“Majesty, I am honored that you tell me your thoughts. I am your subject and I ought only to listen and not to speak.”
“Speak,” the King commanded. “I am surrounded by men who will not speak. Sometimes I think everyone in the palace has cut out his tongue except the Queen. She has no fears! I daresay if Buddha himself were reincarnated here she would tell him how to behave and what to think.”
The King spoke willfully, aware that this was no fit talk between himself and a subject and he enjoyed it the more for that reason.
Il-han made a small smile and did not reply. Instead he went on thus:
“Majesty, your father, the Regent, has done what he believed right in his time. For example, he resisted the Japanese as stoutly as he did all others. I must even say that he seemed at times to devise insults for them, hoping they would leave our shores. They did not leave. I beg you, Majesty, not to follow your father. I beg you to think for yourself, to decide for yourself what must be done to preserve our nation and our people. Of all the western peoples, the Americans seem the least vicious. They are young, they have no experience, and they know what it is to fight for independence for themselves. I have heard that over a hundred years ago they fought the country that ruled them, and won.”
“What are you saying?” the King demanded.
“I am saying that we must accept the Americans, as Li Hung-chang advises,” Il-han replied.
The King clenched his fists and pounded the table so that the dishes jumped. “By a treaty which takes still more from us!” he shouted.
“By a treaty,” Il-han agreed.
The two men looked straight into each other’s eyes. It was the King who yielded. He got to his feet. “I can eat nothing,” he declared, and he turned his back on Il-han and strode from the room.
How then could Il-han eat? He also rose, and putting on his outer garment, he went away. The servants saw him go and came into the empty room. The dishes of delicacies had not even been uncovered, and the servants took them to the kitchens and there with great relish and high laughter they ate the meats prepared for the King.
In the night, when Il-han returned from the long conference with the King, he told Sunia that he had been offered a high post in government and that he had declined. He did not regret his refusal, yet he wondered if she, perhaps, being more simple than he by nature, or so he imagined, might secretly envy other women whose husbands were publicly known. He had a certain fame as a scholar, a thinker, one who did not fear to do what he liked or refuse to do what he disliked, but was this enough? When she replied, he perceived that he had been wrong, and again he marveled, as he had often before, how it is that a man can live with a woman and have sons by her and still know very little of what she is. For Sunia spoke at once when he finished what he had to tell.
“You did very well to refuse a post,” she said.
It was night and they lay on the floor mattresses. A candle burned on the low table at his side. The house was silent and beyond the drawn screens the night was dark. He had talked for a long time, and she had listened.
“Why do you say so?” he asked now.
“For one reason,” she said. “You always forget small things. You are a great man, but only in great things. You speak to kings and queens as though you were their brother, but you do not know one servant in this house from another, except your own man. And I wonder sometimes if you would even know your sons, if you saw them in a crowd of children. Now you will have time to know your sons — and me, too, I daresay!”
She broke off to laugh, and she had ready laughter, but he was surprised at what she had said.
“You describe a very foolish fellow,” he complained, “and I think I am better than that.”
She turned on her side then and leaned her head on her elbow and looked down into his rebellious face. “You are only foolish, I say, in small things. If you were clever in small ways you would be foolish in great ones and I am satisfied with what you are. More than that, I know very well that I am a fortunate woman, a lucky wife, a blessed mother.”
“Now, now,” he said, laughing in turn. “You blame yourself too much. A woman gets what she deserves.”
This banter went into sudden passion between them, he aroused by the sight of the lovely face so near, her eyes lustrous and dark in the candlelight. In this way he knew her very well, for when she was ready a peculiar fragrance came from her body. He had learned, but not easily, that while without this fragrance she could submit, it was without response, and then he was robbed of half his joy. While he was a bridegroom, a husband too young, he had not been able to restrain his passion, or suit its timing to hers, even though he cursed himself because, if he did not, they were further apart afterward. But with the fullness of manhood he learned, and he was rewarded. Better to have her whole, at her own time, than resisting when she was not.
Now her fragrance came sweet and strong, and he held her long and close. When they drew apart, they were closer than ever before, and they lay in peace and silence, she thinking while he fell asleep.
He woke after an hour or so and was thirsty and she poured a bowl of tea and then came out with what she had been thinking.
“While we are in mourning, you can do nothing outside, and you must promise me to learn the difference between our two sons. I feel each is different from the other, each not ordinary, but I have not the wit to know what the difference is. This is the first thing I have to say.”
He drank the tea and held his bowl for more.
“Then there is a second? And a third, doubtless! When a man has a little time to be idle, be sure his wife will fill it for him.”
She pretended to snatch the bowl away from him.
“Dare to think I am like other wives!”
“Fortunately you are not.” He was suddenly wide awake, relaxed, amused, and wondering whether, if he indulged her, her fragrance would flow again. She had changed her garments, he could see, and the odor was that of clean freshness.
“You are to stop thinking your own private thoughts,” she retorted. “You are to listen to me, if you please! Il-han, I say you should know some of these Americans before you advise the King again. You are in a high, responsible place. You advise rulers. Yet how do you know if Americans are good or evil? What if you lead the King into wrongdoing and our people suffer because you know too little of what you are talking about?”
This was the surprising woman. While he could have sworn she had no concern for anything beyond her household, she came forward with this simple wise conclusion. Unpleasant though it was to consider consorting with foreigners, what she had said was true. Chinese he knew, and Japanese, and a few Russians, but he knew almost no Americans.
All inclination for renewed lovemaking ebbed out of him.
“Go to sleep,” he told Sunia. “You have said enough to keep me awake the rest of the night and for many nights to come.” And he pinched out the flame of the candle between his thumb and forefinger.
In these days of mourning for the one dead, Il-han devoted himself to the living. Each morning he sat near while the tutor taught his elder son and he was pleased by the boy’s quickness where he was interested and then displeased because where he had no interest he idled. Nevertheless he did not interfere and as the days passed he saw that the tutor understood the child well, and when the child looked away from his books he did not reproach him. Instead he bade the boy run in the garden or he gave him a brush and colored inks and let him paint a picture.
“In a picture,” he told Il-han privately, “I discover the child’s hidden thoughts and feelings.”