirely new from Asia, yet something we can understand. The tincture of her Western ancestry—”

Only Sasha was scornful. “I know the Russian soldiers,” he said. “They are bold and they are young like me, most of them, but they are not worse than other soldiers. If they come I will speak Russian to them and they will not harm us.”

And he poured out a stream of Russian to show what he would say. The others listened to him, half fearful, then Sunia told him sharply to be silent.

“In this house,” she said, “we speak only Korean.” And she would not heed Sasha’s furious sullen look.

But all were easily impatient in these few bitter days, when searing anxiety burned in them like fever. Then suddenly it was announced everywhere that on the ninth day of the same month, the ninth of the year, at last, at last the Americans were coming! They were to enter at the port of Inchon, and learning the news, the people everywhere prepared banners and Korean flags, flowers and gifts. None dared yet to leave home, nevertheless, for the Japanese Governor-General had asked permission from the Americans to maintain police control lest Koreans make reprisal on the six hundred thousand Japanese now living in that southern part of Korea, many of them having fled from the north when the Russians appeared. Permission had been granted. Koreans remained in their homes and no reprisals were made, the people being too proud in any case to take such petty revenge.

Then another command came from the Japanese Governor-General. Koreans were forbidden to meet the Americans.

“This we cannot obey,” Yul-chun declared.

… On the appointed day therefore, Il-han and his son and grandsons came to the docks at Inchon, wearing Korean robes. Sunia had cut flowers from her garden and Il-han carried a bouquet in his right hand to present to the Americans, but Yul-chun carried the Korean flag, hidden for all these years, and Liang held an American flag. Only Sasha was empty-handed.

When they arrived at the docks they found some five hundred Koreans already there, leading citizens who had been chosen in secret to represent the people in receiving the Americans, all bearing in their hands gifts and flowers from those who could not come and waving banners of welcome and Korean flags. The day was hot but fair. The sun poured down upon land and water, making the green more green and the sea as blue as heaven. The great American ship, her flags flying, was anchored in the harbor, and all stood silent and motionless as the gangway was let down. To the right were the Japanese officials in full uniform, the Governor-General in front, his sword at his side. To the left were the Japanese police holding back the Korean crowd of some five hundred persons.

Yet they could not be held back. When the American General appeared on the gangway, the five hundred pressed forward, waving their flags and banners, to greet the American General as he came down the gangway from his ship. At this same moment the Japanese police lifted their guns and opened fire. Five Koreans fell dead, and nine fell wounded, and gifts and banners were wet with their blood.

What Il-han and Yul-chun and the two young men now saw was not to be believed, but they saw it and were compelled to believe what their eyes told. For that American General, descending from his ship, did not reprove or stay those police or even blame them for what they had done. Instead he commended them for “controlling the mob,” as he put it, whereupon the Koreans who had come to welcome him were scattered by the police and the waiting Japanese officials became the hosts. With their eyes Il-han and Yul-chun and the two young men saw this and with their ears they heard the American General declare to the Japanese officials that they were to keep their posts until he could form a military government to take over the country. He neither spoke to the Koreans nor seemed to see them. While they heard and saw this, the four of them, Il-han and Yul-chun, Sasha and Liang, were standing crowded together in a doorway of a house. The door was barred, but they had taken shelter there under the roof when the police dispersed the welcoming Koreans. They looked at one another, the flags and flowers hanging limp in their hands.

“What shall we do now, Grandfather?” Liang asked.

“We go home again,” Il-han replied. He threw the flowers into a ditch. “Fold our flag,” he told Yul-chun, “we will take it home with us and put it away for another day.”

This they were about to do when Yul-chun turned, irresolute until he saw the American accept the sword of the Governor-General. He heard him speak affably to the Japanese, ignoring the fleeing Koreans. He saw the flags and the banners trampled in the dust as the Koreans ran, the flowers crushed. And suddenly he went mad. He ran back, waving the Korean flag and shouting, “Mansei — Mansei!”

He was not allowed to shout more than this. Guns were instantly raised, shots sounded in the air and he fell into the dust, dead.

It was Liang who ran back to him, and what might have happened to him, too, cannot be told, for he was saved by his superior at the hospital. Among the Koreans but somewhat apart from them were a few Americans, missionaries and teachers and doctors, and it was the doctor who ran to meet Liang.

“Go back,” the American whispered. “Go back — go back before they shoot again! Leave him! I will take him to the hospital — but hurry — hurry — I am in their bad graces — I can’t save you—”

Liang could only obey, for he saw Il-han had fallen and could not be lifted, although Sasha was holding up his head. Together the two young men lifted the aged man and they carried him to the hospital to await the coming of Yul-chun’s dead body, Liang comforting his grandfather as he went.

“My uncle would have chosen a death like this.”

But Il-han refused comfort. “Am I to be comforted? Be silent!”

There was no silence, nevertheless, for behind them came those who were left of the crowd, weeping and groaning because the Living Reed was dead.

“Who will take his place?” Il-han inquired.

It was the day of the funeral and they were home again, but Yul-chun lay now on the hillside beside his grandfather. From everywhere people had come to bow before his old parents and to him.

“No one — no one,” Sunia sobbed. “We have lost our sons.”

They were in the main room, waiting for Ippun to bring them hot tea. Suddenly from the garden they heard angry voices.

“How dare you go to the north?”

“Can that be our Liang?” Sunia whispered.

“Hush,” Il-han said. They sat side by side on their floor cushions, and he put out his hand to take Sunia’s hand while they listened.

In the dark garden the two young men sprang at each other. The two old people heard pants of rage, the grunts and snorts of young men embattled.

“Sasha will kill our Liang,” Sunia muttered. She got to her feet with effort and tottered to the door.

“You two!” she screamed in her high quavering old voice.

They did not hear her and Il-han came to her side.

“What are they fighting about now?” he inquired.

“Who knows?” Sunia said. She peered out from under her hand. They were struggling in the dust, locked together. She began to sob. “Our Liang will be killed!”

But Liang was astride the fallen Sasha. He had him by the shoulders, shaking his head against the hard earth.

“You!” Sasha was shouting between chattering teeth. “You have no pride — you — you — live here — under the — the insult of these Americans — no shame — take your — your hands away — my throat—”

Il-han suddenly pushed Sunia aside. He strode on his shaky legs to the two young men and with all his strength he tried to pull them apart.

“Must I see you against each other, you two in my own house? Are we forever to be against each other?”

At the sound of Il-han’s voice Liang suddenly came to himself. He got up and drew his breath in great sobs. “Grandfather,” he began and could not go on.

But Sasha was on his feet, too. He stooped to take up a knapsack where it had fallen from his shoulder, his old knapsack, and Il-han saw he had put on the clothes in which he had come, the full trousers, the high boots, the belted tunic.

“Traitor!” Sasha now screamed at Liang. “Soft — silly — full of love — stupid love! Dog’s filth! I spit on you — I spit on all of you!”

He spat into the dust at their feet and shouldering his knapsack he ran through the open gate.

Liang stooped then and picked up a small sheet of paper from the earth.

“It was this that sent him mad,” he said to his grandparents. “It was this, after he had seen his father buried. Too much — I know that. And why did I — how could I — it is myself I cannot understand.”

Il-han took the bit of paper from his hand and spelled out the words in the light of the stone lantern. It was a cablegram from Paris: ARE YOU LIVING?

He shook his head. “I can make nothing of that,” he said and he gave it back to Liang.

“Come inside the house,” Sunia called.

But Liang did not heed. He sat down on a stone seat and held his head in his hands. Nor did Il-han heed. He went to the gate and peered into the night beyond, the night into which Sasha had plunged himself.

“What is independence?” Il-han inquired but of no one. He paused and then made his own answer. “Independence? It was a happy thought!”

“Come in!” Sunia called again and she went out and taking his hand, she led Il-han into the house.

“Come, my old man,” she said, soothing him. “Come, my dear old man.”

She helped him to his cushion, and Ippun came in with the teapot and lit a candle.

Outside in the garden Liang came slowly to himself. He felt his soul return into his body. He felt the night wind cool and he heard an early cricket call. Sasha would never come back. They had lost Sasha. He had feared it when he saw Sasha’s face as the coffin was lowered into the grave. He knew it when Sasha, sobbing, had elbowed his way through the reverent crowd. He had followed as quickly as he could, but Sasha had reached home first and had snatched Mariko’s cablegram from the gateman’s hand, the message she had sent from Paris. Sasha was waiting at the gate to spring at him in jealous fury, to accuse him, and suddenly they were trying to kill each other!

The crumpled paper had fallen from his hand. He saw it lying there and took it up and smoothed it out, and read it again.

“Are you living?” These were the words. She had sent them in jest perhaps, or perhaps in love. Safe enough, those words she had chosen by accident, perhaps, in a mood of gaiety or loneliness. Then suddenly conviction rose in him like a voice, though he heard no voice.

Are you living?

Living! His uncle was the Living Reed. Even as he lay in his grave people had murmured the words, and some told again the legend of the young bamboo pushing up between the rough stones in the cell from which he had escaped so long ago. From his coffin he could not escape, and the people mourned. But only a few days ago, Liang now remembered, his uncle had reminded him, almost shyly, of his return one night in secret to see his younger brother, and of how he, Liang, then a baby, had seemed to recognize him, although they had never met before.

“You sprang into my arms, you put your hands upon my cheeks, you knew me from some other life—”

He could almost remember the moment itself. And he recalled other times when Yul-chun had talked of the heritage of Korean patriots.

“In the spring,” he could hear his uncle saying, “in the spring the old root of the bamboo sends up its new green shoot. It has always been so and it will be so forever, as long as men are born.”

“… Come into the house,” his grandmother was calling. “Come into the house, Liang, and shut the door!”

He rose and went no further than the door. He stood there, himself again.

“I am going to the city, Grandmother. Grandfather, I must ask my friend to send a message for me — my American friend.”

“What message?” Il-han asked.

“That I am living,” Liang said.

“It is late,” Sunia complained.

“Not too late, Grandmother,” he said, “not while I live.”

And bowing to them he left them to Ippun and went his way alone. In the sky beyond the gate a new young moon held fullness, and beneath the moon there shone a star, the usual, steady star.